The Chaser Report - Google Incognito Mode Actually Just Cognito Mode | Welcome To The Future

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

In a crossover episode with our Welcome To The Future podcast, Charles and Dom bring you the latest tech news, including: Amazon admitting how it's 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores really worked, and Google admitting that Incognito Mode may not have been as incognito as advertised. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Hello, Charles. It's time to once again pass the feed over to our spin-off podcast. We also put on this feed because, hell, five episodes a week is enough. But we believe in the tech news that we bring you in this wonderful spin-off podcast, which we call... Welcome to the future. We really should just actually do up a...

A proper produced intro, yeah. You do it very well. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, Laughlin puts a bit of echo on it, but most of it's just you. It's just me going, future. Yeah, it doesn't take me anywhere near the future. It just makes me... I'm in a weird dimension.

And I should actually note that we got a great suggestion for Welcome to the Future, which we're not doing on today's episode, but it's all about all the diseases that are upon us because of climate change. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, it's just this wonderful episode. We'll have a special edition, like, next week or something about it. Okay, disease edition.

The disease edition. Special, look for that, coming out too. And there's lots of interesting tech news today, such as Charles. Amazon has, you know that whole system where you could just go into their shops, their physical shops, put stuff in a basket, and then walk out? It's had it really, in a bit. It was called the Just Walkout feature. Yeah.

They've abolished. So I think this is like, welcome to the park. Past, past, past. Yeah, I can't imagine why it failed. I'll tell you, I mean, it is just a wonderful story. All right. There's that. And then also, I just received an invitation for something called Amazon Chime in my inbox.

A product that the world in no way needs, but has any way. Oh, dear. I assume it's got something to do with the door bill. Slash Bluetooth. Yes. Not really, but we'll see. We'll see. Oh, right, okay.

And then the final story is just Google's in a little bit. bit, just tiny, tiny little bit of trouble after it used all the data that collected while people were in incognito mode on Chrome. Okay. Who would imagine that Google would do that? Wow. I don't want to reflect on any cases before the courts. I wonder if Channel 10s managed to get hold of Bruce Lieman's incognito mode side of.

Because if they did, it would definitely not make his case worse. I remember in your stage show last year, the war on 2023, there were the, I think they were called the Defoe Awards. Yes, yes, absolutely. And you made the broad observation that people who launched defamation suits often end up hurting themselves somewhat. Yes. We might get to Bruce Lehman a little bit later on in the week. Yes. Oh, definitely.

No, no. Because it's sort of breaking as we speak. So I think that'll be a sort of Friday wrap up. You know, you know that sort of Friday funnies? Yeah, yeah. We can do the Bruce Lehman Friday Funnies. We can kind of just, you know, So metaphorically speaking, you know, clean up the apartment, flush out the jacuzzi and see what's...

More after this. Okay, should we start with the Just Walk Out being robbed? Yeah, some things like... See, I walked past at one point at one of these Amazon stores. Oh, really? I think it was in America or something. Yeah, yeah. I really advanced stuff.

With the notion that didn't everything have a tag in it and you basically... No. How did it work? Well, this is the story, Don. Right, okay, so... I thought everything had an RFID tag in it and it just kind of all figured itself out. Nope. That is not how it worked.

Oh, okay. And so the thing is Amazon set up all, hundreds of stores called Amazon Fresh, and about half of them had the Just Walkout feature, right? And it was, it was assumed at the time that, yeah, it was some sort of clever QR code or RFID code. That's what I thought it was. Some sort of thing was going on where whenever you put something in your basket, it went blip and, And worked it out, right? Yeah, just to contextualize this, Uniclo now has this amazing feature, the Japanese clothing store that's in Australia.

