this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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A lot of retailers are replacing their standard phone systems with products from Zoom and other AI transcription enabled providers. In environments with audio recording, its reasonable to assume that relatively soon, full transcripts of conversations identified to individual speakers will be easily obtained, summarized and analyzed by AI. This will hopefully soon come under scrutiny for violating both two- and one-party consent laws for audio recording.
And these companies will pay a small fine and continue doing it anyway
In a two-party-consent state, maybe.
But in a one-party-consent state, all that ~~Personnel~~ ~~Human Resources~~ People Ops will do is point to a clause in your onboarding paperwork where you agreed to be recorded while on company property using company telephony equipment as a condition of your employment.
As long as that's in the employee paperwork it protects companies from some liability, but what about customer-employee or customer-customer conversations picked up by the system? I suppose a sign stating that video and audio conversations being recorded would further lessen employer liability but I imagine in the future laws about AI technology used on those convos will be put in place and the use of surreptious AI conversation analytics in retail environments will be more regulated. For now though it sure seems like a free for all and I wouldn't be surprised at unethical use becoming somewhat common.
Wouldn't that be legal even in a two party consent state?
A two-party-consent state requires both people to consent to being recorded. So even if you (tacitly) agree to being recorded as a condition of your employment, if the person on the other end of the conversation doesn't then it's an illegal recording. That's why it probably wouldn't be an issue in one of those states.
But in a one party state, the other person on the recording doesn't have to consent as long as you do. So as long as you know your conversation is being recorded (again, hypothetically as a condition of employment) the other party (probably) doesn't have any recourse should your employer use a third-party to monitor it.
Presumably this is monitoring conversations between employees, all of which would have it in their contract (I'm thinking about stuff like break rooms). In fact, even in customer facing areas, corporations would just hang a sign that says 'for your safety we have recording equipment in the store' or whatever.
The article specifically called out "workplace communication platforms" so my comments were more directed at companies monitoring their instances of Zoom/Slack/Teams/etc. But it's a certain bet that Walmart will try to use AI to monitor its breakrooms to make sure nobody says the evil "U" word.
It's already been ocurring for a while now without the summary and analysis by AI.
Automatic audio transcription has been kicking around for a long time now, at various levels of accuracy. The only important distinction of the speaking party is which side of the call (employee or customer) it's coming from, and that doesn't require any complicated analysis, just that your recordings capture incoming and outgoing audio on separate channels (which is how phone calls work in the first place).
As far as consent goes, any time you hear "this call may be monitored for training purposes" and stay on the line, as a customer you have consented to the recording. As an employee they usually just include it in your contract or one of the many things they get every employee to sign. Only really matters from a business standpoint if someone is willing to take you to court over it.
Most call center software/systems have these options built in at this point.