Security and privacy are two different but related things. Security can help some privacy issues such as encryption stopping others from snooping. It does not include first party privacy issues though.

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.

Right below "Minimum Security Standards" is "Can it snoop on me?"

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"

I fully understand the scepticism around this product. That said, this section feels incomplete. It would be valuable to assess if there are physical controls to turn off both the camera and microphone or a physical camera cover. I think Facebook wisely chose to include that while similar products like the Nest Hub Max didn't. Even if I distrust Facebook more than Google, the Portal seems to have a clear privacy advantage on the Camera front.

Very much so. It's also not included in the original title, so not much of an excuse here.

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.

Yeah I’ve seen this twice now for the portal (some CNET article saying people shouldn’t buy it, but not actually reviewing the hardware).

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.

> This anti-Facebook stuff is mostly just politics

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.

I have to prove a negative?

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 locking down of the API is done to prevent competition, while being publicly framed as a privacy enhancing scheme.

> 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.

It can be both - the Reuters link in that verge article is a little better: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebo...

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.

How does the picture look on the TV one, like does it look like a decent enough, crisp HD image? (And on what size TV are you running it?)

I run it on a 65" 4k TV (specifically the LG E6 OLED) - it looks sharp and does a good job, but I do have it sitting next to the wireless access point.

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).

You've looked at the security features (which, as sibling comment points out, is related to, but not the same as privacy), and stopped short of reading the full privacy review.

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

There is even more on that website:

  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 find Mozilla's editorializing in the little blurbs at the top of each page to be kind of problematic as well. It seems like they came up with an objective set of standards, but it turns out those standards didn't quite fit the narrative they wanted to put forth.

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.

I agree that the privacynotincluded site should have a broader set of standards but I really commend them for investing resources into tackling the truth of the huge amount of surveillance built in to a lot of these products these days. Hopefully they can improve the UI in future as it is a bit confusing. However the main takeaway at the bottom should be understood:

"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."

To be fair, the "minimum security standards" are a very low bar.

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.

What metadata has yet to and can be encrypted? The recipient, the send time and the message size seem impossible to encrypt.

I think the better question is, "What could count as metadata that we don't have to encrypt?"

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.

We've changed the title to take out the name of the blog and say what's in the post.

That's cool, thank you!

I wonder what the consequences would be if after a few years Facebook just decided to disable E2E encryption and all those privacy features, and started collecting and using all that data for advertising purposes contrary to what they're claiming now?

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

Just wait until they turn all photos public even ones deleted in the past.

It is in their terms if they choose.

It was a programming mistake. Only a few accounts were affected. Inadvertently. Only 300 000 users affected. We're committed to privacy as always and in the coming year well take steps to make sure this never happens again. Our estimations were incomplete and a tad off, 270 million accounts affected, possibly more. Our users are at the center of all we do and will do everything in or power to protect their data.

“Only 300,000”

You’re minimizing exposing information of enough people to populate most of Cincinnati, Ohio (301k)?

Casting that as “only 300,000” is sickening.

Pretty sure they were joking

It's a joke and also Facebook's press releases almost verbatim :)

Its only Cincinnati...

Keep reading.

I’d this a joke lacking /s, or a genuine post?

I had trouble telling from the first sentence or so, but after reading to the end I’m pretty confident it’s a sarcastic take on a (hypothetical?) press release.

Yeah, it's a joke and also Facebook's press releases almost verbatim :)

It certainly reads just like one.

That's pretty impressive. Only 300 000 users affected & still promising to do better next year!

> [we] will do everything in or power to protect their data.

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.

Whoosh

Poe's law is strong with this post.

Yeah, the politics around Facebook are tiring...turns out when they gave everybody the power to connect they also gave the tinfoil hats that power

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!

Facebook's $5B fine and current antitrust investigation are far beyond the realm of tinfoil hats.

This is a site in which Breitbart, a well know white nationalist propaganda site is marked as a trusted source for news. Zuck has met privately with conservative pundits. There is reason to be alarmed and skeptical of Facebook.

Stop! Don't mark them as reputably just because they meet with conservatives.

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.

Mozilla knows their products are falling behind and will probably continue to do so as long as they maintain their current trajectory. The only other strategy is to compete via PR.

Falling behind in what way?

HN clickbait