‘Tis the season to wish all of my readers (let’s face it, three…) a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Instagram forces you to sell your photos?
I find it amazing that people really won’t learn when it comes to “free” web sites that just happen to make money by selling all your data, whether it’s Facebook, Google, or anyone else. Today, all over the news sites and newspapers, comes the news that Instagram (who are owned by Facebook) are basically going to sell any photos you upload to their web site without your permission, and are changing the terms and conditions to allow this.
Either people really are not concerned that a company is basically selling their personal information and data to advertisers or they haven’t really woken up to the fact that this is what they are doing. This is precisely the main reason why I basically have cancelled most, if not all, of my social networking accounts because I bothered to read the terms and conditions and saw what they were trying to do with my data! Copyright law exists to protect owners of “content” – so if I take a photograph of something, the copyright of that photograph belongs to me, and I decide what can and cannot be done with it. I don’t want to sign it away to some faceless corporation to do what they want with it, all on the basis that they are providing me “free” somewhere to store my photos.
Let’s hope Instagram gets plenty of bad PR from this, because I don’t know what’s going to stop companies from doing this and getting away with it. Perhaps it’ll need to be some high-profile celebrity or politician having their privacy rights trampled all over before something is done.
Update: Instagram/Facebook now claim they’re not really doing this. It still doesn’t inspire me with confidence though.
Comet and gone
Today marks the final closing down sales of the UK electrical chain Comet which has, as I write this, has or is about to pull down the shutters on the remaining 49 stores which were open for the final time today before closing down for good. Whilst obviously it’s sad that so many jobs have been lost, Comet probably wasn’t going to survive long term because there was basically no room for them any more, sandwiched as they were between Dixons Group (owners of Currys/PC World) and the supermarkets, both of which are now selling the cheap electrical goods of the type that Comet was, and so it had to go, in an environment radically different from the original Comet Battery Stores of the 1930s. Not to mention of course the constant financial problems the company seems to have had in recent years.
RIP Comet Group Ltd (in administration) 1933-2012
6::UK Closes Down
You’ve probably never heard of 6::UK – and that’s pretty much the problem. They were an organisation that started in 2010 and funded by the Government to the tune of £20,000 to help and assist UK organisations and companies to make the switch to IPv6. Today, the entire board of 6::UK resigned because they say the Government is basically not backing them.
The hopeless state of IPv6 in the UK is not really something any of us should be proud of, and none of the Big 6 consumer ISPs have rolled it out yet. There are a few smaller ISPs that have, but in the main the ISPs that control 90-something% of the consumer market just haven’t rolled it out. My view is that no-one basically wants to make the first move on this, because whoever does, costs themselves money, and it’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem.
Perhaps a nice bit of public embarrassment will get things moving, but based on previous experience, I predict not. And as the article points out, the British Government should be doing something towards this, especially as other governments around the world are. Before it’s too late and it costs everyone three times as much to roll it out in a panic rather than do it now.
Update: The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did bother to comment on this eventually, the text of which you can read on the BBC News article. I’m not sure if it adds anything, though.