The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Facebook Updates, Apps, Changes & Other Tech News Aug 20, 2019

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Facebook Updates, Apps, Changes & Other Tech News Aug 20, 2019

Hi folks, it's Foss here from thechrisfossshow.com, The Chris Foss Show. Hey, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a review on the iTunes and other different channels that you subscribe to. We'd certainly appreciate that because we appreciate you tuning in and sharing the channel and giving us great reviews and all that good stuff. You can see us at iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Speaker, Stitcher, Digital Podcast, Player FM, TuneIn, and Luminary Podcast. You can get the Chris Voss Show and the six other podcasts we have.

Chris Voss Podcast on Politics, Startup Unicorn Podcast, Chris Voss Gaming, CryptoLifePodcast.com, LCSpatialComputing Podcast, Book Author Podcast, etc., etc. Pretty cool there, man. So anyway, what we're going to be talking about today is some of the business news, some of the things we're seeing, some of the stories that stick out to the Chris Vosser that I'm going to share with you, and some of my point of view on them as well. Watch for some cool guests that we're going to have later on in the week. So let's get that baby going and all that good stuff. So there's a clear history privacy tool that was issued by Facebook. It's finally rolling out to

Ireland, South Korea, and Spain, which is kind of interesting. It's supposed to, I guess, I don't know, clear your history privacy tool. Basically, you can see where you've which you were you been what you done I guess and clear it which is kinda interesting Facebook good new tool I'll let you see apps and websites to track you so are you've got a tracking technology you can take in tap into the advertisers been using to target you with their advertising business and you can kinda get a good ideas to to what sort of information Facebook has gathered about you and your browsing habits outside the social media network.

And the tool is called Off Facebook Activity. It allows users to view the hundreds of sites and apps that share data and the customer information with Facebook. And you can disconnect the data from their account if you want. So I haven't got a chance to try this out but basically gives it supposedly supposed to give you more transparency and control on Facebook most people have on average 80 apps on their phone holy crap and they use maybe half of them every month I use probably less than that I don't know I look at all the apps on my phone and go, what?

Where do these come from? Who put these on here? Making it difficult to know which ones are collected personal information, how that data was being used. So evidently with this new app, you can take and do this. This is part of their settlement with the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. And their $5 billion fine, which probably is a drop in the bucket and I think doesn't doesn't doesn't he make that an hour or something I don't know not really but close you know what I'm saying so anyway that's gonna be interesting if you get a

chance to try and find the app I haven't played with it I'm just reading the news to you so after this I'm gonna hang it up and go dick around with the app as well. Some other Facebook news that's kind of interesting. They are launching a human curate your news stories sort of thing. They are going to take and hire a team of editors, and they're going to work on a new initiative called NewsTab, which is its latest venture into the world of publishing. So it may be that they will use these journalists, wow, I can't spell journalist,

what am I, president of the United States, would help curate the NewsTab. And it's going to be a news section inside of the couple's mobile application that will surface the most recent relevant stories for readers. It says it plans to hire seasoned journalists from various outlets for the roles and will put up job postings on its employment board on Tuesday. You know, given how many times they've tried to have a go at this and how many times they've failed and rejiggered the thing and everything else, I'm not sure you want to quit your day job at the Washington Post or the New York Times for this just in case it doesn't work out I have a weird feeling the Washington Post New York Times and and everything are probably gonna be

around 100 years from now or at least we hope so I mean they've been there for 100 years now as it is I think so anyway that should be kind of interesting I guess one of the part of the reason they're doing is they'll come, uh, bat, uh, like Russian operatives, manipulating Facebook,

fake news, things of that nature. But, you know, you run into a interesting problem when you're like, well, that's not the fake news. My news is the true news.

I mean, I think we have a president who's trying to do that every day where he's like, no, you can't believe anything, but just believe me. In fact, he says it like every other word, believe me. Um, which is usually anybody who constantly has to say, believe me, you probably should suspect their motives and what they're doing. You know why? Believe me. I'm just kidding. Uh, anyway, uh, always question

authority. I'm, you're welcome to question me too if you want knock yourself out whatever um so that's kind of interesting uh seeing you know um some of the different changes that facebook is making out in the world uh will they impact us will you like them will they do good who knows we're gonna find out uh on top of that nine to five mac is reporting uh a review they've done of the uh apple arcade which reportedly cost $4.99 a month and uh some early access to trial games so they got a chance to play with this baby on nine to five mac you go to the website nine to five mac.com and uh looks like an interesting offer wow there's a whole lot of people that are jumping

into the gaming market you've got stadia from google in fact i was just looking today about ordering one of their new stadia things so i can be ready for that uh destiny 2 just dropped the cross save uh set up uh i went in and set up my accounts on uh ps4 uh so that i can play on pc i'm really excited for that cross save because I got friends on different platforms and and I've got you know different accounts are trying to manage multiple accounts and play them all it's just insane it's hard enough to grind one account on any given game platform let alone playing two platforms I've tried it it's nightmarish all your

