In response to the recently very popular Upgrading Girlfriend 1.0 joke (it’s had hundreds of hits from a forum in Australia over the last two weeks) the following came through on the email – via my Mother-in-Law!

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewellery applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs such as; Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs , such as NHL 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system.

Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate.

The response…

DEAR DESPERATE,

First, keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system.

Please enter command: ithoughtyoulovedme.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update.

If that application works as designed Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewellery 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, D0 NOT under any circumstances install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

In addition, please do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good Luck!
Tech Support

A couple of days back I chose to follow my normal course of behaviour and play with any new Twitter clients for my much loved HTC Hero.  As yet there has been nothing on par with the truly awesome Gravity client on Nokia’s Series 60 by @janole so anything new gets a fair go.

I’d seen reviews of Hootsuite’s new client and after throwing a nice shiny baked ROM at the Hero I was able to download and install Hootsuite Lite.  There is a paid for version ($1.99 at time of writing) but as the only additional benefit I could see was the ability to handle more than 3 Twitter accounts (and I use but 1) there was little point in spending the cash just to see if it works.

Setup was simple enough, even though the you get hassled a couple of times to create a new Hootsuite account before being offered a connection to your Twitter account.

Now I’m not going to review the application other than to say it’s very usable, has some decent thinking around navigation and handles a Twitter account admirably – at least on par with the current leader Seesmic in my opinion.  But something odd happened after a feed refresh sometime on Saturday.

I was out and about, hit refresh and a curious new message appeared in my stream from someone I don’t follow.  This in itself given Twitter’s problems of last weeks with random tweets appearing was nothing too odd but this tweet had a different coloured background and the format of the message was odd.

I quickly sent out a tweet to the crowd asking if anyone else had seen these “ads” but everyone who responded hadn’t. Was this the first inkling of the much talked about Twitter advertising model.  If so it was pretty well exactly what I had expected it might be but had no knowledge of it having yet been enabled.

Of course being out and about research was a little hard to do.

So yesterday I sat down for half an hour and did some digging.  It turns out that Hootsuite have partnered with a third party Twitter advertising agency called 140Proof who’s model is to sell advertising messages injected directly into one’s stream by the client application.  They look and feel like tweets but they aren’t – they are put there ONLY in the application stream.

They are inoffensive and not at all obtrusive, as I said they pretty well looked and felt how I would expect a Twitter ad to be BUT I hadn’t asked for them and more importantly I couldn’t recall ever being informed that I was going to get them.  There were no signup T&C’s with the mobile app, no details easily found on Hootsuite’s web page, nothing.

A little more digging and it turns out that, according to this article on Techcrunch that,

Twitter clients pass 140 Proof a user ID list (with no names) and the public information contained in a Twitter users profile, and on the advertiser side, advertisers bid on ads to be directed toward users based on keywords in tweets, followers, as well as device, location and platform. 140 Proof’s algorithms calculates Twitterer’s “persona” based on public tweets and who they follow and serves ads to users based on this data.

YOU WHAT?  So without my permission Hootsuite passes my PI and graph to a third party who then does their thing with it, sells that bundle (anonymously granted) and throws back a targeted advert!

Now sure my stream is public and viewable by all but that doesn’t make it acceptable for a business to utilise that information for their own gain without at least first asking for permission.  What happens if you have a private non-publicly viewable Twitter stream?  Does Hootsuite not work or do they just blindly continue to pass that data on to 140 Proof?

I don’t mind the ads, they make sense, they (in theory and assuming I pay them attention) pay for Hootsuite to offer up their client for “free” (read no money there) but informed consent is required.

For the record NOT one of the adverts I  have seen over the last couple of days has been even vaguely “relevant” nor have I clicked through on any.

I’ll be having a chat with some people over just what consent they should have obtained as surely there must be a requirement in the EU but it’ll be more interesting to see just what sort of lifespan the 140 Proof model will have once Twitter actually do get their advertising live.

