Privacy | The Equity Kicker

Making sense of privacy

Debates about privacy are often polarised between those of the Scott McNeally “you have no privacy, get over it” school of thought and those who feel deeply uncomfortable with this notion.
I have been in the former camp because it seems to me that people are increasingly sharing private information and getting benefit from doing [...]

Bloggers shouldn’t have a right to anonymity

A UK court ruled yesterday that The Times newspaper has the right to name Richard Horton as the (until now anonymous) author of the Night Jack blog about policing in the UK (the blog was here, but the content has been deleted).
The ruling has been covered in the FT and on Gawker (where they [...]

AT&T launches a Google Latitude competitor and makes a hash of the privacy settings

From BuyGeniusReport:
So check this: AT&T just launched a service called FamilyMap. It basically let’s you locate any number on your AT&T account for a monthly fee. Here’s the thing though… besides the first notification text message alerting that subscriber they are being tracked, everything else is completely silent. For instance, we signed up and were [...]

If you love your customer set her free

There is a great story on Jared Spool’s blog of how a desire to build a relationship with customers can be counter-productive (thanks to Joe Andrieu for the pointer).
The un-named etailer made the mistake of asking customers to register with the site before they checked out – I can fully understand the impulse behind this [...]

Track your friends on mobile with Google Maps

The blogosphere is awash with talk of Google Latitude, their new service that allows friends to see each other’s location on Google maps on their mobiles. The screenshot below says it all.

I think this service will be a big deal. After all the hoo-ha about privacy and nervousness about how people will use it dies [...]

The advertising industry should become the consumers friend

Online advertising continues to grow fast fueled by increasing consumption of entertainment online and growth in ecommerce (up 38% YoY according to NMA).
That is the good news.
The bad news is that outside of search the existing models are coming under strain due to banner blindness and lack of tolerance for interrupt advertising. The industry [...]

Coming through the uncanny valley?

My daughter Eira was watching kids TV programme Ernie the Engine on Saturday and I was struck by how lifelike the faces on the animated characters are. They were lifelike and not at all disconcerting – so much so that I was left wondering whether children’s TV characters are coming through the uncanny valley.
I had [...]

Misuse of personal data

A couple of days ago I wrote a post Why are we concerned about privacy? in which I argued that sharing personal some personal data in return for better services was a good trade off. Alan Patrick and I had a privacy versus sharing debate in the comments which left me thinking that to [...]

The Equity Kicker

WP Twitter Widget News

Recent Posts

Top Commenters

Archives

Categories