Do You Want Facebook Listening In Your Lounge Room?

A major new development will give Facebook ‘ears’ to listen.

In a major new move, Facebook will soon be able to recognize any music track or TV show your playing in your lounge room, or anywhere else for that matter.

Teaming up with the music streaming sites Spotify, Rdio and Deezer, Facebook is using their music know-how to power this new techno tune spotting feature, directly competing with the classic music identifying app, Shazam.

According to Facebook, this new feature will ‘listen’ and identify popular music tracks or TV shows within 15 seconds. This means that you can easily let your Facebook friends know if you’re watching the latest Game of Thrones episode or the latest Beyoncé track, (or, let’s be honest, an episode of Dora the Explorer) in your status update.

These status updates will then click through to links to your song of choice via Spotify, Rdio or Deezer, or in the case of TV shows, will link through to the corresponding TV show’s Facebook page, so your friends can listen and watch along with you – kind of like a live mixtape.

The idea of Facebook ‘listening’ in to us leads to some serious questions about privacy. With Facebook having the ability to know where we work, who we’re in a relationship with, where we live and where we are when we’re out and about, is the idea of the social media behemoth ‘listening’ in to us just a step too far?

Some commentators are outraged by the idea of Facebook ‘listening-in’ to their users, and there are online petitions asking for Facebook to ditch the new feature. According to Facebook, the new feature will not be able to listen to background noise or conversations and it won’t be recording or storing what we choose to listen to, and they stress that this new feature is based on an opt-in as opposed to an opt-out basis.
However, what they have admitted to is that the new feature will be able to more accurately target the advertising that appears within your Facebook stream. Currently this new feature in only available in the U.S., but, depending on the success of the online petitions, could be hitting our shores soon.

What do you think about this new Facebook feature? Harmless fun, or potential nightmare?

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au