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Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

More info about the underlying technology: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/smart-camera-portal-advances

More info about the privacy settings: https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/

Disclosure: I work at FB, my team developed the underlying MaskR-CNN technology.

>You can completely disable the camera and microphone on Portal with a single tap or with a sliding switch. A red light next to the lens indicates the camera and microphone are off.

I think a hardware breakdown video would go a long way. For example, an engineer showing that the kill switches actually work correctly.

Either way, I hope somebody vets this.

I love how they have redefined a red light to mean "not recording", instead of it's ubiquitous interpretation of "recording right now".

Not to mention that even assuming it works as described; it puts the onus on the user to explicitly turn it off and if they don't it may be recording.

For a company with both a horrible track record on privacy and an incredibly strong monetary incentive to monitor its users, I'm curious if engineers like yourself understand that eventually this product will morph into a tool of mass surveillance? Every time Facebook has pitched a product as "Private by design" it eventually gets tapped as a new data source (see WhatsApp, etc.).

Most people in this thread are saying, essentially, "Fool me once..." But I'm curious to know if engineers internal to Facebook are aware they are in the same situation, where the privacy assurances by the company will eventually get usurped by its thirst for data. Or do you acknowledge that will happen and just see yourself as a mercenary?

Do you trust Facebook to adhere to their publicly stated privacy policy? Do you think they have honored those policies in the past?

>Do you trust Facebook to adhere to their publicly stated privacy policy?

Yes. Definitely.

> Do you think they have honored those policies in the past?

I believe they have though I have not been at Facebook very long so I don't have full visibility on this. But I don't think that's the most important question. The most important question is: were these policies strong enough? The answer is definitely no and that's why the company is pivoting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtxPdezclYw&feature=youtu.be

Does it concern you that so few people in this thread (your peers within the industry) share your trust n Facebook to honor their privacy agreements? There is ample evidence they have not honored those agreements in the past. How do we trust a Facebook “pivot” when there is no financial or regulatory benefit to pivoting?

There we have it. New guy trusts them so we're good folks.

You really don't have to do this. No one believes a person with a vested interest anyways.

I don't worry so much about cameras but about microphones. Is the microphone off button physically disconnecting the mike wires so it can't be software-enabled?

If so, you don't have to trust Facebook, which is nice. But it's why I'd like to see this in the hands of a reverse engineer.

Maybe Purism can review it haha.

What exactly is the benefit of this? The video says it uses neural networks and fast algorithms, but doesn't say what they're used for, or how it would benefit me as an end user.

The smart camera automatically follows and zooms in people. This ads shows it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZVFzDjBBq8

It's fully buzzword-compliant.

> More info about the privacy settings: https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/

I'm just saying, the privacy page doesn't address a lot of real concerns. It talks about being able to shut down the camera and microphone. That's cool. But if one were to enumerate all the ways in which a Facebook gadget might compromise your privacy, they'd go through many other items, and much more basic tech, before getting to covert surveillance by surreptitiously turning on cameras and microphones without indication.

How about:

- If I have "Hey Portal" enabled, so my voice does get recorded, what's the retention policy for that? After browsing through several sections and pages, I got to a page ( https://portal.facebook.com/privacy/ ) where it says I can "delete the history of voice commands in the Facebook portal".

That doesn't seem too convenient for intensive use of this device. I don't suppose it automatically gets deleted after, say, 30 days, or the perfectly reasonable timeout dictated by engineering common sense of, well, instantly, right? If so, why? Why not just delete it automatically after a while? If some users want to access their history for an indefinite period of time, why not provide an option for them? Surely it's easier to go to your Facebook settings page and check "Retain history indefinitely" than to manually delete things every day.

- When you say "Facebook doesn’t listen to, view or keep the contents of your Portal video calls. [...] Portal does, however, listen for the “Hey Portal” wake word, including during calls.", does this policy exclude processing and analyzing the transcripts of the command for advertising purposes?

- Is any non-video call data processed, such as noise levels from microphones that aren't shut?

- If there are instances where the wake word was incorrectly detected, and these instances can be identified as such (since you can find them in the activity log, but they don't have a transcript)... what happens with the transcript? I get that it's not available to me, but does Facebook store it? If so, can it be deleted?

- Is there any commitment to the terms of this privacy notice? If I purchase one now, can I reasonably expect that the terms of the privacy agreement won't change within the next two years -- so that I don't end up buying a good video phone that turns out to morph into a good ol' Facebook surveillance tool next year, after management finds out the program just isn't making enough money?

Before anyone asks -- the reason why I'm not as suspicious about (some) other companies is that, well, few other companies messed it up on the scale, and with the irresponsibility of Facebook. I don't doubt that Facebook has the engineering skill to deliver products that level good levels of privacy, I doubt that Facebook has the management interest, commitment and know-how involved in designing and maintaining them.

Assuming the hardware kill switches work, you're right that the wake word is a big issue.

Would be nice if it worked offline with something like this: https://picovoice.ai/products/porcupine.html

A demo of it working without any internet would be cool (even though calls require internet)

So you were on a team of people all working on the same R-CNN? What was that like? How was work divided and what was the dynamic?

My team developed Detectron (https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron) and Detectron2 (PyTorch version, coming soon). Another team optimized it for mobile. A third team integrated it with Portal.

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