MIT Technology Review: “TikTok’s decision to use a woman’s voice without her permission is only one recent example of a problem that some mistakenly think we’ve moved past… When we think of women in computing, we often think about how, both literally and figuratively, they have been silenced more often than they’ve been listened to. Women’s voices and bodies can be found all throughout the history of computing—from being heard in launch countdowns to being visible in photographs—but only relatively recently have historians written these women back into the narrative by explaining what they did. For a long time, women were mistakenly thought to be peripheral to computing history, even though they were often the ones who programmed the computers. And it is still the case that when we hear a woman’s voice as part of a tech product, we might not know who she is, whether she is even real, and if so, whether she consented to have her voice used in that way. Many TikTok users assumed that the text-to-speech voice they heard on the app wasn’t a real person. But it was: it belonged to a Canadian voice actor named Bev Standing, and Standing had never given ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, permission to use it. Standing sued the company in May, alleging that the ways her voice was being used—particularly the way users could make it say anything, including profanity—were injuring her brand and her ability to make a living. Her voice becoming known as “that voice on TikTok” that you could make say whatever you liked brought recognition without remuneration and, she alleged, hurt her ability to get voice work…”