Facebook has been paying "hundreds" of outside contractors to listen to, analyze, and transcribe users' voice messages, without informing the users. The company now says that this practice has been "paused."

The social networking giant confirmed that it had been transcribing users’ audio chats and said that, "much like Apple and Google, [Facebook] paused human review of audio more than a week ago," a new Bloomberg report reveals.

According to people with knowledge of the work, Facebook wanted voice chats to be analyzed and transcribed by humans, ...