The reviews are in for the Amazon Fire Cube -- don't be a square (The 3:59, Ep. 418)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59, I'm Alfred Ng. I'm Dan Ackman. So the reviews are in for the Amazon Fire TV Cube, the latest gadget from Amazon designed to control your TV with your voice. We got our hands on it and the quick rundown is that, you know, the good news is you can channel surf with just your voice. The microphone does a pretty decent at picking up your commands even over your loud speakers The bad news is if you have devices outside of the Fire TV like if you have a DVR or a game console or a Roku, you still can't really use your voice to control that. Dan you were able to play off the cube for a little bit. What were your impressions? Yeah, I did play with it yesterday and you can actually use voice commands for a bunch of different things outside the Fire Cuboid Cell, but none is extensively. As you would with something like a Harmony which is really the gold standard of universal remote type devices. I did like that, the voice commands, the Alexa voice commands. Recognizes your voice if there is loud music play, if you'd say- Because that's one of the biggest thing I was skeptical about. Right. Yeah. If you have a movie or music blasting and go So, it actually heard us almost every time. So that was great, and when you control yourself on the fire queue which is all your video apps and things like that and all your Amazon stuff, great, fantastic, not a problem. It's when you want to mix it with other things in your system whether it's your cable box or your game console, It works, but not quite as seamlessly. I feel like it doesn't have the same hooks into the commands that I'll say a Harmony does, because when you set-up your Harmony it says like, what brand of cable box do you have? What's model number? And it really knows button for button what everything is. Yeah. So we gave it a four out of five star-rating on our website. I will say it's probably like the Five if it comes of rice, which I don't think it does, but next up Google has released an update that shows you how much information the tech giant like has on you, so after Facebook's data misuse scandal they also release this tool to tell you how much data that it has on you But I also remember people pointing out that Google has way more information on you than Facebook does, which makes sense. Facebook is generally just one social network, but Google has data from your Chrome browser, from Gmail, what you're looking up on Google Maps, YouTube. What you watch on YouTube, where you are if you're using like and Android phone. And so it obviously has a much bigger data profile on you, so This update you can find your privacy settings and the data that they have on you from Google's apps now. Right now it's available in Gmail, but they're planning on rolling it out to maps and photos and all these other Google apps that are available. Is this something that you're planning on using? I mean I'll take a look at it but I find there's a lot of big hype about privacy settings and privacy information tools. And for the average consumer, they're never gonna make the three or four mouse clicks required to take a look. They won't know if it looks For if they do. You and I are very aware of this, but if you stop the average person in the streets, they're like, Google's tracking me, all right, what else is new? Yeah. It's just so complicated an issue, they just throw their hands and say, I don't even know what to do about it. There's always this whole thing with data apathy in the sense of it's just like- Yes, exactly. That's a great term, I love that. Where the idea is that yeah, Google has all my information but I also would like knowing where I'm going at anytime. It's transparency theater. Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty good way to describe it. So also the Supreme Court decided today that states can charge you for sales taxes online. Even if the place you're shopping from doesn't have a physical location in that state. Which was a ruling from a 1992 case that essentially had set the price for about like more than a decade.What is really means for you what you really need to know is that, you'll probably be paying more for selfie buyer right now, which I'm sure no one is afraid of. Well it's that loophole they're closing, where if somebody is in a different state and you buy something. they don't know which state to charge you sales tax for, so they don't. We knew this loophole would close eventually. Yeah and, just wanna include this, in breaking news this morning, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich resigned after the company's board learned of a consensual relationship with an Intel employee. The company's Chief Financial Officer Robert Swan will be stepping in while they search for a new CEO. That's all the time we have for the show today, if you like what you heard, check us on CNET, I'm [UNKNOWN], I'm Dan Ackerman. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]