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.

Should You Validate Your Twitter Following?

I followed someone today on Twitter, a real person in fact I had just had a coffee and a long chat with them.  Nothing new there I agree but within seconds of committing the follow I received a Direct Message from a service called TrueTwit asking me to validate my profile.

The premise of the service is that by asking all new followers to jump through a few basic hoops (captcha’s and such) TrueTwit can validate that the profile belongs to a proper person rather than a spambot.  Seems a smart enough idea providing some provenance but it got me thinking…

1. Do I really care if accounts following me are real people or bots enough to ask new followers to place a barrier to them following me?
2. By not validating oneself as a person how does TrueTwit preclude that account from following other than by simply applying a “block”?
3. Even blocking a profile does not prevent an account on Twitter from @ replying anyway as it is not follow/following dependant.
4. What about those bots I actually want to follow me, those which I use for automated functions?

What would be more useful to me would be the ability to validate those that I wish to follow, or at least selectively.  Of course the problem there would be akin to the first point above, “do I care if you follow me enough to validate myself to you?”

Any thoughts on Twitter or any other SocNet validation usefulness?

ReThinking Privacy and Trust (Futures-Diagnosis)

It’s rare that I directly quote/plug another blog post just for the sake of just that, but Norman Lewis has a take on privacy so close to my own and is just that much more eloquent that if you are at all interested in this field it’s worth 5 minutes of your attention.

So go have a read over at Norman’s blog Futures-Diagnosis.

In Marketing Privacy Legal Compliance is Never Enough

News hit the feeds today that, rather unsuprisingly, BT has dropped plans to run with the behavioural tracking company Phorm.   If any (marketing) company ever wanted proof positive where privacy is concerned that the will of the masses has greater authority than merely being legally compliant – this is it.

BT helped to develop Phorm and the system adheres to the UK DPA (if not the EU), consulted with the Home Office to ensure their position but screwed up by breaking the social norms in place by the community at large.

But BT did what any commercial entity would have done and ditched the system (irrespective of it’s worth or value) when it was apparent that their ability to retain Customers was severely hampered as trust had broken down.

In a world so acutely (albeit not always accurately) sensitised to security and privacy issues it never ceases to amaze me that companies believe that just because legally they can do something means they should.

TescoDigital – Update on Rebuilding Trust

Last week was all about TescoDigital’s inability to deliver, inability to resolve and inability to retain.  The full story is over here.

But as an update on Sunday 15th I received an email from Malcolm Gwynne, another “Customer Service Manager” (just how many do they have) over at TescoDigital apologising for the problems and  offering up £3.97 in eWallet credit – kinda like prepay for digital music on TescoDigital’s site.

I am sorry for the delay in getting back to you and that there was a fault with the Lily Allen album.

This has now been fixed and I do apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I have now added £3.97 to your eWallet so that you can try again.

Please go back to TescoDigital and follow the instruction on how to use the eWallet.

Grateful as I am for the credit has this helped TescoDigital rebuild my trust in them; not one iota I’m afraid.  The reason is two fold;

Firstly, the very attraction of online digital music transactions is the immediacy of them, I see something, I click buy and a couple of minutes later I’m listening to to those newly paid for tracks on my computer.

Malcolm’s response took over 72 hours from my last email – that’s too long, especially when until that point the emails had flowed freely almost conversationally.

And I guess there in lies a problem with digital communication for customer service.  The expectation of timeliness inherent with the medium.

If I post a letter to someone a week for a response doesn’t seem unreasonable, an email say 24 hours, an instant message – well instantly of course.

So for a purchase to take 4 to 5 days is just not a viable model for me.

Secondly, and I’ve touched on this already.  If you’re going to tell the customer it’s fixed then make sure the bloody thing is fixed.  £3.97 added to my eWallet – I think not!