All you do is you get your clothes, you dump them in this sort of giant basket at the checkout, it automatically tallies the whole thing up through RFID tags, and then you just tap your card and you go. So that's actually a brilliant system. And you imagine that Amazon is one of the world's leading tech companies would have something equally good. Well, you'd think so. And although I'd say Uniclo has the advantage of owning all the products that they are selling,

Right, like there's a sort of vertical integration there, whereas Amazon, the whole point about Amazon is they just sell you cheap shit from China, right? Of course. So, you know, like, why would you put an RFID into some sort of, I don't know, shine pair of thongs that cost three cents or something? You know what I meant? Like, there's a little bit of a problem. Anyway, because what you do is you walk into this store, you'd scan your own QR code, and

then that was it. Like, it would just charge your Amazon account. That was really it, right? They sort of suggested that it was some sort of AI. Guess what it actually was? I reckon they're some poor goober in a data centre stalking you around. Yes. Yes.

A thousand. No. Over a thousand people in India. Oh my word. We're watching you and labelling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. Because people at the time were very weirded out because you'd walk out and it would often take hours for you to be your Amazon account to be charged. Oh, to even get the email. saying you didn't steal this stuff, you bought it.

Yeah, and to be given you receipt, right. And people are going, so it doesn't seem like very instant, like the AI must be amazingly hard to be able to do it. That's so weird. And so they were reviewing all the footage. They were just watching you and then, and just having this little person in India going, oh, yeah, that'll be like $2.50, that's $3.25. That's $4.80.

What an extraordinary act of cruelty to make low paid workers in India. view Americans buying things that they don't need. What a form of torture. Although, I suppose they could look down on them. Wouldn't it be great to be in the data center and going, look what this idiot just bought? Now, in Amazon's defense, they claim that all these people

who were labelling all the videos were actually just training an AI. So they had this idea that one day, if you labelled enough AI videos, that the AI would start going, you know what? I've got the hang of this. But you know how much AI's hallucinate?

There's no way that would work I mean we've been trying for years Every time you have to verify your ID And it asks you on capture You know tick all the ones with the cars in them It still clearly doesn't know Like we've been doing that for That's been probably the greatest collaborative effort

In the whole of human history It's just millions upon millions of us every day Clicking those things I still can't tell where the fucking cars are Like at what point are they going to give up Yeah Yeah because that's what they should have done They should have turned the capture

They should have made us Be the poor schlubs who have to do the... Would it have been great to be clicking through and suddenly... Oh, there's Charles. He's back of Godgob. What's going on there? That's Andrew Hanson buying eight or walt creams? But I think we're going to see a lot more of this.

Like, you get the sense that now that cash isn't free. Because we went through that period. Remember, sort of during the pandemic, cash was essentially free. The governments were just sloshing it around. Yeah. And so enterprises could just do anything and it didn't cost any money because cash was free. And I think now what's going to happen is we're going to sort of see a pullback on stupid ideas.

That's such a shame. Why didn't we get on board with that? It's a huge shame. One thing you did was develop content during that period you invested in developing content for SNL. Yes, that's right. Yes, exactly. He stole the contact trace his sketch. You know, I think I'm going to launch it like a lawsuit against SNL.

You should. Because it's total, like it's plagiarism. And what you should do is launch it in the means. of a very, very, very over-hyped Saturday night live show with all the sketches of 10 minutes longer than they needed to be. Right. Oh, yeah, I see. So actually copy the idea for SNL from them.

Yes, that's a great idea. We have, you know, late-night boring show. Wow. Did you catch your title? I reckon the ABC would go for that. Oh, right. It could be hosted. No, I'm not going to say that.

You know who we think should host it. Yes. The point is, what it makes me go is, I don't know whether you know this. Dom, but during that period, the Chaser shop actually pioneered a just walk-out shop. Did it? But I didn't know that it was based on AI or, you know, paying people in India to, you know, track your video of you. I just let people walk out of the shop.

Just through hopelessness. Yeah, that's very innovative. Charles, there's a brand new product from Amazon. They have Sony products. I am. This is called Amazon Chime. And someone I know sent me, let's just say, an invite, a chance to try it out. Try and guess what it is.