UPDATE: I am interested to hear from anyone who has knowledge of the BT/Phorm case being brought by the CPA;  specifically the abuse of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

If Hootsuite are intercepting my profile and tweet stream and shipping it off (hashed or not) to 140Proof for analysis and spam would this constitute a breach also?

Don’t get me wrong I don’t want Hootsuite punished I just wonder if this is/were the case what would be their knowledge of the issue and how would the choose to address it.

I have my own thoughts on whether or not personal information can be defined as intellectual property but I’d really love to hear some more opinions before espousing my own.

Please do comment especially if you have strong opine that falls one side of the fence or another.

Well it was always going to happen but today The Register are running a story that the launch of Internet Eyes has been delayed whilst the Information Commissioner’s Office checks on the legality of the service after concerns were raised.

Assistant Information Commissioner Jonathan Bamford told The Register:   “CCTV operators should use appropriately trained staff to monitor images. If a CCTV system is established to help prevent and detect crime, it would be appropriate to disclose images to law enforcement agencies where a crime needs to be investigated.

“However, it is not appropriate to disclose images of identifiable individuals for entertainment purposes or to place them on the internet.

“If images are to be released for identification purposes, this should not generally be done by anyone other than the law enforcement agencies where necessary when investigating a crime.”

I for one am hoping that in this case the ICO really does step up and put a halt to Internet Eyes.

UPDATE: ITV have rescheduled the piece for 18th February.  Shame as I was hoping to hear what Internet Eyes had to say for themselves.

Internet Eyes the citizen snooping CCTV advocate, about whom I have posted before,  is to be  featured on ITV’s Tonight program on 11th February at 19.30 according to their facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Internet-Eyes/108455634071?ref=nf.

I’m personally still appalled at the idea of not only Joe Public having an eye into private CCTV footage for the purpose of reporting observed miscreants but also the notion of this snooping being in some way ranked into league tables of spotters with prizes/rewards on offer for reporting.

Today’s article entitled “Half of Employers Reject Potential Worker After Look at Facebook Page” In the Telegraph reports that;

Bosses are now using the popular social networking site as a tool to double check how likely it would be that their new worker would take a sick day for being hung-over or on drugs the night before.

And job seekers were being found out for lying about their qualifications, with employers checking their Facebook pages to see if their online details matched their resume.

No great surprises there.  After all background checks, references and such have been the bread and butter of the Human Resource industry for yonks and let’s be truthful here; business and HR in particular has never been great advocates of treating people as people.  Liri Anderson highlights some of the absurd thinking in her post here.

But the article had me thinking, especially in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Crunchie Awards statements on privacy and sharing.  With open sharing of very personal information rapidly becoming “normal” (at least within a certain and growing portion of society) businesses are being offered up a far greater insight into who people really are, their true identity.

I recently spent a day being psychometrically tested, a practice I have had little respect for in the past.  But this time it was different.  After an hour of online tests prior to even leaving home, I spent the best part of 9 hours being subjected to a battery of tests, exams, questionings all culminating in a fairly probing interview with an industrial psychologist.

Throughout the whole process I was very conscious of the various (seeming) inconsistencies in my responses, my body language, volume, level of language – the whole performance. The psychologist then blew me away by not only articulating back to me all of those traits but painted a picture of me that was so close to my own view that I could not fail to be impressed.

And of course the whole exercise is designed to see through performance, misdirection and untruths.

With the rapid increase in sharing of personal information HR practioners now have the ability to undertake much of the due diligence that would be accurately be shown up by the above process themselves, in-house with no context, response or even the applicants knowledge.

I’m not going to argue the rights and wrongs of this surreptitious behaviour (although I give a nod towards Deep Packet Inspection) but I do want to pose a couple of points;

1) Are we going to see third party agencies now remotely scanning peoples online behaviour in order to offer up a “professional” opinion of that candidate based on nothing more than what is actually shared as opposed to that which is not expressed?  Where will the oversight come from and can these businesses build a credible model?

