Hundreds of workers were paid to transcribe voice recordings of Facebook users, it has emerged.
Facebook is the latest company to confirm it has used third-party workers to do such work, following Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. The practice had been halted "more than a week ago", Facebook said. Workers were given audio of people's conversations but were not told how it was obtained, according to Bloomberg, which was first to report the news. Facebook said the recordings were being transcribed manually so that artificial intelligence systems used to automatically transcribe conversations could be improved. It added this had been done only when users had opted in to transcription services and given permission for microphone access. "Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago," a spokeswoman said.