The US-based tech company has been paying hundreds of contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on condition of anonymity.
The report was released on Tuesday evening.
Hours later, Facebook confirmed that it had transcribed the audio of some users but claimed that it was no longer performing that data-collection task.
"Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago", a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.
Facebook has come under fire over the past year for breaking privacy rules and collecting user data without authorization.
The company is currently recovering from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved a political consultancy harvesting the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent.
In April, Facebook said in a statement that it had been slapped with a fine of $5 billion as a result of the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) investigation into the company’s failure to protect the data of tens of millions of users from being accessed by Cambridge Analytica.
