Tech firms must give up their awkward secret: Humans

guest · Aug 23, 2019

Tech firms must give up their awkward secret: Humans
Among the thousands upon thousands of words that make up the privacy policies of the tech giants, one you rarely find is “human”
August 23, 2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49455363

Zero uses of the word in Amazon’s privacy policy for its Alexa voice assistant. The same goes for Apple’s Siri. And Google’s Assistant.
Only Microsoft states what all of these other privacy policies arguably should: "Our processing of personal data … includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing."

There is a reasonable explanation for all this - if only the egotistical, secrecy-obsessed tech giants could bring themselves to say it. Without humans, most of these products would suck.

Expensify, to its credit, admitted to me that without human review, it would likely only manage about 80-85% accuracy. It would mean users would need to check all of their receipts for errors, defeating the point of using the software entirely. So, on balance, if a contractor has to step in once in a while - that’s fair. Not mentioning it anywhere on their website? Considerably less so.
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Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all face the same challenge. Those companies capture these recordings not to spy on you, but to figure out when and why their technologies, still early in their development, get things wrong.

But my other expectation is for tech companies to be up front about it, and on that, most have failed.
But then, doing so would mean admitting an imperfection, weakness or inefficiency. And that’s just not the done thing around here.
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