Last week Facebook has announced new feature for their Facebook App that can record the surrounding sounds using your smartphone’s microphone.
This feature was made to allow people to share even more activities using Facebook. With this feature, you can use your phone’s microphone to identify what song is playing right now or what show are you watching, and then easily share it with your friends. Below you can find the video demonstration of this new option.
A New, Optional Way to Share and Discover Music, TV and Movies from Facebook on Vimeo.
Although Facebook strongly emphasizes that they can not identify background noise or conversation, this is another way of tracking Facebook users behavior and harvesting even more data about them.
Facebook spokesperson Momo Zhou said “If you don’t choose to post and the feature detects a match, we don’t store match information except in an anonymized form that is not associated with you.” In other words, if you do not choose to share the match, it will be stored on Facebook servers in anonymous form. If you are going to share the match, it will no longer be anonymous.
However, this amount of data even in anonymized form will create a gigantic database of information about what Facebook users are watching and listening to.
In the end, advertisers and Facebook’s media partnerships are going to benefit from it the most.
Will you let them?