By CCN.com: As if Facebook didn’t have enough privacy issues, the company now confirms that it has been transcribing the audio chats of its users for quite some time.
Facebook claims that the only conversations that were transcribed were from those users who selected that option in the Messenger app.
Facebook also claims that it was on for the sole purpose of making sure the transcription application was performing properly.
Needless to say, it is difficult to believe anything Facebook has to say on this or any other privacy issue.
Even worse, third-parties were used to transcribe the audio, but this information was never disclosed to users.
This is not going to help Facebook in regards to the Libra cryptocurrency venture.
Cryptocurrency users love the idea that transactions are relatively private and like to hope and believe that what they do with their transactions is not scrutinized.
Yet Libra is supposed to be managed by a “trusted issuer,” namely Facebook.
Write-access to the transaction ledger for Libra rests solely with authorized members of a corporation consortium. As it is, distrust of corporations, in general, is widespread, but the distrust of Facebook is now legendary.
Every week it seems like some other privacy breach is revealed in the Facebook universe. Just when it seems like an issue has been aired, or cleared, another one pops up like Whack-a-Mole.
Believers in cryptocurrency coalesce around the desire to eliminate centralized entities. They don’t want to have any connection to some form of centralized control or valuation.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that Libra has fewer and fewer qualities of true cryptocurrencies. Rather, Facebook seems to want Libra to be some kind of innovation with the established financial system – and then control it. Even Congress is concerned.
Ed Butowsky, Managing Partner at Chapwood Capital Investment Management, tells CCN.com that – even though he’s a crypto skeptic – cryptocurrencies and other financial systems have one thing in common:
“System control requires user trust. From gold rush sellers to today’s gold – buying stores, systems to weigh gold have been transparent and trusted. No such transparency exists for Libra. Transparency and Facebook are mutually exclusive. Libra will consequently face big trust challenges.”