Hi folks, I don't know if this has been brought up on Mumsnet already, but this appeared on 'Sum of Us' updates today (quoted below link from the petition page):
action.sumofus.org/a/Facebook-app-taps-phones/?sub=tw
"Facebook just announced (22 May 2014) a new feature to its app, which will let it listen to our conversations through our own phones’ microphone. Talk about a Big Brother move.
Facebook says the feature will be used for harmless things, like identifying the song or TV show playing in the background, but it actually has the ability to listen to everything including your private conservations and store it indefinitely.
Not only is this move just downright creepy, it’s also a massive threat to our privacy. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been criticized for breaching our right to privacy, and it’s hoping this feature will fly under the radar. No such luck for Facebook. If we act now, we can stop Facebook in its tracks before it has a chance to release the feature.
Tell Facebook not to release its creepy and dangerous new app feature that listens to users’ conversations.
Facebook says it'll be responsible with this feature, but we know we can't trust it. After all, just a few months ago Facebook came under fire for receiving millions of dollars for working with the National Security Agency’s PRISM, a wide-scale and highly controversial public electronic data surveillance program something its CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially denied. This is also the company that lied about its now-scuttered Beacon program an advertisement system that sent our “private” data from external websites to Facebook.
It seems like every few months, there's another big Facebook privacy scandal, and yet the social media giant is pushing this new app anyway. Why? The information it gathers by listening to its 1.2 billion users worldwide can be sold for huge profits to advertisers and corporations looking for better information on consumer tastes and preferences.
Facebook is acting in the best interests of its bank account, not its users. This has gone too far - we have to stop it now."
More information - www.ibtimes.com/facebook-microphone-update-store-data-social-media-giant-confirms-new-feature-will-1588916
And here - www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/05/22/facebook-wants-to-listen-in-on-what-youre-doing/
"It reminds me of GPS-tagging an update, but with cultural context rather than location deets. While you decide whether to add the match to a given Facebook update, Facebook gets information about what you were listening to or watching regardless, though it won’t be associated with your profile. '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,' says Zhou. Depending on how many people turn the feature on, it will be a nice store of information about what Facebook users are watching and listening to, even in anonymized form."
Warning - If you read the user agreement on the Facebook mobile app before signing in to it on your mobile device, at the bottom it does mention conflicts with your main online account preferences (privacy, sharing, hidden posts by friends and page updates etc) and if you are agreeing that your account/visibility settings can be overlooked by the app when using it, potentially they can collect and share any information from us that they want.
Stay safe 
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