Mike Schorah

Under European data protection legislation it's possible to request a copy of the information held about you on any given service. Yesterday I saw reports that one such request to Facebook yielded more than 800 pages of information ! The detailed report showed that Facebook stores Name, address, date of birth, friends Messages you have deleted and private messages Which events you decided not to attend as well as those you did The last location you accessed Facebook from A list of every single machine you ever logged into Facebook from Who has poked you Political and religious, and much more... Of course, this is pretty much just the information that the user has entered into Facebook; it's just a bit odd when you see it all collated nicely together! For what it's worth, I heard someone describe how the equivalent information from Amazon ran to a similar length, including what passages they'd highlighted in the Kindle books they'd read, and the notes they...

Here's a thought as to why personal privacy is mostly given up freely: "I want" (or think I want) to be treated as an individual. I want stuff to be personalised for me. But you can't personalise stuff for me unless I reveal who I am, and what my likes, wants and needs are. So my demand for personalisation leads inevitably to greater transparency or, looked at the other way, less privacy. There's almost a sliding scale, a trade-off, between the amount of privacy I have and the degree of custom experience I get. To get the most tailored, custom, service I need to let an all-seeing butler into my life. Alternatively, the higher my privacy, the more my experience is generic - the same as everyone else's - because there's no information with which to differentiate between us. And just why do I want this personalisation that demands transparency? Because, in common with every other human being, I'm both greedy and intensely selfish: I want it all, my way,...

Facebook seems to have a track record of stealthily launching new features that work massively in the company's advantage, then doing some sort of back track if the outcry becomes too loud. One of the latest difficulties is the revelation in the last few days that the "Like" buttons that have been springing up on most major sites over the last few months reveal information about us, even if we are not logged in to Facebook. Even if we have never registered at Facebook, our computer's IP address is still recorded along with the information about the web pages we're visiting, when and for how long ... Last week's announcement of the Open Graph technology allows third-party websites to tell Facebook what people are doing. It extends Facebook's "Like" button to include any action that the site owners think might be interesting to Facebook. As a Facebook user you can opt not to have that information published (don't allow this publishing to st...

This weekend there's been a report that Facebook can track where you go on the web, even if you are not logged in to Facebook . It's all about how Facebook tracking cookies stored on the user's computer can be read by the 'Like' buttons scattered over a million or more web sites, picking up the details of those who browse by. Today a Facebook engineer has poured water, trying to put out the firestorm , claiming 'We don't track logged-out users.' But, the point is that Facebook can use this technique. And so can other dominant Internet players (Google). And that user trust in Facebook is slipping: anecdotally, I know of a number of people gradually dis-engaging from Facebook, reading and not posting ... Surprisingly, friends who have just had a baby have decided not to publish the child's photos online. Is this a growing trend in the Friends generation who are becoming more aware of how their data is shared without their control? Last week ...

We were talking today about how life in social media is like starring in our very own The Truman Show . It's not just  Facebook, but Twitter and the rest also ... We publish our photos, feelings, thoughts, plans and schedules; many of us find our mood swings depending on how many 'Likes' our stuff gets ... And it's similar to starring in our own reality show where we make the 'cameras' follow us pretty much everywhere. What will it take for us, like the character Truman Burbank in the movie, to get uncomfortable and feel that there's some reality somehow 'out there' that we're not in touch with? Get more like this

Mobile devices outnumber traditional computers at a ratio of about 3:1 and, by 2015, it's estimated that 30% of them will be 'smart phone' devices, including tablets. That's just too tempting a target for bad guys for users not to be vigilant. This is especially true of users with commercially sensitive information to process, especially in industries such as financial services. Already, the Skype application on the iOS (iPhone and iPad) is open to abuse: the bad guys can get at data on your phone , including its address book. And, for regular computer users, there's a report today by the BBC that a UK firm is accused of supplying surveillance technology to the pre-revolution Egyptian authorities. The firm denies it, but the interesting piece in the report is that their technology allows monitoring of Skype calls, together with popular services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail. Get more like this

I like the insight from visionary Elon Musk (really) that a teacher's role should be to help you when you get stuck. It reminded me of my conversation yesterday with @patrickjpr  where he described Twitter as his "virtual watercooler" where conversations can range from philosophy or last night's TV/sports through to the practical and technical ... We're moving so rapidly to a world where collaboration and mutual help and support is what's valued and valuable. When I was taught at school, working with others was considered cheating and university teaching was mostly through quite gladiatorial tutorials where we took it in turns each week to defend an essay in front of the tutor while the other student would spar and score points ... Against this background, training in IBM was such a shock where the only  thing that got rewarded was team work. This is the right approach: we all need others around us to help us when we get stuck; and the best way to bui...

