Facebook Gets German Data Probe Into Voice Transcriptions
- Social network is facing intense regulatory scrutiny in Europe
- Speech recognition forms new front for tech privacy probes
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Facebook Inc. is being probed by Hamburg’s data protection authority over transcribing audio from users of its services, adding to an investigation into Google’s automatic speech assistant.
Facebook “is currently the subject of a separate investigation” into transcription of human-to-machine and human-to-human communications, the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection said in a press release on Monday. “Manual evaluation was used in Facebook Messenger to optimize the transcription function.”