Other than the importance of paper data shredding we analyse the data protection market as a whole and highlight significant news and information when it is made available.
Facebook made big news announcements this week that illustrates their atypical take on data privacy. It was announced that a new feature to its mobile application that will enable it to listen to the surroundings through the hardware devices microphone. They announced that the feature will be used to perform harmless tasks such as identifying songs, TV shows and surroundings. It is going to be a kind of Shazam but with a greater sharing and storing the information indefinitely It is planned to have an opt-in feature however as we all are well aware most people with an emphasis on the youth of today will not read the warnings.
What Facebook says it does:
When writing a status update – if you choose to turn the feature on – you’ll have the option to use your phone’s microphone to identify what song is playing or what show or movie is on TV.
That means if you want to share that you’re listening to your favorite Beyoncé track or watching the season premiere of Game of Thrones, you can do it quickly and easily, without typing.
As for what was not covered; is that not only is no sound stored, but it can’t even understand background noise like conversations (Confidential Data Rights)
Facebook have announced that they will be responsible for this feature but I am struggling not to think of all the public failures Corporations & Bodies have made with promises and strategic wording explanations without being totally damaging to themselves.
Hundreds and thousands of concerned data subjects have signed a petition urging Facebook to abandon this data privacy invasion feature.
The petition is currently at 235,000 signatures out of a necessary 250,000.
The feature is set to land on both iOS and Android in the next few weeks. We all need more information on Data Protection and appropriate methods of destroying and managing confidential information.
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