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| Meta may offer a lesson in how to brick a surveillance device |
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| By Janko Roettgers |
It’s the beginning of the end for Meta’s Portal display. The company quietly removed the app for Microsoft Teams from the Portal app store in recent weeks, a little over a year after the video chat service first became available on Meta’s smart displays.
The change, which also includes Microsoft’s Intune app, was first noticed by Portal owners on Reddit; I was able to confirm it with Meta PR. “The Teams app works for Portal users who already have the app downloaded, but we've stopped new downloads of the app,” a Meta spokesperson told me via email.
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| — Meta's Portal has a camera that can follow a person across a room. Image courtesy of Meta. |
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The past few months have been a bit of a roller coaster for Portal owners. Last summer, news broke that Meta was repositioning Portal from a consumer-focused smart display to a device for enterprise and work-from-home use cases. Then, in November, Meta announced that it was going to discontinue the Portal altogether.
“Moving ahead, folks will still be able to use their Portal to call family and friends,” Meta’s spokesperson told me. “However, they’ll see changes to the experiences and apps available as content and features change over time.”
Messaging around this has been haphazard. Meta’s Portal site still proclaims an ongoing shift “to support productivity and work” — the kind of thing you may want Teams for — and its help page still tells people how to install the very Teams app that’s not available in the Portal app store anymore.
All of this has got some Portal owners wondering: Why doesn’t Meta just let them unlock the Android-based device to sideload apps? It’s a fair question, and if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you may have seen a few stories about how companies can sunset devices in ways that are both customer-friendly and don’t lead to unnecessary e-waste.
However, at least in the case of Meta’s Portal, unlocking the device may be the worst possible solution, thanks to its powerful hardware. The company’s 10” Portal, for instance, is equipped with a 13-megapixel camera with a 103° field of view. It also packs four far-field microphones, and the Portal’s software is able to keep video chat participants in frame as they move about the room.
Now imagine all of this on an unlocked device: microphones capable of picking up conversations from several feet away combined with a powerful camera meant to track people on a device running sketchy apps downloaded from third-party app stores. What could possibly go wrong?
"That does seem pretty scary," Pete Warden, CEO of Useful Sensors, said when I presented such a scenario to him.
Useful Sensors is a startup that’s been building tiny cameras and other smart sensors to bring machine learning capabilities to third-party devices. Warden believes that there will eventually be camera sensors for presence detection, gesture control, and similar applications in virtually every appliance, and he’s thought a lot about the privacy implications of that future.
With the Portal, Meta focused heavily on security, stumping enthusiasts who subsequently tried to hack it. As Warden noted to me, if the company was to simply unlock it, the Portal would effectively be as secure as an old computer — except that most people don’t keep their computers running 24/7 at home, and most built-in webcams aren’t nearly as powerful as the Portal’s sensors. "If people can upload anything they want to it and there are no security updates," he said, "then it's going to be even worse than a laptop."
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told Buzzfeed that the company had sold “millions” of Portal units. Disappointing those buyers is not a great move. But it would be a far worse public relations nightmare if just one unlocked Portal with added stalkerware got sold on Ebay and was then used to spy on the unsuspecting buyer.
Meta’s Portal conundrum is a sign of things to come for the consumer electronics industry, especially since Warden’s vision of a future with cameras in every device doesn’t seem that far off anymore. Case in point: Just last month, Razer introduced a new soundbar with an integrated always-on camera.
How can device makers rise to the occasion and ensure that their new camera-equipped gadgets don’t become stalkerware nightmares when their end of life approaches? "You have to design failsafe privacy," Warden told me.
Some companies have already been moving in that direction. The first-generation Portal didn’t have a physical camera shutter, but Meta changed that for subsequent models, and physical mute buttons have become standard on most smart speakers. Increasingly, companies also keep speech recognition and other machine learning features locally on the devices they build, reducing latency and doing away with the need to send voice and other sensor data to the cloud.
The next logical step is to also put privacy first when the end of life for these devices approaches. That means finding ways to keep audio and video data safe even when a device will no longer receive updates. And in many cases, the safest way to sunset a device with a camera or microphone will be to sunset or even brick it — even if that leads to more e-waste, and to disappointment among tinkerers and early adopters.
Janko Roettgers is a reporter writing about the intersection of tech and entertainment. He publishes a weekly newsletter about streaming, AR/VR and more called Lowpass.
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| Here's where the CSA's new health effort should focus |
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After successfully bringing together more than 500 companies to create the Matter smart home interoperability standard, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has set its sights on an audacious new standards plan. The organization has formed a health and wellness working group that wants to build some form of interoperability between home medical devices, smart home devices, and others.
I'm leaving others purposely vague here because they might include family members, insurance firms, pharmacies, or doctors. It's a bit unclear. The CSA's message is that it's early days and the tent is big and open, so everyone should come on in to figure out how to make health and wellness work in the home. It's a great goal, but I have some thoughts about where the CSA should focus for the most success. |
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| — Smart homes could help ensure proper medicine adherence. |
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The CSA is working with a nonprofit called the Center for Medical Interoperability (C4MI), whose most recent success has been a platform for tracking personal protective equipment (PPE) across hospitals nationwide. It was formally validated last year. C4MI also released a specification back in 2019 that lets medical devices and gateways exchange clinical data with patients and caregivers using standard data models.
