US lawmakers pressure tech as devices capture conversations

Warner said the latest revelations about Facebook’s audio collection 'is yet further proof that consumers’ expectations of how their data is collected and used radically differ from what companies like Facebook are actually doing'. — Reuters

Members of US Congress from both parties called out Facebook Inc on Aug 14 for paying contractors to transcribe audio clips from its users and urged new statutes to tackle the drumbeat of such revelations from across the tech industry.

The calls, which followed a Bloomberg report that the company was using the transcriptions to test its artificial intelligence speech-recognition, come as smartphones and other microphone-enabled devices become ever-more ubiquitous in homes, offices and schools.