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.
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.