Tag: amazon

Google records your ENTIRE purchase history.

gpurchases
Your Amazon orders, Square purchases, and Seamless lunches.  Pretty much everything you buy online as well as in-store purchases where you opt to have your receipt emailed; all of this is collated in your Purchases history; saved and mined by Google.

The company says this is done to help you track your purchases, and not to help them to produce those targetted ads you receive. Still, the level of detail being culled will surprise you.

This unheralded (read: sneaky) feature can’t be turned off and there is no method to erase your entire purchase history. You can, however, selectively delete items from it.

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(like that ‘Best of David Hasselhoff ‘ album you thought you had to get)

To see and delete items from your Purchases history

  1. Navigate to your Purchases Page: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases
  2. Click an item to display more Details on that purchase
  3. To delete, click Remove Item

with special thanks to Di, recipient of said album

Cheers!

quincy

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Q, the First Gender-neutral Assistant

Siri, Cortana, Alexa; each is markedly female. And, despite settings that allow you to modify your voice-activated assistant, the voices have been decidedly binary.

Until now; Meet Q

Created by a group of linguists, technologists, and sound designers, Q hopes to “end gender bias” and encourage “more inclusivity in voice technology.” They recorded the voices of two dozen people who identify as male, female, transgender, or non-binary in search for a voice that typically “does not fit within male or female binaries.” To find this voice, the Q team conducted a test involving over 4,600 people, who were asked to rate the voice on a scale of 1 (male) to 5 (female).

For more on the research and technology behind Q, visit TheNextWeb

Cheers!

quincy

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Shhh…Alexa is listening (and she can’t keep a secret)!

Amazon Echo

We’ve heard about her creepy laugh, but this may be the first reported instance of her tattling on her masters family. In what Amazon calls an “unlikely but possible” string of events one Echo device recorded a family’s private conversation and sent recording to contact.

Apparently, the device interpreted a word in the background conversation as ‘Alexa,’ prompting her to wakeup and take notice. She then it interpreted the ensuing words in the conversation as a send message.

Alexa’s query, ‘To whom? ‘ went unheard among the conversants, and she (Alexa) interpreted a word among in the conversation as the name of a saved family contact. Asking for confirmation (‘ ________, right?’) she interpreted, among the following words, a confirming, ‘right.’

Then did what she believes was told to do.

Amazon’s statement : “As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.“

April Fools, Where’s Waldo

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It’s that time again!

April 1st usually marks the day when the Internet collectively let’s it’s hair down and has some fun by creating prank sites and products, to honor April Fool’s Day.

Google, wich has a reputation for not letting this day pass quietly (e.g Express Parachute Delivery), has brought the eponymous, lost hero of “Where’s Waldo”  to Google Maps.

To Find Waldo in Google Maps:

  1. Launch Maps, you’ll see Waldo waving at you.
  2. Tap Waldo then tap Play.

Enjoy,  be on the lookout for too good funny to be true offering from the likes of AirBNB, Amazon, and Subway.

Cheers!

quincy

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