What is Safe Voice?

Safe Voice by Unity Technologies is a voice analysis tool that records and analyzes player communications to support customer service. In reported incidents, it records the relevant communication and provides an analysis used by support teams for decision-making. The Safe Voice API allows game developers to monitor ongoing Vivox voice channels. The recorded audio data and analysis results are stored in a storage provided by the respective developer.

What is "Toxic Behavior"?

"Toxic behavior" is a term borrowed from the English community and refers to harmful or destructive behavior in social interactions. Especially online. It encompasses a variety of negative actions and attitudes such as insults, bullying, harassment, and the deliberate provocation or upsetting of other people.

In online gaming communities and (Steam) forums, the term is often used to describe behaviors that impair the well-being of other players or create a hostile and unpleasant atmosphere.

The accusation of "toxicity" is also often abused to discredit or censor legitimate criticism or discussions. This leads to a complex debate about the boundaries between "toxic behavior" and freedom of expression.

Toxic or Censorship?

The definition of what is considered "toxic" in the context of Unity's Safe Voice and the decision on this is determined by the game developers

1. Analysis of Speech Characteristics: Safe Voice analyzes unique speech characteristics like tone, volume, pitch, intonation, emotion, and the context of player interactions. Safe Voice detects acoustic disturbances and classifies them into more than a dozen categories to automate manual processes.


2. Customizable Filter Lists: Game developers can enable both proactive and player-reported monitoring to gain a comprehensive insight into the disruptive behavior affecting their game. They can create keyword lists to specifically monitor or deprioritize certain words or phrases and adjust toxicity thresholds to ensure that their coverage is as unique as their community.


3. Toxicity Classification: Safe Voice detects and classifies obscenities, threats, insults, identity attacks, and problematic language. It also monitors volume and disturbances, whether they are music, noise, or human speech patterns

The use of Unity's Safe Voice as an abuse or censorship tool is a potential risk that should be considered. Also, monitoring and recording existing background noises in the recordings can theoretically provide insights into a player's location or environment.

Further Privacy Concerns

1. Data Collection: Safe Voice records and analyzes in-game voice chats. This is intended to identify issues in the voice conversations of gaming communities and address problematic participants to reduce the overall toxicity level in the game.


2. Collected Personal Data: Always collected are voice recordings, user IDs, IP addresses, and device IDs. The user ID can either be a player name or a randomly generated ID


3. Demographic Analysis: The product also analyzes voices to predict demographic characteristics like gender


4. Data Protection Laws: Under the GDPR, Unity is responsible for the personal data collected and processed by Safe Voice. Developers are independent controllers of the same data. Under the CCPA (in conjunction with the CPRA), Unity is the business, and developers are also independent businesses


5. Consent to Data Processing: The legal basis for processing is consent. Safe Voice does not collect personal data before the end user has consented


6. Requests from Data Subjects: Safe Voice does not offer native functionality to support requests for data access or deletion. Developers are responsible for processing these requests


7. Dependence on Vivox: Safe Voice is dependent on Vivox. To activate Safe Voice, Vivox must first be activated. Since many games automatically activate Vivox during initialization, without the knowledge of the users, it is advisable to keep an eye on this point.


8. Data Storage: By default, voice recordings and user IDs are retained for up to 12 months. IP addresses on packets are stored for up to 24 hours for routing purposes


9. Child Protection: The service is not intended for applications with child users unless the developer has obtained verified parental consent

Sources

Safe Voice API  
Unity Launches Safe Voice in Closed Beta  
Introduction to Safe Voice  
Unity Safe Voice