There really isn't just one way to use social media tools: there are many potential benefits and, like the shifting tides and weather patterns, you experience different things on different days. Today, my 11:30 meeting in London got pushed back to late afternoon, leaving me free until my 2pm meeting. From my public transport into the city I wrote a Tweet about it , with the hash-tag #bored. By the time I'd arrived in town, just a few minutes later, I had a Tweet back from @patrickjpr who suggested that we meet for a coffee. Patrick runs a PR agency and is currently setting up www.selling-stories.com and it was great to share some business start-up stories and begin to figure out how we might help each other succeed. As an added bonus, he introduced me to #LikeMinds , a social co-working space designed to make physical connections from virtual conversations located in the heart of London’s West End. It's got WiFi, the ever-necessary power sockets, and a quiet, com...

Remember that it's so important to focus on the value that end users will receive, whatever your product - even if it's "only" a web site. A contemporary example of getting things the wrong way round is QR Codes: they are useful in tracking items through a supply chain, especially in situations where RFID tags are not appropriate, and the barrier to entry is really low: you can get started with a black and white printer and a free or cheap smartphone app. But when they're offered to end users as part of a brand's marketing campaign, they're solving a problem for the marketer, not the end user. Do we really expect a user to download an app; start it; scan a code; then wait for some random content to be pushed to them? If the code links only to a regular website then it's not likely to be a great browsing experience on the smartphone; and if they've scanned the code from an ad on the subway or London Tube then they won't have Internet acces...

I lived for more than three years in Kansas City where the renowned Kauffman Foundation is based so my eye was drawn to the quotation as part of the special report on the ' Future of Jobs ' in this week's edition of The Economist . "Research funded by the Kauffman Foundation shows that between 1980 and 2005 all net new private-sector jobs in America were created by companies less than five years old."  Take note of that little word, 'All.' The crude explanation is given by Carl Schramm, the Foundation's president, saying, 'Big firms destroy jobs to become more productive. Small firms need people to find opportunities to scale. That is why they create jobs.' Certainly this chimes with my own experience. I had seven years with IBM and saw how (at that time) those of us on 'Permanent' headcount were semi-safe because the company could manage its demand for overall employment by changing its demand level for temporary contract workers...

We often hear the naive - and wrong - assertion that you don't need privacy unless you're guilty of doing something that you need to hide. Google it - there are a lot of articles, including some excellent thinking by renowned guru Bruce Schneier , that prove this false. But there's a much more fundamental set of reasons: privacy is vital to help business work. We've been approached by someone who wants an exclusive agreement to distribute our software in an industry vertical;  Prior to our public beta launch, we had a number of sensitive commercial conversations with a different company, in a different industry; As I work with a management accountant and other business advisers, we need to transfer financial and other information between us - and we recognise the need to keep the conversations between us, rather than utterly public! If privacy were not needed to help business transactions develop then we wouldn't have the proliferation of confidentiality and ...

It's often interesting to plan some 'light' work that I can do in the coffee shop context where fellow digital professionals gather each week for Cheltenham's #LaptopFriday. Today, part of the general conversation was from someone lamenting that he'd attended a 'cloud computing' event where - amazingly - there was no WiFi provision. So the delegates could hear about cloud, but not actually use it from their mobile devices! And then I turn to today's BBC News where there's a report of Microsoft's Hotmail, Office 365 and Skydrive and other services taken offline, preventing millions of users from accessing their stored files and emails and other services. The BBC notes, 'Such a major problem is likely to raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing versus local storage.' Such problems don't just affect Microsoft. Much of the cloud infrastructure runs on services provided by Amazon and they've had several major o...

