Facebook lied: its in-home "Portal" cameras will collect your data

Facebook Portal is a camera that is supposed to follow you around your house while you videoconference; the product launch was repeatedly delayed because of the company's string of horrific privacy breaches; when the company finally pulled the trigger on the launch it was at pains to insist that Portal would not collect your data while you used it.

That was a lie.

Portal will spy on you continuously while you use it and that data will be used to target Facebook ads at you later.

But Facebook has since reached out to change its answer: Portal doesn't have ads, but data about who you call and data about which apps you use on Portal can be used to target you with ads on other Facebook-owned properties.

"Portal voice calling is built on the Messenger infrastructure, so when you make a video call on Portal, we collect the same types of information (i.e. usage data such as length of calls, frequency of calls) that we collect on other Messenger-enabled devices. We may use this information to inform the ads we show you across our platforms. Other general usage data, such as aggregate usage of apps, etc., may also feed into the information that we use to serve ads," a spokesperson said in an email to Recode.

It turns out that Facebook could in fact use data collected from its Portal in-home video device to target you with ads [Kurt Wagner/Recode]

(Images: Alessio Jacona, CC-BY-SA; Cryteria, CC-BY)