Tech that...
A ROUND-UP OF THE LATEST NEWS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
NEW NAMES FOR INSTAGRAM AND WHATSAPP
ONE of the things that makes Instagram and Whats App cool is that they are not Facebook… even if they are owned by that most respectable of social networks.
Young people are far more likely to communicate via these two young upstart apps than by Facebook, because Facebook is where all the old people hang out these days.
It seems odd, then, that Facebook has taken the potentially disastrous decision to add the words “from Facebook” to the names of their junior services.
Some people won’t care, of course, and the pull of these services is strong when all your friends are still using them. But some people won’t even realise until the change that their favourite apps are owned by Facebook.
And when they do, will they still be comfortable using them?
AMAZON’S HUMAN OPT-OUT
REMEMBER the hoo-ha about people listening in to recordings made by Alexa, Siri, and Google assistant?
Apparently, the things you say to your voice assistant of choice were saved (randomly and anonymously) by the tech giants, who then had humans listen to a very, very small number to make sure they were being correctly interpreted by the software. Sounds creepy, but seems reasonable – how else are they going to make it better?
Anyway, the panic is now over, as Amazon has become the last of the three to give users the ability to opt out of human beings listening.
Amazon will still upload and store the recordings, so you might like to go into the app and delete them if you feel safer. The place to do so, and review your other options, is in the Alexa Privacy section in the settings area of the Alexa app.
From now on, if you opt out of the “make Alexa better” option in the settings, your recordings will no longer be analysed by real people.
Google and Apple have already suspended these activities. If the end result is that companies are more transparent about what they do with the recordings they make, how they store them, and how they dispose of them, everyone will win.