Facebook is able to identify music and TV when writing status update

Not really. If I find it important to mention what I am watching or listening too, I can add it myself.

Obviously, the goals is not surveillance, since 15 seconds would be a too small amount of time. The goal is getting an even more fine-grained idea of your preferences for advertising.

A company who knows more and more about me, removing privacy one small step at a time, is creepy.

There can also be a temporal factor. Today there might be no evil intentions but in a couple years someone might find that "we have this whole data set we could do X with".

But you are asking for some really heavy lifting here. You're positing that we have two choices: assume ill intent on the part of Facebook or assume it's all good.

These are not the only choices, and they're not opposites of each other. Most likely is that FB folks are actively trying to help posters as much as they can. Most likely is that the average poster enjoys all this cool stuff. Most likely is that this is a terrible feature that should have never seen the light of day because of where it's taking the industry -- deeper down a pit of the surveillance/security state. Most likely a lot of folks complain about it simply because it's trendy.

All of these things can be true at the same time.

So I'm not really sure what to say. Sucks to work at Facebook, I guess. Too many developers and a mission to own the planet. Maybe they should have just stuck to "pictures of people you know and what they've been doing lately"

It's a good thing that people care about privacy and security. It's a good thing that people question new free features and the motivation behind them.

Facebook exists to gather data about you so it can target advertising at you better than the rest and get paid more by advertisers using it's platform. Facebook will use this feature in any way it can to gather more data about you, and that's creepy and literally surveillance even if only for the time you're writing a status update.

Secondly, as with the Snowden leaks - say the engineers at FB are well intentioned, having that data travel over the air exposes more than the user is aware.

IMHO we should always assume ill intentions. Always.

Sure, but what if we're wrong? Once Facebook and it's advertisers have access to this information there's no way to be sure that they've deleted everything, just because you asked nicely.

When it's impossible to undo an action it's best to proceed with caution.

This is a half truth at best. Audio recognition can be based on one of two techniques. The first is audio watermarking which is completely client side (albeit not applicable for this FB feature) or fingerprinting. They'll likely use the latter which records a segment of audio, does the rough audio equivalent of a hash on it and then send it the server for an optimised pattern match. It's somewhat unlikely they'll send raw audio to their servers although that's an assumption.

For example, Google release Android 6.0 but I can't upgrade until Motorola decide when and if I can update my phone. Why can't I upgrade at the same time as everyone else, like on iOS?

Second is the abysmal permissions system which grants access to everything and anything - else you can't talk to your friends on Whatsapp.

However, I was forced to update my Nexus 7 to 5.x, and the device became absolutely unusable. So I wonder whether I want the upgrades if even Google can't handle them properly.

But it's OK for Shazam or Soundhound?

At which point is a feature just what it says on the tin?

From the article: "If you choose to turn on this feature..."

After the Snowden leaks, pretty much everyone on HN is aware of the issues. So some are strongly against it and are vocal, and others silently accept it and don't think it's possible to convince them otherwise.

But anyway, thank you for your nice, calm response to my semi-raging post :)