It's not clear if this specification has been adopted and if so, how widely. In an interview with Aaron Goldmuntz, the chief operating officer of C4MI and the head of the health and wellness working group at the CSA, he used the PPE platform as an example of a success and declined to spend much time explaining what else the organization has done.
He was happy to share statistics about the lack of interoperability and data sharing between devices in a hospital setting, which is where C4MI has been focused. But other than fall detection, he declined to give specific use cases that the health and wellness working group might work toward. Michelle Mindala-Freeman, the head of marketing and member services for the CSA, also mentioned fall detection as a good potential use case, and said that the initial focus for the group would likely involve aging in place.
I got the impression that the CSA hopes to use existing sensors and devices in the smart home that are tied to more traditional consumer medical and wellness devices, such as activity trackers or sleep trackers, to deliver a more holistic picture of the health of a person living in one.
But as both Goldmuntz and Freeman have said, the effort is still in its early days. Any standards organization has to walk a tightrope whereby it lays out a clear vision but leaves the concept open enough that the organization can entice new members to pony up and place their stamp on that vision.
With Matter, the CSA had the biggest names in the smart home come together with a clear demand to write a standard that would allow devices to work together. At its creation, the Zigbee Alliance (which was what the CSA was called back then) had already started solving this problem with its own data models for smart home devices, and borrowed some of the networking concepts put forth by the founding members.
The CSA's health and wellness working group lacks that level of clarity and technical groundwork, but thanks to the Matter standard at least half of the foundation the working group needs to build has been laid. With smart speakers, televisions, lights, outlets, thermostats, and a variety of sensors already part of the Matter standard, it will be easy to use interactions with those devices in a home as a proxy for whether or not someone is awake and moving around the home.
That solves one of the most basic issues tied to helping someone age in place by themselves. After that, health data is a nice-to-have, but far more relevant for those monitoring a parent or patient from afar is whether or not they are taking their medicines properly, left a stove on, left the home, or forgot to secure the home. Other use cases, such as whether or not they are getting enough exercise, are eating properly (or at all) are also relevant, and can be just as essential.
I would also add that some way to update, fix, and set up the smart home gear remotely, and perhaps share that burden among multiple parties, is important for this sort of standard. Finally, any standard needs to have security and privacy architected in at the beginning.
Matter has done a great job incorporating security into the standard, and Freeman has said that privacy would be an essential component to the work that the health and wellness working group would perform. Freeman also told me that the entire umbrella organization of the CSA is focusing on privacy, with an emphasis on three elements: transparency, accuracy, and choice.
Transparency involves telling consumers what data is being collected and where it's being used, while accuracy will involve the CSA validating that what players in the ecosystem say is actually true. Choice will ensure that consumers can choose what data they share and recognize that different people will have different levels of tolerance when it comes to sharing.
If the health and wellness working group tackles the use cases mentioned above, and adds a focus on privacy, that's a pretty big standards effort. If the smart home device makers are on board (and it's not clear if they are, since Freeman declined to name any members of the working group outside of C4MI), then the focus should be on filling the use cases associated with medicine adherence. That would involve pharmacies (luckily Amazon is getting into that game and it's already a CSA member), and perhaps electronic records providers, such as Epic or Cerner, will participate.
The federal government has already pushed to make electronic health records more accessible via APIs, so maybe the CSA won't have to involve them or hospital systems. Tracking falls, movement, and exercise could require adding members who make fitness trackers, fall sensors, and maybe even connected exercise equipment. Tracking food intake and nutrition is more challenging, but sensors on stoves, fridges, and other kitchen appliances are set to become part of the Matter standard, so there are possibilities.
I think that if the CSA has a clear vision tied to aging in place, and doesn't get too distracted by focusing on wellness or bringing in formal medical gear too early, the working group has a chance to build a usable standard. And once that's in place, it can branch out into the more highly regulated stuff.
And just for fun, may I offer an excellent video that shows how all of this could be circumvented by our wiser and craftier elders. |
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| Episode 410: Inside the CSA’s plan for health device interoperability |
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| This week's show starts off with news from the Connectivity Standards Alliance as Kevin and I talk about the new Health and Wellness Working Group. Then we discuss some of the challenges that people face trying to use Matter devices across multiple platforms. It's not seamless or easy yet. Also on difficult things, we discuss the challenges of securing the industrial IoT thanks to a new report from Dragos. Then we offer a preview of a new wireless technology for so-called massive IoT that will be on display from Wirepas at Mobile World Congress later this month. For those who were hoping for an open source voice assistant, I have bad news. Mycroft.ai is ceasing development of its open source voice platform, and in addition, will not be shipping voice assistants to Kickstarter backers. There's good news, however, for Arlo customers who were set to see the end of life for some of their cameras in 2024. Arlo has extended that date, and will continue to offer free 7-day cloud storage to existing customers. For listeners who are interested in energy-harvesting sensors, there's an upcoming campaign for an open source board from Riotee that will provide solar-power sensing and Bluetooth. And if you're more into working out and connected fitness, Tonal is looking for cash. |
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| — Mycroft’s Mark II next-generation open source smart speaker won’t ship to Kickstarter backers. Image courtesy of Mycroft. |
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| Our guest this week is Michelle Mindala-Freeman, who is the head of marketing and member services at the Connectivity Standards Alliance. She's here to explain why the CSA is launching a new standards working group for health and wellness. We talk about what types of companies should be involved, what sorts of use cases the CSA hopes to deliver, and why now is the right time to make such a standardization effort happen. Given that helping people age in place is one of the more compelling reasons to install smart home devices, the CSA is likely to find members willing to work on the problem. I also ask what other problems the CSA might try to solve. Enjoy the show. |
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This week on the IoT Podcast Hotline, we answer a listener question about upgrading a router and cleaning up a smart home.
