Saw an advertisement for this in a theater some months back. The wife and I turned to each other and said "Hell no." She isn't even that security aware, it's just... why. What is this for? What problem does this solve? Our iPhones do this already without constant surveillance and probably have superior hardware.
This feels much to me like Stadia did to Google: It's a company inserting itself into a position it didn't need to be. It's a solution in search of a problem. In the 90's this would've been pretty amazing, but in an era of Smartphones that more or less all support this already with multiple apps, who is this for? Why would you have it? Not even going into the privacy aspects, it's basically a voice-controlled video phone.
This is for video conferencing users that are not tech literate. This is something I would get for my grandmother, or my wife's grandmother, instead of an iPhone for video conferencing. If it was not offered by Facebook.
I would trust Mozilla (perhaps partnered with the EFF) or Apple to offer such a product if they would charge for quality hardware, reliable infra, and long term support. Sell your trust as the feature.
> This is for video conferencing users that are not tech literate.
So why does it increasingly feel like privacy and security are reserved for those who can afford it and/or know how to do it themselves? Why is every poor person who doesn't have the time to learn technology basically hung out to dry in terms of data protection?
I would not go so far as to assume iPhones do not perform surveillance. What Tim Cook says is one thing, what the national security letter they've received says is another.
Stadia is a dream come true for Google. Collecting all that personal data at scale about how people interact with virtual environments and how they react to certain situations will give them an unprecedented look into human nature.
Ads and product placements is AAA games is also fairly untapped territory, this is why I'm doubtful that Google will give up on this opportunity and shut down Stadia, as some people have predicted.
Speaking of product placement in games, I also find it untapped and potentially huge market, not just in AAA games.
I mean, if there's a car in the game, why not make it Renault to sponsor development? It seems vastly better than obnoxious ad banners or freemium whale hunting. Is there anything morally problematic with it?
Transaction costs, mostly. It's hard to connect developers and advertisers at scale. It's also difficult technically, does every car in a game need to look the same now?
Like, I totally think someone could make money from this, but it's unlikely to be as profitable as whale-hunting so it probably won't happen for a while.
A very interesting point. Nobody has any complaints about the Portal itself, just the fact that it's from Facebook. If a different company had come out with it... let's face it, that company would be swallowed by Google/Amazon/Facebook/MS sooner or later.
I cannot even think of a single person in any of my networks of people who would buy this and put it in their home. It has "hell no" written all over it. It's almost arrogant or bizarre that they would try to launch such a product given how people feel about Facebook and privacy.
I suppose it's simply to satisfy shareholders who think Facebook needs to compete in this market????
It's the Zune of the Living-Room Assistant space in my opinion.
People have purchased - and installed - Google Home (and Mini's) and Alexa's in their homes. They think they're "cute", and offer a valuable service to them. They are a microphone controlled by data raping giants.
People use "Assistants" and enable full tracking technologies on their devices ("See how great it is Google has your every location on a map for the last decade").
People have not only accepted but embraced a full surveillance and tracking society; even if YOU don't accept it, you're part of it, people may add your contact to their phone that will be gobbled up in seconds by Facebook/Google/et al.
I don't think it is. The difference is that Gmail/Amazon aren't hated the same way as Facebook is. People aren't smart about surveillance, they're not smart enough to realize that giving Instagram access to their phone is a bad idea.
But, there are 2 perfectly capable home assistants on the market today that (right or wrong) aren't part of the same consumer-level narrative about privacy, and people like simple, straightforward, black-and-white narratives, like "Facebook cameras in your house are watching your child so that targeted ads can turn them into a nazi." That's a simple story, it's easy to remember and think about. Even ordinary, privacy-uneducated users like that story.
It's totally feasible to me that this device will flop due to privacy concerns. Scanning around quickly online, I can't see a single positive review (even from mainstream publications) that doesn't end with, "but of course Facebook is evil and you'd have to be stupid to trust them with a camera in your house."
I suspect Facebook just lost the narrative on this. They should have called it "Instagram Portal", and then the consumer situation would be completely different.
Most of my siblings have Alexa devices in their house. It's a privacy nightmare, but they don't care. Even so, none of them would be dumb enough to buy a Facebook portal. It's not even a sacrifice -- Alexa/Google work with more devices and have more features.
>People aren't smart about surveillance, they're not smart enough to realize that giving Instagram access to their phone is a bad idea
I've seen this argument a lot, the issue is not people are not smart enough but people have different value toward privacy. I understand tech and yet I'm fine and even supporting this kind of tech. I understand its really hard and sucks to be in the side where you think is nightmare but other people think is not an issue. But thats the reality, people can have different value.
