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.
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".
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...
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.
I loved my Zune. I wouldn't touch a Portal with a 39.5' pole.
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.
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