

Facebook: Do not release your new app feature that listens to users - makmanalp
http://action.sumofus.org/a/Facebook-app-taps-phones/

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blixt
I don't understand this fear mongering.

First, all apps out there have the capability to do this, once given the
permission to do so. And yes, you do have to enable this feature for it to
work at all, so you're in control.

Second, this feature only listens while you're posting (after you've
explicitly enabled it), so it's not like it's doing this by itself while
you're having super secret conversations (if it did you'd know because iOS
makes the top bar flashing red while recording in the background).

Third, you should have some faith in the tech competence, morals, or at the
very least legality of big companies. There are laws in place to ensure that
your voice doesn't get "recorded indefinitely", and in the case of this
feature, it's just finger printing the audio which means that the only data
being used cannot reconstruct the original audio – only compare two pieces of
audio to each other.

Lastly, if you don't trust this feature, you shouldn't trust anything else
about the company either. I don't see how preventing this feature makes your
life any more secure because if Facebook truly are using all your information
against you, you've already given them more than enough. Not to mention that
if there really was a conspiracy and they could record you without you knowing
it, they'd hardly need to mask it behind this feature. If that was the case
Facebook (or some other app like Skype) could just plain out record your
microphone 24/7 anyway.

~~~
holri
Yes but people are not really aware of the already present severe privacy
implications Facebook has. They are suppressing or downplaying it like
overweight people are pushing aside such thoughts while eating. Every now and
then when a new story or feature pops up that highlights that craziness, there
is an outcry and nothing happens. Same for overweight people. It is just human
to set aside the reality.

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colept
The best way to stop Facebook from releasing this feature is to stop using
Facebook. The users are their customers and the most impressionable feedback
you can give to Facebook is to deactivate or delete your account.

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aselekman
I’m Aryeh Selekman, the product manager on Facebook’s optional audio
recognition feature. I wanted to chime in here around some misunderstandings
around how this feature works.

The feature is completely optional. You get to choose whether you want to turn
it on or not. If you do turn it on, you can always turn it off at any time and
your Facebook experience will not change.

If you do turn it on, the feature never listens to or stores your
conversations. Here’s what happens after you turn the feature on. The app
converts the sound into an audio fingerprint on your phone. This fingerprint
is sent to Facebook's servers to try and match it against our database of
known music and TV fingerprints. We do not store fingerprints from your device
for any amount of time. These fingerprints can never be reversed into the
original audio.

You will always get to choose whether you want to post about what you’re
listening to or watching. Facebook will never automatically post about what
you’re listening to.

In turn, if we don’t find a match, we log that we failed. We don’t store the
fingerprint.

I hope this clears up a lot of common questions around the feature.

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Houshalter
It's a cool idea, your phone listening to the world around it and reacting to
it. Technology like this is probably inevitable. Someday people might even ask
their phone to play back something from awhile ago, or to give them a
transcript of a conversation.

~~~
chroem
>As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines
improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of
these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we
might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard
drugs from now on.

Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN
a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across.
Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's
right.

~~~
philtar
Yeah except one is supposed to make your life better and the other destroys
your life.

This is not an extreme example. This is (I hope, for your sake) a joke.

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return0
I wonder if facebook plans to start tagging people's voices as well, so you
can instantly tag people in photos via voice recognition.

Although i shouldn't be worried, this campaign will definitely work... /s

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finnn
Do people think this will actually work? Isn't facebook generally already
disliked by most, but used by all because everyone else uses it? What's going
to happen if they put this in there? People will continue to not like it but
use it anyway

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goatslacker
[http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-
sh...](http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-share-and-
discover-music-tv-and-movies/)

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codva
I uninstalled the facebook app from my phone last week. It works just fine in
the phone's browser.

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logicbased
Have you ever read the Whatsapp permissions ?