Why is owning an Echo device any more of a privacy nightmare than owning a smartphone? The Echo is not always listening/recording; it is activated by a wake word.
First, the Echo is always listening for a wakeword, and just because of the inherent limitations of the device, will occasionally get wakewords wrong. By default, Android phones don't listen to wakewords when locked, and can be easily configured to require a button press before listening.
Second, the microphone on your smartphone is less powerful than the microphone on your Echo, and your smartphone isn't omnipresent in every room of your house simultaneously, including guest bedrooms.
Third, (opinion me) Amazon is a slightly less trustworthy company than Google, and a much less trustworthy company than Apple.
And finally, you can outright turn off assistants on your phone (and should). An always-on virtual assistant run by Google that always listens even when your phone is locked is also a privacy nightmare, but there's pretty much no reason to have that.
If you're paranoid about the security of carrying a microphone that could be enabled via software at any time, you can also install a custom ROM on your Android device that uninstalls Google Assistant and non-FOSS software entirely. LineageOS is really good, I highly recommend it -- it's just not feasible to install for regular, nontechnical consumers.
I've seen TV ads for Portal and one version of it is a grandpa telling us viewers how great Portal is for connecting him and his grandkids, showing off the auto-pan feature (the kids ran around their living room and the device's camera followed them).
So I guess they're targeting non-techie elderlies for one.
I wonder if you're just in a bubble when you say what you say. I'm in my city's FB group for youths and one time they were doing some excursion where tickets were age-dependant (discount for under 26s). The admin asked the people wanting tickets to post their names and DOB, and there were maybe 50 replies to that post with the asked information...
The average person tends not to care too much about their privacy. It's an abstract problem, and it'd take an extreme like video evidence of a Facebook employee jacking it to a nude photo they discretely captured from your webcam while you were in the bathroom.
Just look at the Oculus Rift. The "sensors" are literally webcams connected to a Facebook app that you point at your living room, your bedroom, your kids, etc. Yet people see a new toy and none of that matters. Even tech-savvy and privacy conscious people will contort their world views to justify the purchase.
> The average person tends not to care too much about their privacy.
This is not quite accurate. The average person cares a lot about privacy, but understands privacy differently from the HN/tech/anti-Facebook zeitgeist.
People care about privacy from people they know. They care about whether their parents, significant other, coworkers, and friends can see things they intend for them not to.
Most people don't care about whether private information about them is collected and stored on servers without any human ever looking at it (even if, hypothetically, some humans with nefarious intent could look at it someday). But this is an extremely narrow interpretation of "privacy".
I'm considering purchasing one. In general, I value convenience and personalization over privacy. I completely don't relate to the idea of relevant ads being a bad thing.
Anyways, as someone who spends a lot of time panning a laptop or iPad to track a toddler who is FaceTiming grandma, this device solves an important problem for us.
I think this is the truth of the world we live in. People want this stuff so bad that they are willing to give away a lot in exchange.
The other component is apathy, many people are just resigned to the fact that they will be surveilled one way or another.
I can foresee huge implications for all of this, it doesn't take much to get from here to using these devices to aid law enforcement. I know the argument is 'if you have nothing to hide... it keeps the kids safe...' but it all smells of a conformist dystopia.
Edit: I have a bunch of Google Homes, I count myself in the apathetic group, sadly.
The problem is it doesn't end with relevant ads. It doesn't even end with Cambridge Analytica. The business model of Facebook is absolutely clear. You are the product and the currency is you. If they can convert that to real $ they'll do it by any means without thinking about the implications. FB has proven again and again that they are incapable of considering or do not want to consider the wider implications of their actions. It's absolutely toxic and your actions today will define the future your children will be living in tomorrow. I personally think that it would be great if that future wasn't 1984 on steroids.
I read a comment a while ago that said, the Firefox Foundation has too much money and the executive committee has to look useful, so they've been coming up with stupid ideas for a few years now.
Except of course that there is no such thing as "the firefox foundation". There's the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works with lots of people and other organizations, both online and offline, on programs and projects that line up with the Mozilla manifesto. Stuff like this Buyer's Guide is what the foundation has always been about.
What it doesn't do is "make Firefox"; it never has.
And of course, most news articles completely gloss over the fact that they're not the same thing, and just call everything both organizations do as something "Mozilla" does, so if this is the first time your hearing about the fact that there's TWO organizations, not just one: now you know.
This title is somewhat problematic. It makes it sound like the portal has "privacy not included" and yet that is the name of the blog. In fact, the Portal meets the Mozilla Foundation's "Minimum Security Standards". It gets a yes for encryption, security updates, strong password, manages vulnerabilities and a privacy policy!
This is honestly kind of cruddy. You can feel however you want to feel about Facebook, but this is misleading.
I wonder what the consequences would be if after a few years Facebook just decided to disable E2E encryption and all those privacy features, and started collecting and using all that data for advertising purposes contrary to what they're claiming now?
Another $5 billion fine? $10 billion? $100 billion? If enough people buy it, it could still be a profitable endeavor.
Although I'm sure we can trust Facebook not to do that. They certainly deserve it /s
It was a programming mistake. Only a few accounts were affected. Inadvertently. Only 300 000 users affected. We're committed to privacy as always and in the coming year well take steps to make sure this never happens again. Our estimations were incomplete and a tad off, 270 million accounts affected, possibly more. Our users are at the center of all we do and will do everything in or power to protect their data.
> [we] will do everything in or power to protect their data.
Cambridge Analytica and other recent events show this statement to be meaningless. Facebook could have done a lot more to protect customer data but chose not to.
I had trouble telling from the first sentence or so, but after reading to the end I’m pretty confident it’s a sarcastic take on a (hypothetical?) press release.
Very much so. It's also not included in the original title, so not much of an excuse here.
If "Facebook Portal" is not descriptive enough, a case might be made for minor editorializing, but e.g. "Facebook Portal: Privacy Assessment" would be much less (mis)leading.
Security and privacy are two different but related things. Security can help some privacy issues such as encryption stopping others from snooping. It does not include first party privacy issues though.
Facebook has a history of privacy issues (hence the comment on the fine).
File under things that are always left unanswered... what about the content the device picks up when it's not in a call? Like a TV show in the background, a song playing from a different device, or something else. What is allowed but not said can be important. It would be nice to have a research outfit who tested these kinds of things.
Right below "Minimum Security Standards" is "Can it snoop on me?"
Camera: Yes
Microphone: Yes
Tracks location: Yes
Further down it ends with "Facebook has a history of betraying users' privacy and trust. [..] The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capabal [sic] of collecting on you. In the past--from Cambridge Analytic and beyond--the answer to that question has way too often been, NO"
I fully understand the scepticism around this product. That said, this section feels incomplete. It would be valuable to assess if there are physical controls to turn off both the camera and microphone or a physical camera cover. I think Facebook wisely chose to include that while similar products like the Nest Hub Max didn't. Even if I distrust Facebook more than Google, the Portal seems to have a clear privacy advantage on the Camera front.
Yeah I’ve seen this twice now for the portal (some CNET article saying people shouldn’t buy it, but not actually reviewing the hardware).
It’s annoying because the portal hardware is actually really great. I got the big one for my mom and I have the TV one and they work extremely well. I was looking for something that did what the portal does on the consumer market about a year before it came out and nothing existed.
This anti-Facebook stuff is mostly just politics and most of it isn’t particularly in depth or accurate.
> This anti-Facebook stuff is mostly just politics
Some of it is politics, but some of it is Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly lying through his teeth about failing to protect users' privacy. At a certain point, it stops sounding accidental. At worst, it was malicious enough that they were fined $5B for it (and should have been fined more).
If you're going to make the claim that Facebook is not as malicious as everyone says, you're making the more extreme and difficult to believe claim, and you should cite some sources. As it is, it just sounds like you're not interested in reading about their abuses even superficially.
Whenever there is a big FB story I try and figure out what actually happened. This is often difficult because 95% of the media reporting on it is either entirely wrong, intentionally misleading, or both.
For the recent Cambridge Analytica thing my take away was that a shady third party (CA) violated FB’s TOS by exploiting a vulnerability in their API that FB had sinced locked down. Cambridge Analytica used that to pull more data from the social graph than they should have been allowed to (after a subset of users participated in scammy quizzes) in order to do stupid things with that data.
When I’ve read the rare detailed reporting from FB’s response [0] about how they’re reacting to issues I’ve been impressed.
Zuckerberg’s comments to the public are also pretty detailed and nuanced - atypically rare for a public facing CEO under massive persistent scrutiny.
This is consistent with what I’ve heard from my friends that work there.
The locking down of the API is done to prevent competition, while being publicly framed as a privacy enhancing scheme.
> The Switcharoo Plan turned out to be an idea whereby Facebook executives would deprecate various APIs that its developer partners depended on for fear that those developers would one day compete with Facebook directly, while publicly announcing that the changes were intended to promote privacy.
FB can be concerned about apps like Pikini that damage their brand and concerned about other companies trying to leverage their data in order to build a competitor.
This is a little hard to reason about fairly given the context that the document leak was targeted to make FB look bad by lawyers that had an agenda around a current anti-trust lawsuit from a client that used FB user data to make a bikini photo finding app (not the most ethical bunch).
That said, I'd argue there's no reason FB should have to allow API access to a company that directly conflicts with FB's interests, particularly when they're trying to take FB's data to build a replacement (and it looks like it would trigger some sort of contract discussion initially anyway). A lot of companies remove third party API access for a number of reasons and this ability is typically explicitly specified in the terms of the API access agreement.
Framing it around a privacy narrative to avoid media backlash around API deprecation is trying to get a handle on PR - I prefer when companies are just direct, but given the risk around bad media coverage I can see why they did it.
This entire issue is somewhat distinct from what I was talking about in the Cambridge Analytica case which I think was a bug in the social graph (they were not supposed to be able to crawl as much of it as they could) and this bug was fixed prior (I think years prior?) to the whistleblower from CA releasing details. My understanding was that accessing the data, while technically possible due to the bug, was still in violation of TOS.
I run it on a 65" 4k TV (specifically the LG E6 OLED) - it looks sharp and does a good job, but I do have it sitting next to the wireless access point.
Also since I mostly communicate with my mom who is using her big portal the quality is pretty good (since the camera on that one is pretty good).
This is a site in which Breitbart, a well know white nationalist propaganda site is marked as a trusted source for news. Zuck has met privately with conservative pundits. There is reason to be alarmed and skeptical of Facebook.
Stop! Don't mark them as reputably just because they meet with conservatives.
Breitbart is not reliable, and that should reduce Facebook's trust, but meetings conservatives should not. Conservatives have long accused facebook of ignoring them, so when facebook stops ignoring them, we should not demonize them.
To be fair, the "minimum security standards" are a very low bar.
I hope the public soon realizes that harvesting metadata is just as valuable to advertisers as the actual content of your messages. In fact, it's arguably more valuable since you can discern all of the details without any of the regulations.
E2E Encryption is ad tech's latest sleight-of-hand. Everything, including the metadata, should be encrypted. It's otherwise pointless.
Mozilla knows their products are falling behind and will probably continue to do so as long as they maintain their current trajectory. The only other strategy is to compete via PR.
You've looked at the security features (which, as sibling comment points out, is related to, but not the same as privacy), and stopped short of reading the full privacy review.
A lot of commenters have made the same mistake, so perhaps this is useful UX feedback for Mozilla.
The title however, is NOT misleading. To copypaste the parts nobody seems to be reading:
Can it snoop on me?
Camera: Yes
Microphone: Yes
Tracks Location: Yes
How does it handle privacy
How does it share data?
data about your Portal usage –
how often you do video calls, what
apps you open, what features you
use – can be used to target you with
advertisements across Facebook. The
company may also share specific
demographic and audience engagement
data with advertisers and analytics
partners.
Collects biometrics data? Yes
User friendly privacy info? No
What could happen if something went wrong
Facebook has a history of betraying users' privacy and trust. They've faced record fines for this and have been caught
hiding privacy breaches from their users. This is the starting point for bringing a device with an AI-powered smart camera
and always listening microphone that is sending data back to Facebook regularly. They also say they do human review of audio
snippets unless you chose (and take the time to figure out how) to opt out. The question comes down to, does Facebook have
your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capabal of collecting on you. In the past--from
Cambridge Analytic and beyond--the answer to that question has way too often been, NO.
I find Mozilla's editorializing in the little blurbs at the top of each page to be kind of problematic as well. It seems like they came up with an objective set of standards, but it turns out those standards didn't quite fit the narrative they wanted to put forth.
I'm no fan of Facebook, but if you want to point out their privacy shortcomings, come up with a stronger set of standards and apply them to all the products. Don't take cheap shots at them at the top of a page that gives them 5 stars.
I agree that the privacynotincluded site should have a broader set of standards but I really commend them for investing resources into tackling the truth of the huge amount of surveillance built in to a lot of these products these days. Hopefully they can improve the UI in future as it is a bit confusing. However the main takeaway at the bottom should be understood:
"Facebook has a history of betraying users' privacy and trust. They've faced record fines for this and have been caught hiding privacy breaches from their users. This is the starting point for bringing a device with an AI-powered smart camera and always listening microphone that is sending data back to Facebook regularly. They also say they do human review of audio snippets unless you chose (and take the time to figure out how) to opt out. The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capable (*fixed typo) of collecting on you. In the past--from Cambridge Analytic and beyond--the answer to that question has way too often been, NO."
> The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capabal [sic] of collecting on you.
> Even the Muppets can’t make Facebook Portal seem less creepy
(linked article at FastCompany) [1]
The Muppets pushing anything is and already was obscene (Kermit sipping Lipton meme, anyone?). Their first feature film, which is roughly as old as I am, revolved around Kermit following his dream and specifically not selling out his own species by making an advertisement.
