How Facebook "listens" to you without you knowing
There's a really interesting podcast from Reply All about how Facebook "listens" to you without your consent. But don't get your pitchforks out yet. You actually have, in a weird way, given consent. But how Facebook "listens" to you isn't really through your cellphone's microphone (as it has been widely reported -- and debunked), but through your location history, your search preferences, and something called the Facebook Pixel.
Reply All's parent company Gimlet Media has a page set up with instructions on how not to be tracked by Facebook.
My favorite podcast episode of 2016: Reply All - Boy In Photo
If you haven't listened to this Reply All episode yet, you should. It's just a funny, weird, and interesting story about the internet. Go here: BOY IN PHOTO.
Reply All: Boy In Photo
"Wayne", the Boy In Photo
One of my favorite podcasts is Reply All from Gimlet Media and one of their more recent episodes, #79, is just fantastic. If you enjoy a good story -- a real story -- you'll want to listen to this one. It's a little weird but super interesting and surprising.
The short story here is that Reply All's PJ Vogt came across this photo above of a boy sitting in a room with two girls. The photo was posted back in 2006 to a message board called ILX and the members of this board went wild trying to figure out who this kid was. By zooming in on the photo and taking clues from objects, the board managed to find out a lot. Like where the photo was taken, whose party this was, and what town this was taken in. But they never found any information on the boy.
And then the story gets really twisted...