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Comment by denzil_correa | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook doesn’t listen to, view or keep the contents of your Portal video calls. Your Portal conversations stay between you and the people you’re calling.

But, we do store your call history. We use this call history to "serve you great ads". We also sell meta-information from this call history to advertisement providers to help them know more about you. This could help them make decisions in your life like insurance policies, flight/train tickets amongst other things. Apart from that, Portal is completely "Private by Design".

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I can't find anything on the portal site mentioning encryption. They claim:

>Private by design

>Portal was created with privacy, safety and security in mind. And it has clear and simple settings, so you stay in control.

and in the FAQ:

>Secure calls

>Facebook doesn’t listen to, view or keep the contents of your Portal video calls. Your conversations stay between you and the people you’re calling.

And they have lock icons all over the place bragging about the security. But not once does it mention any sort of encryption. Presumably it's encrypted in transit to and from Facebook's servers, but if it were end-to-end encrypted such that Facebook couldn't monitor it, you'd think they would mention that.

Is "We don't listen to your calls, but we could" what passes for security and privacy at Facebook? Or is there e2e encryption and they've for some reason chosen not to mention it?

I'll stick with Facetime and iMessage, thanks.

It's crazy how much people expect of Facebook compared to Google and Amazon, despite both of the latter companies either incorporating ads or gathering targeting information from Hangouts, Google Home, Alexa etc, or planning on doing so (Amazon planning on turning Alexa into an ads platform)[0].

[0](https://www.adweek.com/digital/why-brands-should-be-ready-fo...)

That’s the “What about her emails” of criticism.

If there is a valid criticism of Facebook, and another of Google, the appropriate response is, “Yes, and Google too.”

Let’s keep the focus on the bad actors, not on policing dissent.

Are you just assuming the second part? The privacy policy doesn’t mention anything about this, except that third-party integrations may have ads, but they’re not served via FB, etc.

They're really cagey about it though:

> Portal does not have Facebook ads at this time. Some third-party services on Portal (e.g., music partners) may embed ads in their content in the same way they do when providing their services on other devices.

How about no ads, ever?

That'd mean blocking eg. Spotify's free service though.

That would make for a pretty terrible device. It would mean no web browser. No software that wasn't carefully vetted. Probably no app ecosystem at all. I mean, go for it, but you're serving a very small market at that point.

Portal does not have Facebook ads at this time

Sure, Mr. Zuckerberg, whatever. We totally trust you not to clandestinely change that in the future, because you're such a trustworthy guy running a totally trustworthy company.[1]

You would never, say, make information marked as private suddenly public without the user even knowing, right?

You would, of course, never screw around with privacy defaults without letting the user even know, correct?

On a less sarcastic note. If you put a spy device manufactured by facebook into your place of living and trust them to keep their "promises" you really deserve what you get.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu...

Also, they reserve the right to change this in the future - just like they've always done. FB is pretty good at bait and switch.

> Portal does not have Facebook ads at this time.

So when do they add them?

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