Disney is definitely milking that acquisition for all its worth. Which is understandable if you read the history of Disney. Licensing for Mikey Mouse was a cash cow for them from the start. And if I'm being honest, I have to admit that I generally enjoy Disney content. However, every time I turn around now I'm seeing the Muppets shilling for some product or other. The Muppets are Disney's to do with as they please. I just wish they'd be more discerning and tasteful about who and what they license to. Pitching for anything coming out of Facebook sours the Muppets brand in my opinion.
You know your brand is toxic when a generic/faceless version of your product would have been received better. Someone else here mentioned that it should have been "Instagram Portal", which I totally agree with, or maybe even better: "WhatsApp Portal". It seems like Facebook is trying to resuscitate its reputation by releasing this obviously invasive device and swearing on a stack of bibles that they won't touch the data. That's not how it works though. Once people realize you're an untrustworthy megacorp who's mining and selling data, there's nothing you can do to disprove it except get out of the data game altogether; the cat is already out of the bag.
I wonder how much they're interested in resuscitating their reputation with this product vs hoe much they're interested in targeting a demographic they may not have had a lot of in roads into. A demographic that has time and money to spend: the Baby Boomer generation and older. They're generally not technically savvy like the generations after them so Facebook built a device that all they have to do is talk to. Every time I see an ad for Facebook Portal it includes a person from that demographic.
Meanwhile, Facebook gets to suck up all that valuable data they so lust for and start selling ads to the elderly Portal users. I thought it was bad that my parents friends are falling for scams and buying too much stuff on QVC. I don't think they stand a chance at Facebook targeting them.
I hate that I'm so cynical about this. I really do. But Facebook has proven time and again all they care about is our data to sell to advertisers. So I can't help but see any new products of theirs through that lens.
I don't think a generic version would have ever caught my attention at all. I'd think Instagram's jumped the shark if they branded it with that. Like, that would just sound like a photo frame that only shows IG posts or something; I'd roll my eyes and move on. I don't know anything about WhatsApp other than people were hacked or something.
For non-tech folks, I think the Facebook brand great. They chat with friends and family with Facebook messenger. This must be where they can make video calls to those same people. You get it just by seeing the name and the product together.
I don’t get what this is supposed to convey. The post has nothing of substance, takes a shot at Facebook but seems to immediately absolve it, more so with a really shallow security and privacy requirements list. This speaks more about Mozilla than Facebook. They can do a lot better in what ever it is they are trying to do. At the very least explain what the post is intended to do first.
The concept is great, a human-usable video conferencing system that doesn't suck massive balls.
As for the privacy, that's more nuanced. In terms of thirdparty access/security, its almost certainly more secure than the traditional suppliers(I'm looking at your authentication cisco...)
The nitty gritty is data collection by the company it's self. Thats harder. If your VC system uses android under the hood, then you have no privacy at all. Your data is funnelled to google at a minimum, some app vendors, and the company that made it.
Apple, its held in many secret silos in apple land, and not even apple knows which team has what data.
Facebook, now, they need a hardware platform, and this is the first step to getting there. If they were clever, they'd be prostrating themselves demonstrating that they are reformed, that they are full of trust and junk.
But as they are still clinging to the "its not our job to police the myriad of crap people advertise on our site", I don't think they understand. This kind of pressure should force a change, as facebook are publicly traded.
The problem is that tech journalism isn't really journalism. Its unquestionably adding breathless hot takes to PR, or if you've been burnt, unfailingly shitting on every product made by said company.
This... thing in your house is only one Privacy Terms & Conditions update away from tailoring ads to scare you into voting for whichever political candidate promises to not pursue Facebook with an AntiTrust lawsuit. If that isn’t terrifying, I don’t know what is.
Honestly the UX of the privacy not included blog is pretty terrible. It is seems as if the blog is simultaneously sarcastic, shaming, and endorsing all at once. I would strongly suggest removing all of the unnecessary visual formatting, adding iconography to indicate Mozilla's stance on a topic, removing the personal tone from the articles, and overall restructuring the information to communicate the important information more swiftly and clearly.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadThis feels much to me like Stadia did to Google: It's a company inserting itself into a position it didn't need to be. It's a solution in search of a problem. In the 90's this would've been pretty amazing, but in an era of Smartphones that more or less all support this already with multiple apps, who is this for? Why would you have it? Not even going into the privacy aspects, it's basically a voice-controlled video phone.
I would trust Mozilla (perhaps partnered with the EFF) or Apple to offer such a product if they would charge for quality hardware, reliable infra, and long term support. Sell your trust as the feature.
So why does it increasingly feel like privacy and security are reserved for those who can afford it and/or know how to do it themselves? Why is every poor person who doesn't have the time to learn technology basically hung out to dry in terms of data protection?
