Change These Facebook Settings to Make Your Audio Recordings More Private
In what has become a thing over the past few months, Facebook is the latest of the tech giants to admit that outside contractors have gained access to users’ voice recordings.
Although Facebook did not go into details, we can assume that the program played out like this: you allowed Facebook to transcribe the voice recording, they saved it and allowed people to listen to it to improve their transcription service, and all you said – although not linked to your account – still heard by people you don’t know. Some people may have said things they regret or acted in ways that they would not want others to hear.
Facebook officials told Bloomberg that the company has since stopped “human sound analysis,” which appears to have happened quite recently.
As always, the best way to deal with these kinds of things is not to wait for the company to fix one of their programs, but make sure you do your best to keep your data — and your voice — under your control.
Option one: do not transcribe voice recordings on Facebook
I hope that by default Facebook doesn’t parse the voice messages you send to your friends’ chats. I suspect that part of the protection that Facebook “users have given us permission” is that you must actively tell Facebook that you want it to transcribe any voice messages you send to your friends:
When you turn on transcription in one chat, it turns it on for all voice messages you have shared in that message thread. However, in this case, transcription will not be enabled for chats with other people; you will have to configure this manually by clicking on the names of the people you are talking to at the top of the chat window and checking this option:
While there is no way to turn off Voice to Text across all Facebook Messenger, I recommend going through chats where this feature is turned on and off. It would be better if there was a way to delete all voice recordings that you previously sent to friends, but I don’t see such an option anywhere.
Option 2. Consider switching to a secret conversation
Secret conversations – continuously encrypted chats that prevent even Facebook from seeing what you say – can be one way to send voice messages without fear of Facebook saving and processing their content. When you send a voice message in a secret conversation, it cannot be decrypted:
This apparently means that Facebook has no way of taking this information and doing something with it. And since deleting a secret conversation permanently removes it from Facebook (hopefully), it’s a great way to wipe out any voicemails you’ve previously sent to a friend.
Option 3. Manage voice recordings on your Facebook portal.
This one is a bit more niche (at least I don’t know anyone who has a Facebook portal). If you have one and have spoken to him, check your Activity Log to see if there are any voice recordings you can or should delete. Just open Voice Interaction from the Activity Log sidebar and delete whatever you find.
Option four: restrict microphone access to Facebook apps
This one is big. Whether you’re wearing a tin foil hat and assume that Facebook listens to everything you do through the ads it serves you, or you just don’t want to deal with anything voice-related forever, privacy gimmicks nuclear bomb is to prevent any Facebook application from accessing your microphone.
On iOS, simply open the Settings app, scroll down to the Facebook app, tap it, and turn off microphone access. How simple it is.
On Android, open the Settings app, tap Apps & notifications, tap See all … apps at the top, find the Facebook app and tap on it, tap Permissions, tap Microphone, and tap about ban: