Facebook Offers to Pay Users for their Voice Recordings
Freeman writes:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/facebook-offers-to-pay-users-for-their-voice-recordings/
Facebook is offering to pay its users for personal information including recordings of their own voice, in a rare example of internet companies directly compensating people for collecting their data.
[...]Makers of smart speakers including Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google faced criticism last year when it emerged that they were routinely sending users' voice recordings to human moderators, without revealing the practice to customers or obtaining their consent.
[...]The social network's Viewpoints app, which was first released three months ago to test new features and survey users, this week began to invite users in the US to say "Hey Portal" and the names of up to 10 friends. Going through the recording process five times would earn points that can be converted into a $5 cash reward.
[...]Facebook said this week that its latest Viewpoints feature was designed to "improve speech understanding", by training machine-learning algorithms, which rely on a large amount of examples to improve their accuracy and performance.
[...]Any data gathered though Viewpoints "helps us build better apps and services and benefit the community", Facebook said on the service's website. "We don't share your Facebook Viewpoints activity on Facebook or on other accounts you've linked without your permission. We also don't sell your information from this app to third parties."
However, the Viewpoints data policy notes that some information collected using the app, such as payment and device data, can be used to personalize other Facebook apps and target advertising. Data [gathered] during a Viewpoints research program may also be shared with "research partners", including academics, publishers and advertisers, though Facebook said participants would be informed if that was the case.
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