Ads and product placements is AAA games is also fairly untapped territory, this is why I'm doubtful that Google will give up on this opportunity and shut down Stadia, as some people have predicted.
I mean, if there's a car in the game, why not make it Renault to sponsor development? It seems vastly better than obnoxious ad banners or freemium whale hunting. Is there anything morally problematic with it?
Like, I totally think someone could make money from this, but it's unlikely to be as profitable as whale-hunting so it probably won't happen for a while.
Portal is an example of bad company-product fit.
I suppose it's simply to satisfy shareholders who think Facebook needs to compete in this market????
It's the Zune of the Living-Room Assistant space in my opinion.
People use "Assistants" and enable full tracking technologies on their devices ("See how great it is Google has your every location on a map for the last decade").
People have not only accepted but embraced a full surveillance and tracking society; even if YOU don't accept it, you're part of it, people may add your contact to their phone that will be gobbled up in seconds by Facebook/Google/et al.
People don't care. End of story.
But, there are 2 perfectly capable home assistants on the market today that (right or wrong) aren't part of the same consumer-level narrative about privacy, and people like simple, straightforward, black-and-white narratives, like "Facebook cameras in your house are watching your child so that targeted ads can turn them into a nazi." That's a simple story, it's easy to remember and think about. Even ordinary, privacy-uneducated users like that story.
It's totally feasible to me that this device will flop due to privacy concerns. Scanning around quickly online, I can't see a single positive review (even from mainstream publications) that doesn't end with, "but of course Facebook is evil and you'd have to be stupid to trust them with a camera in your house."
I suspect Facebook just lost the narrative on this. They should have called it "Instagram Portal", and then the consumer situation would be completely different.
Most of my siblings have Alexa devices in their house. It's a privacy nightmare, but they don't care. Even so, none of them would be dumb enough to buy a Facebook portal. It's not even a sacrifice -- Alexa/Google work with more devices and have more features.
I've seen this argument a lot, the issue is not people are not smart enough but people have different value toward privacy. I understand tech and yet I'm fine and even supporting this kind of tech. I understand its really hard and sucks to be in the side where you think is nightmare but other people think is not an issue. But thats the reality, people can have different value.
Again, how is this different from a smartphone that will wake up when you say "Hey Siri" ?
Second, the microphone on your smartphone is less powerful than the microphone on your Echo, and your smartphone isn't omnipresent in every room of your house simultaneously, including guest bedrooms.
Third, (opinion me) Amazon is a slightly less trustworthy company than Google, and a much less trustworthy company than Apple.
And finally, you can outright turn off assistants on your phone (and should). An always-on virtual assistant run by Google that always listens even when your phone is locked is also a privacy nightmare, but there's pretty much no reason to have that.
If you're paranoid about the security of carrying a microphone that could be enabled via software at any time, you can also install a custom ROM on your Android device that uninstalls Google Assistant and non-FOSS software entirely. LineageOS is really good, I highly recommend it -- it's just not feasible to install for regular, nontechnical consumers.
I loved my Zune. I wouldn't touch a Portal with a 39.5' pole.
So I guess they're targeting non-techie elderlies for one.
I wonder if you're just in a bubble when you say what you say. I'm in my city's FB group for youths and one time they were doing some excursion where tickets were age-dependant (discount for under 26s). The admin asked the people wanting tickets to post their names and DOB, and there were maybe 50 replies to that post with the asked information...
Just look at the Oculus Rift. The "sensors" are literally webcams connected to a Facebook app that you point at your living room, your bedroom, your kids, etc. Yet people see a new toy and none of that matters. Even tech-savvy and privacy conscious people will contort their world views to justify the purchase.
This is not quite accurate. The average person cares a lot about privacy, but understands privacy differently from the HN/tech/anti-Facebook zeitgeist.
People care about privacy from people they know. They care about whether their parents, significant other, coworkers, and friends can see things they intend for them not to.
Most people don't care about whether private information about them is collected and stored on servers without any human ever looking at it (even if, hypothetically, some humans with nefarious intent could look at it someday). But this is an extremely narrow interpretation of "privacy".
Anyways, as someone who spends a lot of time panning a laptop or iPad to track a toddler who is FaceTiming grandma, this device solves an important problem for us.
The other component is apathy, many people are just resigned to the fact that they will be surveilled one way or another.
I can foresee huge implications for all of this, it doesn't take much to get from here to using these devices to aid law enforcement. I know the argument is 'if you have nothing to hide... it keeps the kids safe...' but it all smells of a conformist dystopia.
Edit: I have a bunch of Google Homes, I count myself in the apathetic group, sadly.