Remember the little boy who cried out that the emperor had no clothes on? It seems the same may be true of location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and the now defunct Facebook Places . With only 12% of adult smart phone users using a geolocation service like Foursquare or Gowalla, checking in is the least popular activity in the table published by Mashable yesterday. Why? Privacy and safety concerns - folk are worried that in broadcasting their location they're advertising where they are not, and that the stuff they care about might be left unattended. There just aren't enough users to make it useful: even a few million users worldwide translates to just a very few locally and, outside the geek circle, not many mainstream users. There just aren't enough users to make a consistent appreciable difference to the revenue of any one business. Although many small businesses have been experimenting with deals and offers, it seems that users don't feel there are...

Watch it quickly on BBC iPlayer before it expires, if you're in the UK. Monday's episode of How Facebook Changed the World: The Arab Spring: Episode 1  contains a great quote 28 minutes in: The programme interviews Nawara Negm who says, 'The problem with the old school thinking of the Mubarak regime is that it thought that only factions that had a pyramid structure were dangerous. That is why it was confronting parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic factions, because they were traditional organizations with a hierarchical structure. He thought that because the Internet had no structure and leadership that it wasn't a threat.' The counter-argument is put by Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion  and, back in January this year when the events unfolded so rapidly , hour by hour, it was difficult to get a perspective on what was happening. But the argument in the BBC programme is that the protesters, at least in Egypt, were very aware that everything t...

You know the famous quote from the character played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street  that 'Greed is good' ... and the follow-on quote in the successor movie of 2010 that 'Someone reminded me I once said "Greed is good". Now it seems it's legal...' Robert Peston makes a similar claim in the final chapter of Who runs Britain?  that 'It may not be pretty but, on the whole, greed is good.' It's an appeal to greed, dressed up in the language of features and benefits, that underpins most of the marketing industry. The thesis goes that, as a marketer, I need to work out what will appeal to my prospects' wants so that they desire my offering enough to part with money for it. Of course, we don't present their wants as anything other than legitimate - even necessary - because to imply that wants fuel greed is a negative judgment, and no one gets anywhere by insulting customers or talking quite so baldly. However, there'...

According to The Drum today, the Queen's eldest granddaughter, Zara Phillips, has declared, “I think Facebook’s dangerous. So many people I know get into trouble with Facebook...I’d rather just pick up the phone. Or Skype.” Beyond the somewhat elusive claim "so many people I know get into trouble" there are not many clues here. I want to know what kind of trouble, exactly?! So, from a bit of Google searching today (thanks, Google, for the Freddie Mercury 65th birthday Doodle !) Like email, it's all too easy for others to interpret my Facebook status updates in a way I didn't intend: there's no "tone of voice" (hence the proliferation of emoticon smiley faces ;) It can all get a bit false as we self-consciously promote what we want others to think of us, editing out the photos and updates that don't support our desired image. The "Like" button has become an immediate gauge of my popularity: "Why have I only got 2 likes for...

Having sat on a sofa for the last twenty years I have actually played two games of badminton one afternoon when bullied by some friends. And this week Cathy and I have together accomplished Week One of the NHS "Couch to 5k" programme. Have you come across it? We think it's brilliant: thirteen podcasts, and some great encouragement to accompany music that we are choosing to regard as catchy instead of cheesy. Of course, we have only done the three runs of the first week so far; but we have done it without a call to 999 or an oxygen infusion. (We are concerned, though, that we may be the ones responsible for the Japanese earth tremors this week.) Anyway, we are doing the programme together, to the mild surprise of the kids, and convincing ourselves that we don't look ridiculous. (I only have bright blue swim shorts to run in at present as my pairs of Crew and Eddie Bauer canvas shorts are too heavy!) The best bit, of course, are the rest days in between. I really look f...

The web promised a level playing field, a democratic free-for-all where all voices were equal. Despite the proliferation of web sites and Internet broadcast channels, most web users regularly visit just a handful of sites. I met a client recently who just didn't "get" that his customers aren't interested enough in a regular "relationship" that they're unlikely to keep returning to his website, or remember their login credentials when they do... (He needs to innovate ways to reach them, but that's another story that we are working on with him.) But there's a more insidious problem: there's a hunger for power that concentrates information in the hands of just a few key players on the Internet. Google, Facebook and Apple dominate, though there are others. They're battling to know all about us, to own those relationships and control the revenue flows. The latest move is from The Financial Times , withdrawing their apps for iPhone and iPad fro...