Facebook Portal – Privacy review
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
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.
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'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 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...
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.
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
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.
Portal is an example of bad company-product fit.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ Our mission: Keep the internet open and accessible to all.
> 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.
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.
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.