A few days ago, Facebook announced an update that would add the ability to tag music and TV shows in your status updates, listening in the background as you’re typing away. Is it a little creepy, or is that just me?
Facebook explained the basic idea behind the optional listening service in a blog post: “If you’ve turned the feature on, you’ll see an audio icon moving on the screen when you write a status update. If the feature finds a match, you can then choose to add the song, TV show or movie to your post.”
It then went on to clarify that it’s not going to be mandatory, that the recordings won’t be stored any longer than is necessary for the analysis to be run, and that it’s not going to automatically make posts for you. Facebook was even at pains to make that clear from the start — the post is even titled “A New, Optional Way to Share and Discover Music, TV and Movies”.
To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Facebook in the first place, and I don’t use it regularly enough to ever need it to automagically discover what show I’m watching or what music I’m listening to. But the idea of my phone listening to me at any time still puts me off.
Knowing your status update would record and upload an audio “fingerprint” to Facebook’s servers for analysis, would you switch this feature on?