favorite guns are on the other account. But you want to play with your friends. It'll be cool to see the cross-save dropping on Destiny 2, and evidently Fortnite has it or will have it soon. But I don't care for Fortnite, so there's that. That's my personal thing. What can I say? So it looks like nine to five

got a chance to play this they played like six games it's got like basically a thing where you pay i believe a monthly sort of service to it uh and you work it from the app store so you're still using the uh apple app store which i don't know what are you going to do for people that are on pc is it going to run through shitty itunes something? I'm so glad they're trashing iTunes and breaking it up. I think it's been a fucking turd for like 25 years. I've hated iTunes. Uh, I think the whole time I've ever known iTunes, I've hated iTunes. Um, so there's that, but, uh, evidently, you know, they feel it's a kind of a worthy effort. It doesn't look like 9to5 is reporting anything that they hated.

Some of the games are pretty light on their, not only quality, but light on their footprint in how many megabytes, gigabytes, all that sort of good stuff you're dealing with. The games I'm seeing that they posted on on their review look kind of cheesy graphic wise um frogger in toy town okay uh you know and it looks like some of the cheap sort of stuff you'd see on steam um for some of the cheaper games and whatever but uh you know i'm sure they're just you know launching the service developing it and we'll see where it goes and what becomes of it. So there's that.

Kind of interested to see what happens. What happens with, is that going to feed over to PC computers or PC computers just fucking screwed? Getting back to Facebook again, it seems like Facebook seems to be dominating the news today, is they've released the findings of a roughly year-long conservative bias audit, along with changes to advertising policies as a result. So this is kind of interesting.

The findings were people worried about the algorithms began to deprioritize conservative viewpoints. And so they noted that despite the conservative concerns with the Facebook fact-checking process, Facebook accepted fact-checkers affiliated with conservative publishers. So I guess they were okay there. Uh, it looks like Facebook is going to update some of their content policies to

make it more clear and providing insight into its policy process for conservative people, uh, content enforcement. Um, they have, uh, launched a content appeals process for people to challenge content rulings i really

wish they'd fix that better because it's getting really stupid i mean they're they're doing some really stupid stuff now uh the other day i called uh let's see i was making a comment on my own feed and i i made the reference white trash trump, and that got fucking flagged and suspended, and they wouldn't, no matter how much I appealed it. I made a joke. I can't remember what the joke was, but it was a joke. And I was replying to a friend of mine who knows I'm joking with him, and I made a joke, and it wasn't racial,

or I don't think it had anything to do with Trump. I think it was like stupid Trumper or something like that. I was joking with him. And I remember thinking, you know, you should probably put an LOL on that. And usually I do. But it also got taken down by Facebook. And no matter what I could do. And the problem is you can't tell them the context of what you wrote and so they're punishing you for

this this little comment they see and they don't know that you're joking around with friends that your friends get the joke and all that uh all that stuff and if they would let you give an explanation like look i was joking with my friends. They get this joke. Look at the context of the whole thing. The problem is, is nine times out of 10, when you're getting this suspended, um, on your comment or your post or whatever, it, it's not taking the context of the thing. It just takes the wording that you posted. And it's like, Hey man, that was a joke. Like, I mean, Jesus Christ, if you're a comedian, you're going to be posting jokes on Facebook. They're all going to get fucking suspended now.

And I don't know, when did white trash and Trump become, like, some sort of evil thing? I mean, if you go into the, and Facebook has said they are going to fix the groups because the groups are toxic if you go into the deplorables groups uh the stuff that they write about um the obamas michelle obama um i mean they write they write some pretty heinous stuff that's that's very deplorable let's put it that way but it's stuff that should not be on that platform. And if anything, it does encourage white nationalism. I mean, I've seen references on there where they compared her, of course,

to that racial trope, to being a monkey. They've said Michelle Obama was a transsexual and they've tried to, you know, they've done photo editing to the photo to try and make that argument, which is just disgusting. You know, I mean, look, if you have problems with presidents, great. Call them out.

But, you know, don't attack your family. I've tried to, you know, over the years people brought up Barron, and I remember going through the Clinton age where the Clintons had to say, hey, look, you need to back off Chelsea. She's just a little kid trying to, you know, swim in this crazy pool we put her in with us. And the press had to back off her then. I think the Carters, I think with the Carter children, they had to do the same thing. Barron certainly got enough of his shots at him, and they had to say, hey, man, back off Barron.

And you really should, man. I mean, to say, Hey man, back off Baron. And, and you really should, man. I mean, these, these kids, you can't pick your parents. You can't pick your family.

