Facebook paid “hundreds of outside contractors” to transcribe user audio clips from its Messenger app, reports Bloomberg.
Employees who worked on the transcription were not told where the audio was recorded or how it was obtained, nor were they told why Facebook needs conversations transcribed.
Facebook says that while it had indeed been transcribing audio, it no longer plans to do so. "We paused human review of audio more than a week ago,” Facebook told Bloomberg.
Facebook’s decision to pause its audio transcribing comes following scrutiny of human review programs from Apple, Amazon, and Google. The three companies use employees to review voice assistant requests and accidental activations for improvement purposes.
One firm that Facebook uses to transcribe Messenger conversations is TaskUs, a company that also reviews Facebook content for possible policy violations.
Facebook says that users who had voice chats transcribed had opted in, and that the transcriptions were used to mak
