Facebook pushes further into your home with Portal TV

Facebook is coming for your television. 

The company that brought us such privacy hits as Cambridge Analytica and teen-spying apps is plowing ahead in its effort to own the inside of your home. Say hello to Portal TV, the latest addition to Facebook’s video chat hardware line. 

Unlike the first generation Portal and Portal+, this new device targets those who may be wary of purchasing a dedicated Facebook video screen (and already own a TV). Available to customers on Nov. 5, the $149 device fits on top of or below a television, and includes a camera with 8 built-in microphones. 

“We want Portal to fit into every space in your home,” explained Facebook’s head of Portal Ryan Cairns on Tuesday. 

Cairns was speaking to a host of reporters crammed into a living room facing San Francisco’s Alta Plaza park. The home where the demo took place, which appeared to have been rented by Facebook for the day and was staged as if it was on the market, was filled with various Portal devices placed inconspicuously on book shelves and kitchen counters. 

The house smelled of freshly baked cookies, which upon inspection turned out to be because of actual cookies inside the kitchen oven, with the apparent goal of putting everyone’s olfactory senses at ease while we all literally stared into yet another potential surveillance device. 

Two scented candles, lit, on either side of the Portal TV demo unit seemed to serve the same purpose. 

Cookies aside, Cairns took pains to emphasize that Facebook really, truly, does care about privacy. 

“We designed privacy into the product since day one,” he emphasized. “There’s a button on the side of the Portal TV that if you push it completely disables the camera and microphone.”

Upon questioning, Cairns confirmed that the button is a hardware shutoff for the microphone — meaning hackers, or Facebook, won’t be able to remotely engage the mic while you think it’s off. A built-in lens cover for the camera serves the same purpose. 

The Portal TV comes with numerous features, such as the ability to add augmented reality filters to call participants’ faces, which a product manager on the Portal Team seemed slightly embarrassed to demo to the stone-faced crowd of journalists. 

A small remote control allows for non-voice command inputs, such as the ability to tag a specific person on the other end of the video call who the camera will track as he or she walks around a room. 

The Portal TV will also integrate with Alexa, and support Amazon Prime Video. Customers will be able to place calls over Facebook Messenger or Facebook-owned WhatsApp. 

Also on display Tuesday morning was the second generation of standalone Portal products. Specifically, the Portal and Portal Mini, both now stylized as picture frames. 

The former will cost $179, and sports a 10-inch display. The latter will cost $129 at launch, and has an 8-inch display. The two devices will ship Oct. 15.

All three devices are activated via voice command, with the Portals’ microphones listening for the wake phrase “Hey Portal.” Notably, Facebook’s vice president of virtual reality and augmented reality, Andrew Bosworth, clarified that, yes, contractors have in the past and will continue to review some of the recordings. 

That means that, as with many other other smart speakers or assistants, putting a Portal in your home opens you up to the possibility that a random person somewhere will have access to audio recordings from inside your home. This is extra important when one considers the likelihood of smart speakers incorrectly triggering on random sounds — something that we know happens —sending all kinds of personal information to real humans in the process.   

Notably, Bosworth clarified that with new Portal devices, customers will have the option to turn off this problematic human review element. Importantly, however, customers will have to manually make that switch on their Portals or through Facebook’s activity log. 

This change, along with the hardware microphone cutoff and built-in lens cover, shows that at least Facebook’s hardware team knows it has to do better on issues of consumer privacy. 

Whether that acknowledgement is enough to convince anyone to purchase the new Portal TV, Portal, or Portal Mini remains to be seen.