Ah, no, thank you

I am no one’s idea, let alone Mark Zuckerberg’s idea, of a Facebook fan. Unlike several of my friends – very tech savvy friends, I will note – who up and left the platform after all the election-related hoopla, and because of the way they use our data, I’ve stuck around. But I’m entirely passive. I look at what my friends are up to: their kids, their grandkids, their doggos, their travels. And occasionally their political opinions.

But I really don’t like Facebook.

And I really don’t trust Facebook.

So I will not be a candidate for their smart display Portal device, which they’re supposedly announcing any day now.

The main feature will be video chat, and Facebook will use facial recognition to tag users and follow them around the room. (Amazon’s Echo Show and Google-powered smart displays don’t identify users’ faces, though some security cameras do.) (Source: Fast Company, citing details from Cheddar‘s Alex Heath)

I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want following me around the room is Facebook, even if they weren’t using facial recognition to tag me. Makes me a bit nostalgic for the early days of video conferencing systems, when the images were so blurry, and the motions so herky-jerky, you almost couldn’t tell who was sitting there, a thousand miles away, at a conference table. No way you could use facial recognition and tag someone with that old tech.

The device will have a privacy shutter to disable the camera tracking, but amazingly, Facebook may have only thought to include this in response to its own recent privacy scandals.

I’m occasionally on video conference calls. If I just got out of the shower and have wet head, I tape over the camera. If not, I’ll allow myself to be on display. But if I was anywhere around a Portal device I’d be slapping that privacy shutter closed and duct-taping it. Maybe they should also consider incorporating a feature that lets you turn off the tagging.

Just the idea of FB having one more way to invade our individual and collective privacy. Even with a shutter, I shudder at the thought of them grabbing our whereabouts and who-abouts with such great precision.

Recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans don’t trust Facebook to protect their personal information. For the most part, this doesn’t appear to have stopped people from using the social network, but buying a Facebook-powered, always-on video camera is a much bigger ask than habitually opening an app. We’ll see how the company pitches it to the public soon enough.

I’m actually sort of amazed that Facebook’s attrition has been so low, but that’s just me extrapolating from my tech buddies who went over and out. Anyway, spies really are everywhere. Bad enough that someone’s hoovering up every online keystroke we make. But identifying me and watching me buzz around. Even if I were a big Facebooker, I wouldn’t be inviting their always-on camera into my house.