You Might Be Eavesdropped Even When Playing Games!- 大数跨境

You Might Be Eavesdropped Even When Playing Games!

HACOS瀚客企服

2019-08-30

导读：According to reports, Microsoft contractors have liste

According to reports, Microsoft contractors have listened to voice recordings captured by the Xbox One console. Not only that, tech companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are also reported for the eavesdropping, which raises privacy concerns.

In most cases, audio clips of Xbox users are recorded through Kinect camera accessory with voice commands triggered intentionally or accidentally. Some voices are of children, who are the main users of game console.

Besides, Microsoft has already confirmed that contractors have similarly screened voice recordings from Cortana and listened to Skype calls when people used the app’s language translation feature, in order to improve services and voice recognition.

Microsoft announced that the recording is not necessary anymore and it will remove Cortana from the Xbox one console.

Recent reports have said that other big tech companies listen to a lot of recordings of users’ conversation. Click here to review our previous article about it.

Amazon, Google, and Apple create recordings each time users speak to Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, which are the voice assistants in the apps. These companies say the practice is to improve the artificial intelligence that underpins the virtual assistant-powered gadgets and services, and it is only a small percentage of recordings are listened by humans.

In the opinion of CNN, AI is not magic. Virtual assistants need to be trained on massive amounts of data. Therefore so many tech companies choose to record users’ audio.

While the user experience becomes better as assistants get improved, users wouldn’t like to share their privacy. It is weird and violated to be heard by others, even it is not a human.

It seems that that's not likely to stop recording so far, but at least tech companies are trying to protect users' privacy by making records anonymous.