The video is encrypted and content from the call cannot be used. If this was not the case I wouldn't buy it.
The other things they say they'll use from it are in line with what I already expect from having a FB account in the first place.
The portal even has a built in camera cover/off switch in hardware.
https://medium.com/@shiriendamra/why-the-zune-failed-1327845...
TLDR: iPod already dominated the market, and the zune wasn't marketed aggressively enough.
And yet Alexa, Siri etc are fine to many
Is it a review? Is it telling me it's secure? It's good? It's bad? What are the 5 stars for? Should I buy it? Should I not?
The page is just really badly put together and it's not really clear what I'm looking at.
Is there a page for this? I'm not sure whether to vote more or less creepy for what it's doing.
What it doesn't do is "make Firefox"; it never has.
There's the Mozilla Corporation (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/), which makes products, like Firefox, and then there's the Mozilla Foundation (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/), which is all about furthering the Mozilla mission, not making products.
And of course, most news articles completely gloss over the fact that they're not the same thing, and just call everything both organizations do as something "Mozilla" does, so if this is the first time your hearing about the fact that there's TWO organizations, not just one: now you know.
D'oh! Allow me to use the excuse of having had a 14 hour flight when I wrote the original comment.
This is honestly kind of cruddy. You can feel however you want to feel about Facebook, but this is misleading.
Another $5 billion fine? $10 billion? $100 billion? If enough people buy it, it could still be a profitable endeavor.
Although I'm sure we can trust Facebook not to do that. They certainly deserve it /s
It is in their terms if they choose.
You’re minimizing exposing information of enough people to populate most of Cincinnati, Ohio (301k)?
Casting that as “only 300,000” is sickening.
Cambridge Analytica and other recent events show this statement to be meaningless. Facebook could have done a lot more to protect customer data but chose not to.
If "Facebook Portal" is not descriptive enough, a case might be made for minor editorializing, but e.g. "Facebook Portal: Privacy Assessment" would be much less (mis)leading.
Facebook has a history of privacy issues (hence the comment on the fine).
File under things that are always left unanswered... what about the content the device picks up when it's not in a call? Like a TV show in the background, a song playing from a different device, or something else. What is allowed but not said can be important. It would be nice to have a research outfit who tested these kinds of things.
Camera: Yes
Microphone: Yes
Tracks location: Yes
Further down it ends with "Facebook has a history of betraying users' privacy and trust. [..] The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capabal [sic] of collecting on you. In the past--from Cambridge Analytic and beyond--the answer to that question has way too often been, NO"
It’s annoying because the portal hardware is actually really great. I got the big one for my mom and I have the TV one and they work extremely well. I was looking for something that did what the portal does on the consumer market about a year before it came out and nothing existed.
This anti-Facebook stuff is mostly just politics and most of it isn’t particularly in depth or accurate.
Some of it is politics, but some of it is Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly lying through his teeth about failing to protect users' privacy. At a certain point, it stops sounding accidental. At worst, it was malicious enough that they were fined $5B for it (and should have been fined more).
If you're going to make the claim that Facebook is not as malicious as everyone says, you're making the more extreme and difficult to believe claim, and you should cite some sources. As it is, it just sounds like you're not interested in reading about their abuses even superficially.
Whenever there is a big FB story I try and figure out what actually happened. This is often difficult because 95% of the media reporting on it is either entirely wrong, intentionally misleading, or both.
For the recent Cambridge Analytica thing my take away was that a shady third party (CA) violated FB’s TOS by exploiting a vulnerability in their API that FB had sinced locked down. Cambridge Analytica used that to pull more data from the social graph than they should have been allowed to (after a subset of users participated in scammy quizzes) in order to do stupid things with that data.
When I’ve read the rare detailed reporting from FB’s response [0] about how they’re reacting to issues I’ve been impressed.
Zuckerberg’s comments to the public are also pretty detailed and nuanced - atypically rare for a public facing CEO under massive persistent scrutiny.
This is consistent with what I’ve heard from my friends that work there.
[0]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/men-are-scum-inside-...
> The Switcharoo Plan turned out to be an idea whereby Facebook executives would deprecate various APIs that its developer partners depended on for fear that those developers would one day compete with Facebook directly, while publicly announcing that the changes were intended to promote privacy.
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/11/8/20953623/facebo...
Nothing Facebook says publicly should be trusted.
FB can be concerned about apps like Pikini that damage their brand and concerned about other companies trying to leverage their data in order to build a competitor.
This is a little hard to reason about fairly given the context that the document leak was targeted to make FB look bad by lawyers that had an agenda around a current anti-trust lawsuit from a client that used FB user data to make a bikini photo finding app (not the most ethical bunch).