And until these kids grow up to be the toxic pieces of shit, like that are Donald Trump jr. And Eric, you know, you kind of, you kind of let it kind of back off them and let them develop their wings. And hopefully they don't turn into toxic brew of whatever. What's interesting is that they're taking in doing some adjustments to make this conservative thing more happy. So hopefully that helps them.

It doesn't look like we found any huge examples of bias that they were being accused of but i'm sure that's not going to get the conservative right wing to shut up because the right wing still wants to you know say that facebook's and algorithms are evil and it's fake news and of course they want to discourage their people from listening to it so there you go man um uh let's see what else is up on the news nine to five mac announcing apple has uh said the apple card is now available to iphone users in the united states it's got a three percent cash back offer for uber and uber eats that's probably good because a lot of those people i think that use iphones like uber and like that There are those millennials that like all that stuff. So that's probably a smart idea. And you can get cash back on your Uber purchases to buy more Uber. So there you go. Who needs a car, right? I am actually really excited for the day when,

when we don't have to have cars. I was hoping it would be here by now. Where is that? Anyway, can someone check on that for me? i really would like to not have to own a car anymore and then uh yeah just pay for a service the only fear i have about the whole thing is we all get rid of our cars and then they end up charging us uh basically the equivalent of owning a new car uh and you're just like wait i thought this was supposed to save us some money and a lot of times when these new inventions come into place they don't end up saving us money and you're just like, wait, I thought this was supposed to save us some money. And a lot of times when these new inventions come into place, they don't end up saving us money because some guy goes,

well, you were paying that before, so you'll gladly pay that now. So screw you. Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all. Google has announced Google Go, according to TechCrunch, the lightweight search app that takes only 7 megabytes of phone storage and launches it to Android users worldwide. It's optimized to save about 40% on data. So I guess if that's the one you want to use, meanwhile, the other ones are sucking data in the background while they're monitoring you. I don't know why that's a thing. Maybe it's big in third world countries. If you have older phones and you know, you don't have the fastest data speeds and all that kind of crap or something, maybe that's good for that. You're in China, you know, where things move so goddamn

slow through their, through their system. You, uh, got to deal with it that way. I don't know, man. Well, I don't know. So let's see. What else? There's a group of as many as 20 states are going to launch a joint antitrust investigation of big tech companies. This is going to be pretty interesting. There's going to be a giant war on tech companies and largely to, you know, a lot of these people are folks that are, um, Republicans and they're trying to, uh, go against them because no longer the tech companies are working for them. So they're trying to bully him into, uh, they're trying to bully him into, um, uh, submission because they can't cheat with the Russians anymore. So they don't like that. So there's that.

So anyway. You can check that out. See what you think. And you can go to the website. For that. That's in the Wall Street Journal. They've got the article there. Apple Music is launching a new chart.

Called the Shazam Discovery Top 50. This is. You can file in things. you didn't ever fucking need. Features the top songs trending in the US and 10 plus other countries, according to Shazam data. So, yeah, there's that. Wow, man. So, I don't know, man.

Did you really need that? were you just sitting around going my life is not self-actualized i'm not complete until i get the shazam discovery app really okay all right man i don't know man i mean basically shazam pulls what data from musics around the world that you're listening to and you're like hey man what's that music i mean i have used shazam to discover some great music back in the day uh but i mean i don't use it often it's not really like a thing i'm not spending a lot of time with shazam um i'm not you know most most time in a public place the music shit so I don't really want to identify it's really rare I'm in a

public place I'm like what is that it's really cool so anyway you know whatever check it out you can download it because you got nothing better to do because you're waiting for your Uber and your Uber Eats to deliver your food with you can you deliver can you order Uber Eats and uber at the

same time so that when they come to you and you're driving to work or coming home from work or going to whatever event you're going they also have your food in the fucking car so you can eat it while you're using your uber and does that cost more or is that all inclusive in the cost these are the shit things that I want to know sources according to Bloomberg YouTube officials are finalizing plans under pressure from regulators to end targeted advertisements on videos kids are likely to watch this is a real big issue they have with YouTube and kids because kids are you too really I mean it's it's a 10 to 15 year old market if not younger Uh, this is a real big issue they have with YouTube and kids because kids are YouTube really.

I mean, it's a, it's a 10 to 15 year old market, if not younger than that. Um, it's really a thing made for kids. I mean, even now YouTube's more gotten more exclusive where if you're over the age of 25, good luck making any traction on there. I swear to God, they just go, Oh, you're over 40. Yeah. We're going to bury your account in our algorithm because mine's buried it's been buried for quite some time so uh that's kind of interesting uh the new york times got an interesting article this is cool uh companies like mcdonald's and

facebook are using podcasts such as gizmodo produced the sauce as subtle branding efforts meant to entertain and persuade. So great. Now my Big Mac has got a fucking podcast. Is that what you're telling me? Hey, welcome to the Big Mac podcast. And I probably do this in the voice of Ronald McDonald, but I'm not sure he has an actual like voice voice you can copy. Maybe I should do the Hamburglar.

