Facebook says no European users' audio chats were accessed by outside contractors | Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images Facebook says no EU users affected by transcribing of audio chats Social networking giant in spotlight for allowing outside contractors to listen to conversations.

Facebook said on Thursday that no European users were included in a project that allowed outside contractors to listen to and transcribe people's audio chats on the tech giant's platforms.

The disclosure came a day after the company admitted it had paid hundreds of people to transcribe snippets of users' audio conversations, raising questions about a possible violation of individuals' privacy rights.

Bloomberg first reported about the Facebook project, which was aimed at improving the company's speech recognition technology and follows pushback from regulators against Google, Amazon and Apple around similar practices.

“No EU users were involved in the test," Alex Dziedzan, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement. "This is a feature which we were testing for U.S. users only.”

Ireland's privacy regulator, which oversees Facebook's data protection standards in Europe because the company's international headquarters is based in Dublin, had asked the tech giant to clarify on what grounds it was carrying out the practices. The fact that no EU users were affected makes it unlikely that Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner will open a formal investigation.

A spokesperson for the regulator was not immediately available to comment.

Under existing U.S. privacy standards, companies like Facebook can conduct such transcribing of people's audio recordings, as long as they include the practice within their terms and conditions. The company said that only those users who had opted in to having the conversations recorded were included in the trial, though it was unclear if individuals understood what Facebook would do with their data.

Currently, Facebook is facing more than 10 ongoing investigations by Ireland over a range of possible privacy violations. Dale Sunderland, the Irish official in change of those probes, told POLITICO last month that a decision in at least one of those cases would be announced by the end of this year.

The company was also recently fined €5 billion by U.S. authorities over privacy violations.