expōnere

Internet Eyes on TV – Watch, Learn & be… Disgusted?

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.

Are Modern HR Practices a Zero-Sum Game?

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.

Simple honest privacy for Costa Competition

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)

Screencast of Models, Ownership and Privacy

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.

Someone ALWAYS Pays – A Business Truism

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.