Facebook, are you kidding? – TechCrunch

Facebook makes a video camera. The company wants you to take her home, to watch her one wandering eye, and to express your thoughts privately to your loved ones as part of her multi-eared panel.

The thing is called Portal and she wants to live on your kitchen counter or in your living room or wherever you want your friends and family to spend time remotely with you. The portal adjusts to keep its subject in the frame while traveling to allow occasional video conversation at home. The device minimizes background noise to improve clarity of voice. These tips are neat but not revealing.

This sounds useful, though. Everyone you know is on Facebook. Or they were still … things are a little different now.

Facebook, champion of bad timing

While many users are looking for ways to compartmentalize or reduce their reliance on Facebook, the company has been invited to the house. Portal is voice activated, listens to a reference phrase (in this case, "Hey Portal"), and also uses Alexa's voice commands from Amazon. The problem is that many users are already sufficiently impressed by Alexa's constant listening feature and her habit of capturing excerpts from the next room. It may have the best social graph in the world, but in 2018, people plan to use Facebook at a price less than or equal to the maximum.

Facebook reportedly planned to unveil the portal at the F8 this year but withheld the product because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, among other scandals. The fact that the company released the devices at the end of a major data breach disclosure suggests that it could no longer hold the product for longer without killing it completely and that it did not see a break in the data breach. the clouds arrive so early. The Facebook portal is another way for Facebook to trace a daily path taken by its users to connect to each other. Several months after the planned initial shipping date, the moment still could not be worse.

Over the last eight years, Facebook has repeatedly insisted that it was not a hardware company. I remember sitting in the back row at a mysterious press event in Menlo Park five years ago when journalists were murmuring that we could finally meet the mythological Facebook phone. Instead, Mark Zuckerberg introduced the search for graphs.

It's hard to overstate how better the market timing would have been in 2013. For privacy advocates, the platform was already well-notified, but most users routinely made uncontrollable trips back and forth in Facebook. . Friends who had left Facebook cold turkey were still abnormal. Introspection of the inexorable impact of social media on social behavior has not been a casual conversation, except among disillusioned technical journalists.

Trust Facebook (or not)

Aside from the noteworthy news schedule, Facebook has shown a glimmer of self-awareness, promising that Portal was "built with privacy and security in mind." He makes some extra promises:

"Facebook does not listen to, view or store the content of your video calls on the portal. Your conversations on the portal remain between you and the people you call. In addition, video calls on Portal are encrypted, so your calls are always secure. "

"For added security, Smart Camera and Smart Sound use artificial intelligence technology that runs locally on the portal, not on Facebook's servers. Portal's camera does not use facial recognition and does not identify your identity. "

"Like other voice-activated devices, Portal only sends voice commands to Facebook servers after you've declared" Hey Portal. "You can delete the history of the voice of your portal in your Facebook activity log at any time. "

It seems right to me, but it's the norm. And, like any Facebook product testing the waters before putting the adapter in full, all of this is subject to change. For example, Portal's camera does not identify your identity, but Facebook has a powerful facial recognition engine and is known to blur the boundaries between its main products, a habit that may worsen with some of the guards.

Facebook does not order a standard level of trust. To recover from recent lows, Facebook must establish an extraordinary level of trust with users. A level of fantastic trust. Instead, he is recording new breakthroughs in their lives.

The material is difficult. Facebook is not a hardware manufacturer and its management of Oculus is the only real test of the company, which faces the challenge of creating, marketing – and securing – an application that does not is not a social application. In 2012, Zuckerberg said that hardware has "always been the wrong strategy" for Facebook. Two years later, Facebook buys Oculus, but it is the attempt to become the owner of the platform of the future after missing the boat at the time of the boom of the mobile telephony. This is not a sign that Facebook wanted to become a hardware company.

Reminder: Facebook's raison d'être is to extract personal data from its users. For intimate products – video chat, messaging, panoptic adapted to kitchens – it is better to rely on companies whose business model is not diametrically opposed to the privacy of users. Facebook is not the only one of these companies (uh, hey, google), but Facebook's products are not singular enough to deserve to be caught in a situation of excessive trust.

Intestinal test

Right now, as consumers, we have very little weight. A handful of giant technology companies – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – produce products that are apparently useful and we decide on their usefulness and the degree of confidentiality that we are willing to exchange to obtain them. That's the contract and the contract is void.

As a consumer, it's really worth sitting with that. Which companies do you trust the least? Why?

It goes without saying that if Facebook can not reliably secure its flagship product – Facebook itself – we should not entrust the company with experimental incursions into extremely different products, namely physical products. Securing a software platform serving 2.23 billion users is an extremely difficult task, and adding hardware to this equation only complicates existing problems.

You do not need to know the technical details of security to make secure choices. Trust is a lever – the demand that it be won. If a product does not pass the odor test, trust that feeling. Discard. Better yet, do not invite it early on your kitchen counter.

If we can not trust Facebook to help us securely connect to websites or share stories, why should we trust Facebook to move a loudspeaker still in place and able to collect extremely sensitive data in our homes? Tl; dr: We should not! Of course we should not. But you knew it.