Today I stumbled upon a newspaper article on nu.nl which I found very disturbing ( http://www.nu.nl/internet/4329372/australisch-techbedrijf-heeft-telefoongesprekken-nederlanders-in-handen.html). For all the non-dutchies; the article is about a former employee of an Australian company, Appen, who claims that the company holds private phone- and chatconversations from dutch people dating from 2010/2011. According to the Dutch forensic research bureau, the conversations were tapped by the Britisch security service, which Appen would work together with. It is not known how they got the conversations or why they would have interest in it in the first place. I did some research about the company, Appen, and it is a global leader in speech and search technology services.
I did some research about the company, Appen, and it is a global leader in speech and search technology services. My question here is why either Appen or the Britisch security service would want Dutch phone records and , considering the fact that privacy is such a hot item the last couple of years, how come it took 6 years to discover this? Maybe an even more important question is how many other companies have, unnoticed, private records in hands of normal citizen like you and me..
Dear Kelly, thank you for your short but interesting post. I have just read the nu.nl and the Volkskrant article. While I think it is quite scary that they got access to so many data, it also does not really surprise me somehow… (maybe that is a bad thing). More and more companies and governments are listening to our conversations or reading our chats, without us knowing. There have been dataleaks in the past years, and I feel that technology moves so fast that law making sometimes does not keep up. What I do hope, however, is that the Dutch government investigates this case further, improves security and punishes the companies/governments that took the data without permission. It should not be made this easy to listen to phonecalls and read chats without anyone knowing for 6 years…