Amid Eavesdropping Tech Giants, Facebook Wants To Reward Users For Voice Data

As concerns around data privacy continue to multiply across countries, the responsibility of technology giants is being questioned with each privacy breach incident and reports of surreptitious listening to voice commands, conversations and more.  The latest attempt, however, is slightly different, as social media Facebook wants to pay users to submit recordings of their conversations to improve services.While Facebook claims the recordings will be used to offer better speech recognition services, when seen in the light of security breaches on Facebook, it does raise  questions of ethics. Is paying users the right way to go about getting them to submit data?

While the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google continue to use samples of conversations to improve their services, Facebook is openly asking for data and is also rewarding users with a token amount for the same. As per a report by The Verge, Facebook is building a new programme called “Pronunciations” in its Viewpoints market research app for US-based users. Select users will be able to record the phrase “Hey Portal” followed by the first name of a friend from their friends’ list. The user will have to record each statement twice for up to 10 friends and will get rewarded at the end of it.