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Do companies store facial and voice recognition data from the thousands of hours of zoom/teams calls that their employees use? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Snapz@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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I heard a person call into a show the other day, voice only, and talk about some poor working conditions at a factory. Made me think about how it would probably be so easy for nefarious bosses to be able to identify that person through voice recognition SW with all of the data that comes from us looking directly into cameras and speaking clearly in modern workplace meetings.

Do "anonymous" callers need to start using voice modulation software for these kinds of calls in the modern world?

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[–] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

There are easier ways to spy on your employees. This is not cost-effective.

I use Zoom for work now and each call can be several gigabytes large, depending on resolution of shared materials and a few other factors. If you want to save that kind of stuff long term, you have to pay to keep it somewhere. If you multiply several gigabytes over a few dozen calls a day, you're going to end up with terabytes of garbage you need to store. Zoom also informs you of when a recording is starting and active, offering for you to leave the call or otherwise implicitly agree to being recorded. You have to pay for all these things because there's a significant amount of processing power involved. It's not like it's free to run facial recognition and speech recognition.

When I did contract work for Apple support, the spying was way more efficient than just listening to my calls. My supervisor could literally always see my monitor through the chat program we had installed. There's all kinds of remote software for things like this. If an admin wants to see you misuse your equipment, they have easier ways of finding out than sifting through calls to find wrongthink.

[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, wasn't suggesting perpetual info capture, this could be a brief view every 3 to 6 months, just enough to update a voice/facial profile in a system.

[–] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Again, there are easier ways to do this.

Biometric authentication can be required for some companies. You'd have to opt in to use the system or at least agree to the terms set forth by the employer. This kind of stuff doesn't just get collected just because; it's pretty sensitive data.

What you're talking about is a cyberpunk nightmare; some corporate-assisted mass surveillance designed for like, union busting.

If you're making vocal and facial profiles of employees you must have some reason to do so, and it can't just be to burn cash. Like I said before, this stuff costs money, and it's kind of pointless unless you're using it in a way that makes money, selling the data somehow.