Facebook’s much-awaited the Portal is ready for the shipping the video chat device. The Portal is the company’s first piece hardware available in two configurations:
- The Echo Show-like Portal, pricing $199
- The larger Portal+ for $349
Facebook ran with many issues and allegations for breaching of privacy issues in this 2018 which isn’t a great start for the team. The device had some privacy red flags when it was announced last month and tried to nip some of the issues before heading to launch further not to have any pitfalls.
With all that in mind, Facebook spells out Portal’s privacy policy launching with a blog post. On the safer side, Facebook promises not to view and listen to video calls. Portal also provides encrypted calls and AI tech is performed on-device locally.
In the blog post, it promises to treat conversations on Portal just like Messenger. It tracks data usage for the later use to serve up cross-platform ads even though not viewing the calls.
“When you make a Portal video call, we process the same device usage information as other Messenger-enabled devices,” Facebook writes. This includes volume level, number of bytes received and frame resolution. Some of this data might be used for advertising purposes, but this information does not include contents of users Portal video calls. In simpler words, it will not collect personal identification data but tracks the information.
Hope the Portal device and its privacy/ad policy issues will be clearing the air of doubts in device users.
