This is honestly kind of cruddy. You can feel however you want to feel about Facebook, but this is misleading.
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"
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.