Okay, well, so my immediate thing, but you've said no, is that it was a doorbell. A smart doorbell. It sounds like, you know, like you ring a doorbell and you know how Google has the ring where it videos you. Oh, yes. It's presumably tracks all your data. You can automatically, you know, open the front door to. Yeah, yeah. Delivery people.

And then a team in India go through it in mind a ball. Yeah, that's right. So it's not there. Is it something to do with music? Is it like a musical instrument? No, it is a product that there is literally no need for. Okay. That everyone else has already developed.

Is it a pool toy? No, that would be great. And this guy, this guy who... There's no need for it. This guy who works for Amazon, right? Yeah. He sent this invitation to her and he said, you won't have heard of Amazon chimes.

So take a while to get across this invitation. Okay, so is it... So what you're saying is it exists elsewhere. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, there are many other version of this thing already, but Amazon's made their own one. Oh, okay. Is it a social network?

Closer. Message. It's a message thing. It's, like, a WhatsApp. It's Zoom. It's Amazon Zoom. Oh, no. Of all of the things that the world did not need.

Like, every other is already Teams. There's already Google Spaces. There's already Zoom. There's WebEx. There's 50 of these fucking things, but Amazon has to develop their own one. And so this coincides. So it's on the same day that they shut down, just walk out of your shop. Yeah.

You think maybe they've got a whole lot of video facilities lying around. That's what. People in here are going to be doing. They're going to be watching our meetings. Yeah, that's right. It's just more darn it than mine. Yes. What a brilliant idea.

So why have they launched it? Why, why would? I don't know. And should we, from now on, whenever we're remote, should we use chime? I haven't used it. I get back to. Chime time. It's such a.

You can have some chime time. Because everyone knows Amazon Prime. Like, the idea that other services have to rhyme with... Like, I'm looking forward to Amazon crime. They finally admit all the intrusive shit that they do. Anyway, thank you for that invitation. I won't say who it was from. But, yeah.

But can we, like, we need a review of it, Don. Oh, definitely review it. Okay. In the future. No, it'll just be... And I've got the app on my phone now. It's just like the 10th stupid video. And it'll be just as bad as Zoom.

That's the whole point. Zoom is so right. Right for taking down, and it'll be worse. So there was news during the week that Amazon are going to use their server farm to fuel their AI, and they reckon they've got an advantage AI. Mind you, every company is saying this. They reckon they're going to make $120 billion of investments in their server farm in order to basically win the AI battle, right?

Because it's all about compute power. That's the thing that they have most of is the compute power. Well, this is being done for those boffens. It's through AWS, Amazon Web Services. So do you think maybe Amazon Chime is going to offer features? Because it's all about what are the AI features that you can offer that's going to see you be propelled in the next thing. Well, if it can animate me appearing to pay attention.

Exactly. And just put out some boilerplate replies. That could be very good. I know, exactly. Like the future is that everyone thinks that they're turning up to a meeting. And yet nobody is actually at that meeting. But everyone goes away going, great meeting. Yep.

I'll forward you that, you know, the notes from that meeting. And AI just looks after our work lives. That's so good. I used on the radio, I filled in for Craig on his radio show this week. And I used an AI Craig. That was amazing. Yes. And a lot of listeners thought it was the real Craig.

That's true. And someone texted in and said, unfortunately, the words were far too here into. It couldn't be the real crime. And he didn't laugh enough about its own jokes. But, no, look, it was quite. realistic. I mean, you could kind of pick it if you knew, but I reckon I would have full on for it. Well, I reckon what we should do is, because we tried that disastrous episode where I replaced you with an AI. That didn't work. But maybe in the future,

we'll just secretly do an episode where one of us is an AI and... See if you can pick it. And see if anyone can do it. Well, I know how to use this thing now. So I reckon we could pull that off. Okay. Yep. So one day when you're busy, I'll make an episode where... Who knows? It could be now. It could be this one. Our final story after this. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. Okay, so this one is great, which is, have you ever used incognito mode, Tom? I have. I have used incognito.

