Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Just starting to listen to this episode, but felt the urge to say this. For the Facebook tracking thingy.
I never use Facebook to log into any apps or websites except Facebook. And i do not use the FB app either. I only log in via browser. But, according to the off Facebook feature, dozen of apps apparently were somehow linked to Facebook, or Facebook is funneling my data from those apps, without any indication that it is doing so…and thus been tracking me.
Creepy as hell…really wondering what other things they are doing without telling us.
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I don’t use Facebook at all.
I checked my DNS logs at the weekend, only to find that my smartphone was trying to reach Facebook, even though no Facebook apps are installed and I’ve never visited Facebook - and I was asleep at the time.
I think it was a game that was installed on the phone that was trying to communicate with Facebook - all Facebooks domains are blacklisted on my network.
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Exactly, that’s what it is doing, apparently tons of apps seems to have some kind of connection to Facebook, and they are sending data to FB, or Facebook is buying data from them…idk.
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I agree with you guys and would like to raise another point: why on earth would any semi-easily persuadable consumer want targeted ads? It would lead to massively rising consumer overspending, galloping consumer debt, and an ever tighter bond of an individual to the commercial cycle. I always marvel at Leo’s semi-joyous semi-embarassed telling of stories how he buys too much stuff from Insta ads and then talks pro targeting. Even though half of it might just be doing the devil’s advocate, the line between genius and consumer madness appears to blur.
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It appears that every Twitter account I have followed is sharing info with Facebook, although whether that’s through the client apps I’ve used (Albatross, UberSocial) or some other method I can’t say.
I used the facility to manage off-Facebook tracking, specifically to stop data being associated with my account in future. Not perfect but better than nothing:
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Re: Amazon sending you things you didn’t purchase.
Does the product show up in your orders? I highly doubt Amazon would send you something without telling you about it in an e-mail or somewhere on the side.
To me, it sounds much more like what Leo mentioned, the random packages. Reply All had an episode on it, but the short story is that review farms have to “purchase” products, so they ship it to random addresses they don’t own. They generally pick addresses in the US and other “normal” places making it harder for Amazon to figure the pattern. Then having ordered the product, they can leave a review on it, but they don’t actually want the product itself so they don’t care about sending it to a random person.
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Just wrapped up this episode. Did this show really have no sponsors? Or was this something Leo decided to do by the seat of his pants? I love This Week in Google and would hate to see it go.
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One of my favorites too! There’s much more to come from Google, so we need our TWiG to help process it all!
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I was wondering the same thing. I doubt Leo would just skip ads for the fun of it. (I could just see the look on Lisa’s face.) I try not to use anything Google (yes, I admit I use Bing, works just fine, most of the time) but I do enjoy the show. I’d hate to see it go away too.
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Frankly, we’re not going to get away from advertising. It pays for a lot of things. Do I like them? No. But I’ll take targeted ads vs blanket ones. However, that’s with the big caveat that I mean more targeted than blanket vs target me specifically.
Though, I have a little more self control on impulse buying. Usually, heh
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I had PR folks randomly send stuff. Never anything from Amazon proactivity spending my way.
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Thanks for the support. Thanks for supporting our sponsors with the special links we mention on air. It helps a lot. 
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Jeff: “Did I ever tell you about Caslon…?”
Stacey: “YES!”
I have no idea if it was going to feature in Jeff’s story (because he recognised the warning signs and stopped 
), but the print business started by William Caslon is still going 300 years later:
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Q1 is often slow. But we didn’t, in fact, have any ads on this show. I’m sure we will in future.
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On this show Leo mentioned a PowerShell script he uses on new Windows machines, and showed a screenshot from ‘The 4AM Wiki’ or something like that. Could someone share a link to that script?
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