2) In Zuckerberg’s ideal world we all share more and share more openly.  Given this scenario when will the tipping point come where candidates are equally exposed and deemed inappropriate; what then?  Does this point surely not create a Zero-Sum game for this practice of pseudo-psychology, one where employers realise that the process will not actually highlight potentially “bad” employees but that people are just people.

In my usual daily trawl of interesting stuff I came across a competition from Costa Coffee in the UK to win a year’s free coffee and as anyone who knows me – free coffee has got to be a good thing.

The compo, it turns out, is actually just a draw, you know the sort of thing; enter your contact details, don’t win and yet still get bombarded with masses of junk marketing from all and sundry.

Well here’s the entry page and it quite clearly says Costa aren’t going to use your details for that, and the terms and conditions are equally simple, fair and honest.  A great nod to consumer privacy and not abusing it.

Simple privacy terms from Costa Coffee

A massive WELL DONE to Costa for breaking the norm and offering to play nicely. (needless to say yes I have entered)

Okay here is a screencast of my presentation from the recent BEUC Forum on Consumer Privacy.  It has taken longer than hoped to get up and running (call me a luddite – I’m just not a video person and so learning new tools has been a steep old learning curve).  BTW sorry for the slightly iffy sound quality (inc the slightly monotone narration), a super snotty cold is never going to help.

Proper thanks must go to the masses of wonderful people who make their photographs available under Creative Commons (especially those good enough to allow commercial use) without whom this just would have been a non-starter with stock art websites charging way beyond my means.  That and really I needed to hammer the CC license thing home – you’ll see why.

On the subject of Creative Commons, this screencast is available for you to take away, use & redistribute (yup even for commercial stuff) at will as long as it doesn’t get edited, attribution is given and all the licenses of embedded works respected (i.e. no nicking bits of other people’s stuff).

So to all those whose works I have used, here’s credit where it is due:

For anyone needing/wanting you can also download the presentation in 3GP format (approx 7mb) for your mobile/iPod here.

Irrespective of whether a company’s business model is based on direct sales or pyramid schemes, personal value or freemium at their very core all business models are united in the simple premise that; someone always pays. I’ve understood this, as I am sure anyone in business has, for many years.  No matter how altruistic one may feel the process of doing business costs money, and unless someone pays for those costs that business very rapidly is going out of business.

Shelly Palmer, MD of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC articulated this simplicity brilliantly in his recent blog;

There are only three business models: I pay, you pay or someone else pays. That’s it.

I pay means that I (the publisher of the content) am willing to fund the creation, production and distribution of the content for my own purposes.

You pay means that you are willing to pay me for my content.

Someone else [They pay] pays means that a third party is willing to pay me so that you can consume my content.

Simply no matter what the business model being adopted someone always pays. This works well for me; I’m quite simplistic in my view on the world, breaking things down into basic building blocks.

When talking about those business practices that have impacted upon consumer privacy, for me, once one can accept that really all business models are much the same and that emerging models really can’t be to blame one can move on and start to look for those areas more culpable.

What are those areas?  Well I think that the payment mechanisms that underpin business models leave an audit trail of their impact but that’s another story.

So finally after much work the beast that is my BEUC Forum of Privacy 2009  is complete (and busy sending right now).  It is a 173 slide monster but provisional timings stick that at around 14minutes.

As a teaser here’s the summary I’ve posted to the BEUC:

“Models, Privacy & Ownership”

When given people trust businesses those businesses perform better. But for people to truly trust businesses and organisations they must have confidence in their privacy being safe-guarded.

Barney Craggs examines the effect emerging payment mechanisms has had on the volume of personal information being traded and highlights how by abandoning old set notions of ownership any organisation can foster trust and thrive which ever business model they pursue.