Will you trust your privacy to Facebook Portal this Christmas?

The most overtly commercial manifestation of the new lockdown economy is something called Portal, which brings the Facebook brand to consumer electronics for the first time. Portal is an electronic picture frame which connects to the internet and lets you conduct video calls with relatives and friends in their own bubbles and outside yours. It has a camera, microphone and speaker built in, and artificial intelligence that allows the lens to pan and zoom to accommodate as many people as necessary.

At first glance, it looks like a heaven-sent solution to the problem of arranging family gatherings, but it doesn’t take long to realise that while it’s undoubtedly a convenience, it’s also completely unnecessary. Your phone, tablet or laptop can already do everything Portal does.

That said, it might still be an acceptable gift for someone in your family with a knack for using none of those, and from whom you will be separated this Christmas. You will have to send it well in advance and arrange for someone at the other end to set it up, though.

Portal is not one product but a range of four, from an 8in frame at £65 to one just under twice that size, at £219. There is also a poor-value 10in model at £119 and a version with no screen at all, which instead plugs into your TV, for £10 more. Those prices are all promotional and may rise before Christmas.

In all cases, you can communicate with anyone who has a Facebook or WhatsApp account, and up to five accounts can be added to each Portal. You can talk to multiple people at the same time, but if you want to communicate with someone who has not embraced social media, this is not the platform for you.

Of course, not everyone who is on Facebook will have a Portal – and that’s where the system becomes self-defeating, because not everyone on the call has to be using one. Indeed, no-one has to be. So what are the advantages?

Well, Facebook claims it does a better job of picking up sound and distinguishing conversation from ambient noise. It can also be used when no call is in progress – as a standard digital photo frame, for instance, or for listening to Spotify through its built-in speaker. It also incorporates Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and can respond to instructions if you precede them with the words, “Hey Portal”.

On the downside, it does not have a battery, which means it won’t work when it’s unplugged from the mains. So carrying it from room to room during a call, as you can with a phone or tablet, is not possible. At least the Portal has a built-in stand so you don’t have to worry about holding it steady.

There is also the question of whether you are comfortable entrusting your private conversations to Facebook, a company whose use of data has been questioned at government level. It says that calls made through Portal are encrypted, and there is a switch on the top to disable the microphone or camera when you’re not using them. Even so, it’s hard to recommend it over a Zoom call on a phone or laptop – even for convenience, let alone security.

And if there’s a tablet in the house you will found it better still at almost everything Portal does, and much more besides. Amazon’s 10in Fire HD10 tablet at £90 is a better buy than anything with the Facebook badge. And its 8in Echo Show, which is more of a direct rival to Portal, requires no Facebook account and costs only £60.

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