[537] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Who Actually Hears Your Voicemail Messages?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Wed Nov 18 22:26:25 2009
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:57:08 -0800
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Who Actually Hears Your Voicemail Messages?
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000637.html
Greetings. When you leave someone a voicemail message, you expect
that the party you called will ultimately hear it. But have you
considered that there may be other potential listeners as well?
Years ago, if you wanted to have telephone calls answered when you
weren't around, you basically had a couple of options. You could pay
for expensive live telephone answering services, or you could use a
telephone answering machine (aka "answerphone"). In the glory days of
Ma Bell several decades ago, when it was still illicit to hook up your
own telephone equipment to phone lines, a typical (pretty much only!)
legal approach was to rent from the phone company (at fairly
outrageous prices) an answering machine like the Code-A-Phone 700 -- a
heavy duty device that seemed to weigh as much as a battleship and
could probably survive a direct hit by a tactical nuke.
Of course there were some folks for which the, ah, legal niceties were
of less concern than the joys of experimentation. Over the years of
my youth I built a whole series of answering machines -- the original
ones based on my Erector Set -- that performed with various degrees of
aplomb but, alas, certainly didn't meet AT&T "BSP" technical specs.
Once it became legal to hook up your own equipment, all manner of
answering devices appeared based on different tape systems, and later,
digital recording of highly varying audio quality.
Such consumer-oriented machines -- and live answering services as
well -- still exist of course, and for simplicity and various other
functionalities they can serve their purposes well.
Nowadays though, centralized voicemail has become extremely common,
not only of the relatively straightforward type typically offered by
cell carriers and local phone companies, but also highly sophisticated
systems integrated with the Internet, such as Google Voice and
YouMail.
I've chosen these two services as examples mainly because I'm fans of
both -- and use both of them every day.
But with any centralized voicemail system comes a potentially thorny
question -- just how private are the voicemail messages that callers
leave for you?
Given that such messages are simply files spinning on servers
somewhere, all of the usual data retention questions come into play.
Are archived copies still stored after you "delete" voicemail from
your inbox and trash folders? How accessible are your messages to
third parties -- courts, lawyers, law enforcement -- with or without
subpoenas?
A taped message on a local physical answering machine is pretty much
totally under the user's control to save, delete, or physically
destroy. Not so with centralized voicemail.
Still, most voicemail services understand the sensitivity of this
voice message data, have published privacy policies that address such
issues at least in general and sometimes with great specificity, and
typically can be depended upon not to hand over your messages to a
third party investigation or court without appropriate legal process.
Certainly this includes both YouMail and Google Voice.
But a relatively new aspect of sophisticated voicemail systems, which
might be called "voicemail transcription for the masses" threatens to
cloud this picture a bit.
Google, for example, routinely transcribes voicemail into textual form
as a basic part of the free Google Voice service. YouMail offers
similar transcriptions as fee-based options.
Google's transcription system is totally automated -- untouched by
human hands, so to speak. Speech to text in the telephone environment
is one seriously tough task. Google Voice transcripts today are
sometimes not perfect and occasionally contain some amusing
transcription errors, but overall they're pretty damn good -- and
given Google Voice's rapidly growing user community, they're likely to
continue getting better at breakneck speed.
But what if automated transcriptions just aren't felt to be accurate
enough right now for some applications? That's where a potentially
problematic aspect of YouMail comes into play. As it turns out --
though this is currently not obvious from online YouMail
documentation -- some YouMail voicemail messages are transcribed by
human beings (as far as I know right now, by an outside company contracted
to do this work by YouMail). Reportedly the lower tier of YouMail's
transcription service is essentially fully automated (but I'm told
that it's possible some difficult messages might potentially be kicked
to live transcribers at this level). YouMail's higher priced "More
Accurate" transcription tier is apparently more routinely dependent on
human transcribers.
Humans in the transcription loop can't help but create a qualitatively
different situation than fully automated systems.
Users need to know when humans are involved with the generation and
storage of voicemail transcripts, so that those users can make
informed decisions about whether or not they wish to avail themselves
of those facilities -- based on their own comfort levels with third
parties hearing their private voicemail messages, and the possible
associated social, legal, and civil implications.
What happens when a human transcriber hears some important, private,
business-related information? Can they always be depended upon to
treat it as confidential and not make use of that information for
their own gain? Or what if the transcriber believes -- rightly or
not -- that they're overhearing something illegal? Or how about just
plain "juicy" messages -- perhaps involving someone important or well
known? What steps are taken to make sure that human transcribers
can't make audio copies (easy to do with a cell phone recorder or a
tiny digital recording device) of "interesting" voicemail messages for
their own use, abuse, pleasure, distribution, sale, etc.? There's a
whole spectrum of important issues when humans are in the
transcription loop, that simply don't exist in fully automated
transcription environments.
In response to my concerns, YouMail has agreed with me that their
current documentation is deficient in this regard, and informs me that
they now plan to clearly explain in their online materials the extent
to which humans are involved in voicemail transcriptions, and what
precautions are in place when transcriptions are processed by humans
rather than by purely automated systems. I appreciate YouMail's
immediate response to my concerns.
But the broader question of whether any given individual will prefer
to have their private messages processed by machines, humans, or a
combination of both, is a complex issue without any universal answers.
Human-machine trade-offs are often fascinating. Many years ago,
customers of one major firm were bemused by overdue payment notices
that used to say something like:
"This is the billing computer at [XYZ Corp]. Your account is now 30
days overdue. So far I'm the only one who knows about it. But if
your payment isn't received within 10 days, I'm going to have to inform
a human, and they may not be as pleasant as I am!"
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition
for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
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