I don't remember if the Hamburger has a voice, I think he just goes, Hamburger, or something, I don't know, it's been a long time since I've seen those commercials, but I remember when I was a kid, but yeah, does my Big Mac really need a fucking podcast, does those fries really need a podcast, like, hey man, today we're inside you, and we're hardening your arteries, why don't you come in and get some more fries and we can finish off we can finish off that future heart attack you have coming with our grease that we have in our thing um here's a podcast i love for mcdonald's what's in that stuff you call quote unquote meat i like a podcast for that not Not that I'd listen. Cause I

probably just get hungry for a big Mac and then go order one, which is really bad. Um, yeah, don't eat there, man. Seriously. Don't just don't do it. Uh, this is kind of interesting. Twitter says it proactively suspended 200,000 spammy accounts before they became substantially active. So I guess somebody loaded them all up alongside its initial ban of 936 China-linked accounts. So China's had a bunch of accounts that they've been using for the attack on the Hong Kong, people that are rebelling there in Hong Kong.

And so they've got all these accounts they're using. This is probably good because these accounts can be used for other sort of dissemination. I hope they've done the same with Russia and all the other places. What will be interesting is it just occurred to me there will be no Wiki links, or there shouldn't be much Wiki links because they're kind of on the ropes ropes right now in fact i haven't heard much from from them since their leader got arrested but probably hearing them affecting the 2020 election so whoever won in 2016 is probably gonna have a hard time dealing with that but uh i am happy to see twitter going after all these different uh spammy accounts um maybe we need to cut after all these different spammy accounts.

Maybe we need to cut all that out, the spammy cuts that are out in the world, and ban them and make them so that people can't make a bunch of fake news. Of course, there are accounts that are kind of legitimate, but also spreading their own BS. If you heard recently in the podcast there was the amazon fc facility uh control people that are taking and uh utilizing uh different accounts to spread information about how glorious it is to work for amazon and to combat you know people that are complaining about you know sleeping in horrible conditions inside their facilities. So kind of an interesting thing that's going on.

According to Facebook, after a tip from Twitter, Facebook also worked with them. This is kind of good too. I think it's good for consumers. They removed seven pages, three groups, five accounts originating from China that are involved in coordinated, inauthentic behavior regarding Hong Kong. So hopefully this is going to help protect our 2020 election. It's kind of sad we have to expect Twitter and Facebook to do this.

We can't get legislation passed because of McConnell to protect our elections. So I guess we have to hope our consumer side survives and makes it work. That should be pretty interesting. So that's the rundown of different news that stuck out to me today, different stories, things of that nature. Um, you know, I don't, I don't know if you really want to get into the Google go stuff or if that really twist your nipples or whatever. I mean, I don't really care in America, but I suppose there might be some places like, I don't know, what, Nigeria or something. They still have those shitty flip phones.

Maybe they would really like to have, I don't know, a lighter footprint of stuff. Things on Podhunt, a product on today that I took a look at. There is something kind of interesting called Podhunt. They have the best new podcast daily the best new like here's the problem i have with most podcasts because i get people all the time hey man listen to my podcast how many episodes do you have four okay man why don't you get back to me when you stick with that thing for a while the one thing I learned with podcasting is you really got to stick with it. I've looked at so many podcasts, uh, over the years and they tend to die after like seven

episodes. Like I've had people write me or tell me that, Hey, I have a great podcast. And I'll go, I'll go to their iTunes and I'm like, you only have seven episodes up. And that was like six months ago. Like that's all you can do so this is kind of interesting pod hunt the best new podcast daily at pod hunt dot app not a calm pod hunt dot app you can check it out I don't know says daily correct creation of the best new podcast I wonder how they're getting that stuff that's kind of interesting I don't know of any API that scrapes that, but whatever. So, yeah, man, you can check that out as an app that kind of sticks out for something to me.

Anything else on Product Hunt that I really, I don't know. There's Node, which is sustained flat-packed homes. That's kind of interesting. I'm seeing more and more of these smaller homes and everything else. I'd love to have one because I'm just me. I'm just Chris and two dogs, and I don't need all this stuff and everything else. So anyway, top of the list is Podhunt. You can check that out.

It's got 393 upvotes as of yet with 54 comments. It seems to be something that people are excited aboutunt. You can check that out. It's got 393 upvotes as of yet with 54 comments. Seems to be something that people are excited about. So you can check that out and see what you think. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys. Be sure to watch for future guests that we have on the Chris Voss Show. Give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.

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