That said, I'd argue there's no reason FB should have to allow API access to a company that directly conflicts with FB's interests, particularly when they're trying to take FB's data to build a replacement (and it looks like it would trigger some sort of contract discussion initially anyway). A lot of companies remove third party API access for a number of reasons and this ability is typically explicitly specified in the terms of the API access agreement.
Framing it around a privacy narrative to avoid media backlash around API deprecation is trying to get a handle on PR - I prefer when companies are just direct, but given the risk around bad media coverage I can see why they did it.
This entire issue is somewhat distinct from what I was talking about in the Cambridge Analytica case which I think was a bug in the social graph (they were not supposed to be able to crawl as much of it as they could) and this bug was fixed prior (I think years prior?) to the whistleblower from CA releasing details. My understanding was that accessing the data, while technically possible due to the bug, was still in violation of TOS.
Also since I mostly communicate with my mom who is using her big portal the quality is pretty good (since the camera on that one is pretty good).
We have two portals here at home and almost everyone I know who wants to stay in touch with their families has one too. Specially the kids love it!
Breitbart is not reliable, and that should reduce Facebook's trust, but meetings conservatives should not. Conservatives have long accused facebook of ignoring them, so when facebook stops ignoring them, we should not demonize them.
Everything is fine if you just remove sentence 2.
I hope the public soon realizes that harvesting metadata is just as valuable to advertisers as the actual content of your messages. In fact, it's arguably more valuable since you can discern all of the details without any of the regulations.
E2E Encryption is ad tech's latest sleight-of-hand. Everything, including the metadata, should be encrypted. It's otherwise pointless.
But to answer yours: https://github.com/vuvuzela/vuvuzela
Encrypting metadata is a huge challenge. In the meantime, our best bet is to use open-source systems that we know won't be harvesting metadata.
Granted, the hn circlejerk loves to hate on Alexa devices as much as possible as well, but IMO this is "upvote bait" headline.
Dang, can we change the title?
A lot of commenters have made the same mistake, so perhaps this is useful UX feedback for Mozilla.
The title however, is NOT misleading. To copypaste the parts nobody seems to be reading:
I'm no fan of Facebook, but if you want to point out their privacy shortcomings, come up with a stronger set of standards and apply them to all the products. Don't take cheap shots at them at the top of a page that gives them 5 stars.
"Facebook has a history of betraying users' privacy and trust. They've faced record fines for this and have been caught hiding privacy breaches from their users. This is the starting point for bringing a device with an AI-powered smart camera and always listening microphone that is sending data back to Facebook regularly. They also say they do human review of audio snippets unless you chose (and take the time to figure out how) to opt out. The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capable (*fixed typo) of collecting on you. In the past--from Cambridge Analytic and beyond--the answer to that question has way too often been, NO."
> The question comes down to, does Facebook have your best interests at heart when it collects all the data this device is capabal [sic] of collecting on you.
The Muppets pushing anything is and already was obscene (Kermit sipping Lipton meme, anyone?). Their first feature film, which is roughly as old as I am, revolved around Kermit following his dream and specifically not selling out his own species by making an advertisement.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90409198/even-the-muppets-cant-m...
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ Our mission: Keep the internet open and accessible to all.
Meanwhile, Facebook gets to suck up all that valuable data they so lust for and start selling ads to the elderly Portal users. I thought it was bad that my parents friends are falling for scams and buying too much stuff on QVC. I don't think they stand a chance at Facebook targeting them.
I hate that I'm so cynical about this. I really do. But Facebook has proven time and again all they care about is our data to sell to advertisers. So I can't help but see any new products of theirs through that lens.
For non-tech folks, I think the Facebook brand great. They chat with friends and family with Facebook messenger. This must be where they can make video calls to those same people. You get it just by seeing the name and the product together.
As for the privacy, that's more nuanced. In terms of thirdparty access/security, its almost certainly more secure than the traditional suppliers(I'm looking at your authentication cisco...)
The nitty gritty is data collection by the company it's self. Thats harder. If your VC system uses android under the hood, then you have no privacy at all. Your data is funnelled to google at a minimum, some app vendors, and the company that made it.
Apple, its held in many secret silos in apple land, and not even apple knows which team has what data.
Facebook, now, they need a hardware platform, and this is the first step to getting there. If they were clever, they'd be prostrating themselves demonstrating that they are reformed, that they are full of trust and junk.
But as they are still clinging to the "its not our job to police the myriad of crap people advertise on our site", I don't think they understand. This kind of pressure should force a change, as facebook are publicly traded.
The problem is that tech journalism isn't really journalism. Its unquestionably adding breathless hot takes to PR, or if you've been burnt, unfailingly shitting on every product made by said company.