Microsoft has updated its privacy policy and other online pages to explicitly imply that human workers or subcontractors can pay attention to recordings captured through the company’s Cortana and Skype Translator products.
Resolution comes after Motherboard discovered that subcontractors were listening to audio from any of the services, adding sensitive, non-public conversations from Microsoft customers, based on a cache of documents, screenshots, and filtered audio recordings. Apple, Google and more recently Facebook have suspended their own use of human personnel for their respective products.
“We realized, based on the issues raised recently, that we could do a greater job by specifying that humans infrequently review this content,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email sent Tuesday.
While in the past neither Microsoft’s privacy policy nor the Skype translator’s FAQs allowed humans to simply pay attention to audio captured through the service visitor, a position criticized by privacy experts, Microsoft updated the pages and others of its website.
“Our non-public knowledge processing for those includes automated and manual (human) processing methods,” the company’s privacy policy now states.
Microsoft users delete audio recordings that are composed of them with a compromised online tool.
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