Other people’s privacy

I meant to blog this earlier and completely forgot: it’s a typically incisive piece by Nicholas Carr on Google, Facebook and privacy.

Reading through these wealthy, powerful people’s glib statements on privacy, one begins to suspect that what they’re really talking about is other people’s privacy, not their own. If you exist within a personal Green Zone of private jets, fenced off hideaways, and firewalls maintained by the country’s best law firms and PR agencies, it’s hardly a surprise that you’d eventually come to see privacy more as a privilege than a right. And if your company happens to make its money by mining personal data, well, that’s all the more reason to convince yourself that other people’s privacy may not be so important.

CES 2010: technology and a horrible bum disease

I’ve been following the more interesting developments at this week’s CES gadget frenzy, and naturally I’ve been writing about them too. First up, comparing Steve Ballmer to anal unpleasantness.

Every day, Apple shareholders wake up and thank their lucky stars that their chosen firm’s CEO isn’t Steve Ballmer. The Gordon Brown of tech could make even the Apple Tablet as desirable as some horrible bum disease.

Also, how tech can make teenagers’ lives miserable.

Parental controls are in everything. They’re in your Sky box, in your games console. They’re in Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. If they want to, your folks can even prevent you from doing anything vaguely interesting or useful on your iPhone in case you might see a word such as “tits”. And now they’re in your car.

Isn’t that awful?

Not to mention, Why Apple and Google should show at CES.

What we’d like to see is for Google and Apple to embrace CES, to join in the fun, to remember that consumer electronics are first and foremost about entertainment.

It’d be brilliant – the tech Glastonbury, and we don’t mean one of the rubbish years where everyone pretends to like Tom Jones.

They could heckle Steve Ballmer, deliver jaw-dropping keynotes and wake up in strange rooms with Steve Jobs missing, a baby in the cupboard and Mike Tyson’s tiger in the bathroom.

Last but not least: why comparing Android versus iPhone to PC versus Mac is, well, a great big load of shite.

“Technology tastemakers are thrilled with the platform’s open-ness”, Blodget asserts, waggling an accusing finger at Big Bad Apple and its treatment of developers. That’s irrelevant. Ogg Vorbis is open and thoroughly approved by technology tastemakers. When was the last time anybody without a beard ripped their CDs into that format?

And while risible, Apple’s treatment of the odd developer is only of interest to a few developers.

Is Android pretty nifty? Will it gain market share? Will a few iPhone refuseniks buy Nexus Ones? Yes, definitely and undoubtedly. Is the iPhone about to tank? Don’t be silly.

Facebook and Google simply don’t get privacy

Me, Techradar:

What they don’t seem to understand is that online privacy is like curtains: you don’t block the windows because you’re running a meth lab or a brothel in your house; you block them because you don’t want weirdoes peering through the window when you’re watching TV Burp.

Would UK bloggers get the same support as Iranian ones?

Web freedom is easy to support when it doesn’t affect your bottom line…

God bless the internet. As shocking events in Iran continue to unfold, bloggers, Twitter users and social networkers are helping oppressed Iranians fight the power.

Even Google is helping… But if the bloggers were in the UK, the newspapers and tech firms wouldn’t be on their side. If there’s money to be made, new media and old media alike will happily help Goliath give David a battering.

Ding dong, the database is dead. Isn’t it?

Jacqui Smith is scrapping the uber-database that would monitor everything we do online. Isn’t she?

In an unexpected press conference yesterday, Doctor Evil admitted that his unpopular plans for “sharks with frickin’ laser beams” were “extreme” and too expensive, so the entire programme is being scrapped.

However, when journalists examined the details of the policy, they discovered that Doctor Evil’s programme is still going ahead.

Sharks are still being fitted with laser beams, but Doctor Evil has renamed the beams as “big torches.”

Owning a camera doesn’t make you a criminal

Me on security guards, snappers and deleting photos…

Part of the problem is overzealous people in uniform, whether they’re security guards or serving police officers. The Metropolitan Police’s crazed anti-terrorism adverts (PDF), which brand photographers as potential bombers, don’t exactly help. But there’s also a problem with the law.

The idea that Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act makes photographing the police illegal is pure fantasy. It doesn’t mention photos at all. Rather, it says that it’s illegal to gather or publish information about the police or armed forces that is “likely to be useful” to a mad bomber, foreign spy or Osama Bin Laden.

With pretty much everything in the world linked to terrorism these days – Icelandic banks’ assets were frozen under anti-terrorism legislation, while anti-terrorism surveillance powers have also been used to crack down on such threats to life and liberty as dog crap and fly-tippers – then it’s easy to see how that phrase can be misinterpreted, either by accident or by design.

Worried about privacy? Forget about Street View

Me, on Techradar:

Before we pay too much attention to the headlines and the soundbytes, though, we should perhaps wonder if there are more sinister invasions of privacy than a Google car taking shots in the street.

For example, we could start with newspapers.

.net column: could the war on terror mean the end of online anonymity?

Another of my print columns has made its way online: The war on terror will wipe out Web privacy.

Getting rid of online anonymity wouldn’t actually be that hard to do. Simply pass a law that requires everybody who goes online to get a unique identifier, and to use that identifier whenever they interact with the internet – when they email, or comment, or shop…

You’d need to provide your ID when you used your broadband connection, or set up a webmail account, or commented on a blog, or joined a public Wi-Fi hotspot, or used a cybercafe: no ID, no access.

Voice stress analysis for benefit claimants: bollocks, or complete and utter bollocks?

My Dad thought I’d be interested in this one. He was right. Ministry of Truth investigates the technology that will apparently tell the Department of Work and Pensions whether benefit claimants are telling porkies.

Have you watched The Wire? You know the bit where the homicide detectives tell a gullible suspect that their office photocopier is a lie detector? That’s probably just as effective, but an awful lot cheaper.

.net column: I read the news today, oh boy

Another of my .net columns has made its way to them thar internets:

There were four interesting news stories this week. The Home Office decided that it fancied a giant central database of everybody’s internet activity, something that would be perfect for data mining in search of thought crimes. A student was detained for six days under antiterrorist legislation for downloading documents from the US Department of Justice website. A well-intentioned but badly drafted new law could put manga fans in prison as suspected kiddie-fiddlers. And Boris Johnson banned booze on the London Underground. Only one of these caused UK internet users to take to the streets in mass protest. Can you guess which one?