Posted Feb 21 2020 at 6:02 p.m.Updated Feb 21. 2020 at 6:03 p.m.
Chat with Facebook for a handful of dollars. This is the amazing proposal that the Menlo Park group is now submitting to its American users: since Thursday, the latter can apply for a new Viewpoints program, its application dedicated to market research, and send him voice recordings for remuneration .
Selling personal data is not a new idea. Many voices have been campaigning for several years for the creation of a private property right for data, the “black gold” of the 21st century that the tech giants have so far managed to capture in exchange for a service “ free ”- the
proposal from the think-tank Génération Libre,
chaired by the “Echoes” columnist Gaspard Koenig.
Train Portal, the connected speaker
Initiatives following the scandals linked to the abuse of users’ personal data, for which several platforms were guilty, primarily Facebook. Like Amazon, Google
or Apple,
the firm also admitted in August that it had employed hundreds of contract workers to
listen to and transcribe certain conversations
exchanged on Messenger without the consent of the interlocutors.
A practice intended to correct the errors made by his artificial intelligence – which identified keywords in order to refine advertising targeting – and interrupted after the revelations from the Bloomberg agency.
Facebook is now ready to pay. Applicants must be of legal age and reside in the United States, specify
Viewpoints terms of use.
The program in question, entitled “Pronunciations”, aims to “improve the understanding of speech” of Portal, the connected speaker marketed by the firm.
Reward: $ 5
Its principle is childish: the participant must record in the application the message “Hey Portal” followed by the first name of one of his Facebook friends. The operation earns 200 points and can be repeated five times – for a total of 1,000 points, from which it is possible to convert your rewards into currency. A thousand points earn 5 dollars.
“We do not sell the information collected on this application to third parties”, specifies the terms of Viewpoints. Facebook specifies, however, that data can be shared with “humans”, “research partners”, “service providers” or in the event of “substantial transaction, such as the sale of a website, a merger, a consolidation, the sale of an asset or the unlikely hypothesis of bankruptcy ”.