If I sent you an e-mail and you made it public, that is your right, isn’t it? If I send you a voice mail and you decide to record it and share it with your friends, press, who-ever. . ..that is your right.

If I gave you an autograph from Winston Churchill, you own it and can do what you want with it.

So in this situation, it is the person who is the receiver of the voice mail who owns it. Not the sender, not the intermediary. .. . the recipient.

I’m all for someone demonstrating that the “Emperor has no clothes” in relation to Spinvox, but I don’t believe that it is a journalist who should take it upon himself to make complaints to the ICO.

Milo: wouldn’t it have been easier to get someone from #lubewrestling to file a complaint?

In most contexts, is seems to me, it is the creator of the content who owns the rights to it.

If you don’t like it don’t use it…. stupid……
Gosh wtf… you are such a pussy…

I wouldn’t be surprised if they fire your ass…

I wish to encourage any SpinVox client in an EU Country to contact the link you supplied and to demand an investigation.

If SpinVox is hoarding data for any purpose longer than 48 hours it should be ordered destroyed. If they use people’s voice recordings to “train D2″ then they should be paying those people for the use of their voice. And if they can’t use the voice messages to train D2 within 48 hours, well that is just too bad for them.

Imagine what it would cost them to get even tens of thousands of people with different dialects, accents, versions of different languages to speak for them to *TRAIN D2*?

Right now they are getting it for free and in many cases charging for it! Great Trick!

Connor

There is no privacy online, get over it.

Another thing to think about is that its very likely that it has also been heard by more than just one person – where do you think there training messages come from? I am betting they just use live messages in some way – how else could you generate realistic training data for 3000+ transcription agents (its probably 10,000+ given the churn in those call center companies – learn to type in the 3rd world and you are on the way to a better job).

The outright lies on their blog about only partial messages going to agents only makes me more concerned about what other ‘truths’ they are telling us.

The first is a compliance issue (Data Protection Act, ICO, etc) as per above. And clearly, for any company to be operating in a non-compliant manner, is – or should be – an area of concern.

The second is a personal privacy issue, separate from a compliance issue. Depending on the content of those messages and each individual’s privacy preferences (e.g. do I care some some random person is likely listening to my voicemails), this may or may not be a problem. For me, and for many others, I suspect it would be a problem (with respect to personal voicemail at least, which is SpinVox’s main application).

To say, as SpinVox does, that only fragments are listened to by humans, is – I suspect – not true. As anyone who has worked in speech recognition and natural language processing will know, having access to the wider context in which some utterance was made is key to correctly understanding/converting that message (be that with technology or people). As a result, I suspect that most messages will be interacted with by SpinVox’s “call center” staff in some way. What is the probability that a N word message will be correctly and automatically transcribed (with a reasonable degree of confidence) from end-to-end without any human intervention? SpinVox have never stated this percentage (and probably for – in their minds – good reason).

There are of course other application areas where this personal privacy aspect is less of an issue. E.g. some people use SpinVox as a “voice front-end” to twitter. Given this is a broadcast application where the intent is to tell the world (or a subset there of) your message, you are less likely to be concerned that some random person in an offshore call centre is listening to your message and transcribing it (or at least significantly assisting in that process). You never know, that person may also be on twitter and is actually just hearing your message before the rest of twitter read it. However, there is no revenue stream (as yet, that I can see,) associated with these non-voicemail applications for SpinVox; all of their revenue comes from the telco deals for voicemail transcription, and that is where the largest personal privacy issue is.

It will be connected to all mobile networks worldwide(source of revenue) and partnering up with the biggest brands known to mankind,interms of revenue this will be the biggest on the net.Can’t wait to see how this turns out.See demo site below:

http://www.yaffflezone.com

I personally think your concerns are very well founded.

So I’ve decided to ask the ICO to look into the matter with greater urgency than they are currently doing, and letting other people know how to register their concerns, should they choose to. That’s all.