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| News of the Week |
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Allegion Ventures puts money into self-storage startup: Stuf Storage, a startup offering to connect landlords with underused real estate with consumers who need a place to store their stuff, has raised $11 million in funding from Allegion Ventures and Altos Ventures. The startup decks out available commercial space with storage containers and sells access to those containers to consumers. Landlords get a cut of the storage fees and consumers get a place to keep their excess items that is likely located closer to their home than other storage options. Allegion Ventures is trying to make investments in companies that are helping to disrupt the core access control market that Allegion is in, so this deal makes some sense. Worst case, Allegion can sell more locks and access tech. (Stuf)
IKEA's new air quality monitor sensor is coming in time for spring allergy season: After some speculation, IKEA has announced its new air quality monitor, which measures VOCs, particulate matter, temperature, and humidity. If it added carbon dioxide, this sensor would have all of the air quality indicators I'd like. The VINDSTYRKA sensor will be available in April and will work with IKEA's Dirigera hub. (IKEA)
Resideo has added water heaters to its demand response programs: Resideo has a new partnership with A.O. Smith, which makes water heaters, to help customers reduce demand on the electric grid during peak times. Resideo's Grid Services business manages demand response programs for 27 utilities. Traditionally these programs dial back a customer's thermostat when power demands get too high. Through this partnership, Resideo is adding hot water heaters, which are usually the second-largest consumer of electricity in a residential home. This is a good first step toward a more responsive grid. (Resideo)
Here's a new smart yoga mat: There aren't a lot of details here, but I figured I'd flag this smart yoga mat for those interested in connected fitness devices. This mat has embedded sensors and connects to an app to measure the intensity and quality of various yoga poses. The app doesn't offer real-time feedback, but shares the data after the class is complete. I'm more of a real-time feedback person when I'm trying to master a complex pose, but I can appreciate how others might want to stay in the moment and not worry about their poses while trying to get a few moments of Zen. What's cool is that as the tech to create these devices and apps becomes more accessible, we'll likely see both types of yoga mats hit the market. Connectivity and sensors will simply enable different feature sets appealing to different types of buyers. (SMRTYoga)
Forget big data and focus on new data: I like this post because it's written by one of the Big Data evangelists from a decade ago. These technologists were out there proposing solutions for querying the massive amounts of data that were flooding data centers thanks to digitization and cheap storage and compute. But as most folks dealing with sensor data realize, it's not the amount of data that matters, but what you can do with it. And most businesses want to use recent data, like data from the last hour or day or week. Which means that querying big data isn't the problem; quickly finding the right recent data that can deliver insights is. I wish the writer talked about the technical challenges associated with this new problem, but I do appreciate him setting the record straight on big data's lack of importance. (MotherDuck)
Hi Solutions wants to make professionally installed smart homes more accessible: This article profiles Hi Solutions, a publicly traded roll-up of smart home integrators in "NFL cities" that wants to provide a middle tier for smart home installations. The idea is that the company will have and continue to acquire professional installers and outfit them with pre-built packages of existing professional and DIY smart home gear. With high-end systems integrators charging tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars for proprietary packages and companies such as Vivint and ADT on the lower end, there's certainly room for a company that can package together a bunch of Lutron, Sonos, Ring, and other gear and sell it to a consumer for under $10,000, plus a monthly fee. (CEPro)
Manufacturing companies are really buying into private 5G: Manufacturers are relying on cellular networks, specifically private 5G, for their digitization plans, based on data from Nokia and Kyndryl. The two companies signed a partnership agreement last year to offer private 5G and now have more than 100 clients, with 90% of them in the manufacturing sector. And the two companies have added Palo Alto Networks to provide security for their deployments as an additional service. For more on why manufacturers are turning to private 5G, check out my visit to John Deere. (RCR Wireless)
Put this podcast in your feed: The most recent Vergecast podcast is all about repairing your gadgets and keeping old gadgets alive, making it a perfect podcast to listen to while you read Janko's story at the top of this newsletter about why Meta can't just open source the software behind its Portal communication device. The recording has interviews with a guy who repairs old HomePods and a gentleman who is keeping old Harmony remotes running, plus the CEO of iFixit, who can be found whenever someone is talking about repairing old (or not-so-old) gadgets. (The Verge)
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