Why? Google Chrome. When I wanted to see what Bruce Lehman was up to. So this news report, which is from NPR, which is the National Public Radio Network in America, is very discreet in the way that it describes the way people use incognito. It's just for people when they want to browse privately. Yeah, it's for Freedom Fighters, Judge. For freedom fighters who just want to look up, you know, ways of promoting democracy and human rights.

That's what it's thought. Although it notes that some data scraped by Google could have contained potentially embarrassing searches. Do you think? Perhaps it could. So basically, incognito mode means nothing, right? So what they did, this is an amazing story, right? is they, you went into incognito mode, they just kept capturing all the data

and then used it to sell that data to advertisers to sell web traffic and ads against. I mean, who would have thought that a business's entire existence is based on building profiles of people to sell that data to advertisers, would build profiles of you and sell it to advertisers? But I don't understand.

Like what? So what the fuck? Is incognito mode, if it, like, what... Yeah, if it is there? What, like, it's, what, I mean, It's just not incognito. Well, no. It's cognitive mode.

Cognito mode. I mean, look, the good thing about incognito mode, if you're going to use it, be a bit more serious about it, is that it means you don't have all the cookies from the other sites. So you know how when you go on to, like, any site, you then get email. Like, you've logged into Gmail. You've been, ads forever. You don't want anyone to know that you've been to the seven news website. That's right. Or the daily mail.

Or you've brought us avocado pool toys on our site or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, so that's quite useful, it's not having that. And it means you can, like, get a Google search without having your profile, which is sometimes quite useful as well. Yeah, that's true. But apart from that, no, clearly it's just another way of getting data. I mean, admittedly, I don't use Chrome, Charles, at all.

Yeah, I don't use Chrome. I've always just suspected that Google might harvest the data. Because it's what they do. See, like, it's like people with an Android phone going, oh, my goodness, Google knows a lot about me. Yeah. Why do you think Android's free? But this is the most amazing thing is,

So they've just agreed to destroy all this data, right? They've said, okay, they've admitted it. Whoops, we've done the wrong thing. On Monday, they had a settlement and they've destroyed, they're going to destroy tens of millions of people's data for the thing. But this was first raised as a concern in a lawsuit in 2020. Well, I'm surprised it took that long. It should have been raised in a lawsuit one second after they invented a convento mode for Google.

Charles, this does make me sad, actually. It makes me sad I didn't spend years using Chrome to just browse some absolutely offensive and heinous porn because there's going to be a massive class lawsuit in this. Yes. Oh, and it'll be the most embarrassing who gets the most amount of money, right? The most disgusting stuff. But does that mean the most embarrassing searches

are the ones that are going to get the biggest settlement in this case? I think so. So essentially, so what's the process for getting in on the settlement? Like, you've got to register that you're an agreed to bag. So you're going to go, well, I'll probably search for this and that. What if, I mean, it's possible that there could be some search terms that are still embarrassing that aren't completely gross. Like, when I Google Domite reputation and friends and stuff.

Like, what's, that would be embarrassing to put out that. So the point is they probably know that nobody's going to register with this settlement. It's the perfect crime. It's the perfect crime. So anyway, email us for embarrassing data, podcast at chaser.com. Dot A.U. Yep. And we will...

We're just not good at this stuff. We're just not good at monetizing people's shame. Yes. We're going to get better at that. We're going to start a platform company. Well, we're going to start Chasebook. Oh, yes, Chasebook. That's right.

Yeah. So don't worry. We'll get you. So you know the Chaser website, if you want to really be welcome to the future, is in the final stages of development. Oh, yes. I'm really excited about this. And we'll be rolling out the big.

beta version of it. Well, hopefully next week. Amazing. So, Dom, you should come to the training to learn how to use the back end and everything. Oh. Or that's probably, I should say that incognito. Incognito. Use the back end.

I want to make better use of my back end. Again, Anna Warcreen. Okay. That's it. Wow. I love tech news. Aguirre is from Road. We're part of the iconic class network.

And we'll catch you next time.