What will you buy on Amazon Prime Day? (The 3:59, Ep. 426)

Welcome to the 3:59, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. Okay, so today is finally Prime Day. If you're an Amazone Prime member and feel like spending even more money with the ecommerce giant, today is your day. As in past years, Amazon is using the big sales day to promote its own devices and products Offering discounts on Echo and Fire devices, plus it's growing list of clothing and home decor brands. Alfred, are you excited? I actually have a list going on of what I want to buy, and I'm not sharing it for security purposes. But yeah, last week I had all thsi stuff that I was going to buy and then because I needed it [LAUGH] sooner rather than later And I just thought, you know what? I can wait a week for this. Like in case, like. Hopefully not toiley paper, but yeah I get it. You can wait a week for toilet! [LAUGH] All right, so [LAUGH]. Obviously people are probably interested in some of the deals, so I wanna run through a couple of them. So for instance the Fire TV Stick with the Alexa voice remote Is going for $20 the echo spot going for $100 that's a $30 savings, the new second generation echo is for $70 now granted if you're not if you don't wanna pull the trigger on these specific deals right now, these same deals are probably gonna arrive in black Friday Cyber Monday as well so. You're not in the shopping mood. Yeah honestly I never look at the Amazon products as a real deal just because it's like they control the prices on these. And they can go down to these prices anytime that Amazon chooses to which it usually does. Sometimes there'll be a random weekend where it's like the Kindle is like $40 off today by the way. Yes. So those aren't really the deals that I would be excited about with Prime day content. So what kind of stuff are you excited about? It's all random. I can never really tell when it's not Amazon products. Like it's a given that Amazon products are gonna be on sale. Last year I got a cat tree that was $90 retail and I got it for 40. It's the unexpected things that I know won't be this price again for a while. Also wanted to mention there are other retailers jumping into the fray, because July tends to be a pretty quiet period for retail. So Target, Walmart, and eBay are also offering deals today. So if you are shopping around online, definitely do some comparison shopping. Do you think that Amazon has Basically forced other companies until making deals on prime day as well. Yes, yeah and there's a lot more like traffic and interest going on so it benefits them to a certain extent to. Also, Alfred, you look into how Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are working to kill fake, bad accounts on their networks. Tell me a little bit more about this, especially like what Facebook is doing. Yeah so this was a deep dive into artificial intelligence that I was just generally curious about on my own after watching all these tech CEOs basically talking about we have all these problems that we're dealing with using artificial intelligence. And then that was it. It just got me thinking How does this actually work? In one example with Facebook, they had been working with a company based in Israel called Unbotify, where it uses biometrics, but like behavioral biometrics Think about how you tap your phone, the angle that you hold your phone at, and where you touch your screen when you're swiping around and things like that. It could also sense breathing, too, liek it senses the small motions and the gyroscope. Yeah, but it doesn't yeah, it uses your gyroscope, so it's not like it's this guy's breathing. [LAUGH] Like it basically, when you hold your phone, obviously you are breathing so it moves up and down. So, they use that as a this is a human. Like this isn't a bot because it's like, it's taking subtle movements like that and using that to tell like this is a human versus this is a bot. So, related to behavioral biometrics, how easy do you think it would be for Like fakers, counterfeiters, what have you, to actually start to catch up and provide ways of [CROSSTALK]. I think you'd have to be really sophisticated. I mean, obviously there's GPS spoofing, where you can tell your phone you're in one location when you're not really. So I don't think we're far off from gaming the accelerometer and gaming the gyroscope but then it's up to the spotmakers to figure out how human moves. So they would basically have to do the jobs of these AI companies as well, like figuring out the angle. Game the device at and things like that. Yeah, the cat and mouse game continues. If you wanna read more about these stories check us out on CNET. I'm Ben Fox Ruben. I'm Alfred Yang. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]