Facebook was also listening to Portal commands and will start again soon

A new report confirms that contractors working for Facebook had been listening to audio recorded from users' Portal requests and the company plans to restart the practice soon.

Back in August, Bloomberg reported that contractors working for the social media giant had been listening to and transcribing audio of users' conversations obtained from Facebook's Messenger app.

The new report says that user requests beginning with the prompt "Hey Portal" were also among the audio clips contractors listened to. The company is reinstating listening to those requests but will be giving users an opt-out option beginning with a software update in October.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s head of hardware, said, “We paused human review of the ‘Hey Portal’ voice interactions last month while we worked on a plan that gave people more transparency and control, including a way to turn it off."

Bosworth added that the Portal transcriptions were separate from the Messenger issue and that Messenger audio review was still on hold for now.

Interestingly enough, while "voice queries and commands" related to "Hey Portal" commands are covered by Portal's data policy, there's no mention, per Bloomberg, of allowing third-party contractors to review the audio.

Facebook is hardly the only company to face scrutiny over allowing contractors to listen in to users' conversations. Apple faced backlash earlier in 2019 when it turned out contractors were listening to Siri conversations, while both Amazon and Google have been employing humans to listen to audio from their AI assistants.

We've reached out to Facebook for comment on the Portal report.

It just goes to show that nothing in 2019 is ever private, especially with the ever-growing number of devices you surround yourself with.