Your country needs you, or at least your data

They have stolen your data?  Boo hoo.  Who knew?

Everyone knew.

If you thought your data was ever secure, then you probably live off grid, meaning you have a cabin in Montana or a zero hours contract in Eastleigh, either way, you eat roadkill, even if you do buy it from a shop called ‘Tennassee Fried Chicken’, and you find innovative ways to heat your home, such as chopping your own firewood or buying cloned keycards from a bloke in the pub.

If you are smart enough to read to the end of any privacy agreement, ever, related to the use of a free service remotely connected to anything featuring a silicone chip, then you are smart enough to stop reading two thirds of the way down, hit ‘decline’ and read a book instead.  Not on a Kindle.

If however, like billions of others, you see the words ‘yadda yadda yadda’ immediately after reading the word ‘heretofore’ and skip straight to pressing the button that states ‘I agree, I want to join a social network where I can view pictures of my ex, just to see how happy they are with their perfect home, and perfect kids and Jesus is that a Lexus they’re driving?’ then you should know that, at the very, very best, the senior leadership of North Korea are in an underground bunker, watching vast screens with your social media feed on it, laughing themselves stupid at your ongoing Twitter feud with ‘StarWarsH8ter’, in actuality a NK Bot run on a ZX Spectrum, 16k, which is still getting more likes and retweets than you.

I remember the first time I went online.  We plugged an external modem into the PC, loaded up Pipex Dial from a floppy, opened up the browser and…nothing, we had no idea what to do next until one of the group suggested ‘type www.playboy.com into that box there’.

The next thing that was said was ‘You realise GCHQ know we’re doing this’.  Nervous laughter.

But that was about right.  There has always been that awareness that, unlike traditional secure methods of communication such as purchasing porn from an out-of-town newsagents where the only reason you would bump into anyone you knew is that they were there buying porn too, or writing a letter, electronic communication has always been open to monitoring.

Back when newsgroups were a thing, there were essentially two types of newsgroup.  The first discussed kinky sex, the other discussed ‘Star Trek’.  I never worked out which had the higher quotient of virgins posting, but I firmly believe that whoever was in charge of internet monitoring back in the day is the world expert on two things, how to turn the spare room into a sex dungeon on a budget, and the definitive answer to just who the best Star Trek captain was.

Just what data is it on Facebook that people are so worried about being used?  I could understand it if it was something important, private and personal, like a picture of your genitalia or your browsing history, but apparently it’s just some fuckwit quiz outcome, basically the sort of thing that used to be on the back page of Cosmo (If you answered mostly A you are slightly slutty and think toddlers should be allowed to carry guns) or Jackie (If you answered mostly C then you and David Cassidy would enjoy smooching, and you detest free trade agreements).

Given that we have all basically made Mark Zuckerberg a Bond villain, I reckon the guy shows tremendous restraint.  He is the absolute ruler of a digital domain with over two billion citizens.  Imagine if you annoy him, your Facebook status could change from ‘Single but hopeful J’ to ‘I fuck babboons’.  And that’s best case scenario.  This is a guy who could change your status to ‘I like to get fucked by baboons.  I paint my ass red and let them go to town on me.  Then I don’t call them back.  Who’s the animal now?’.

You are, you ape fucking freak.

Essentially, don’t commit anything to a string of ones and zeros that you would not be happy to see stapled to a lamppost in your neighbourhood.

Twittering on Facebook

Social networking, isn’t that just grunting ‘alrig?’ to one of your neighbours as you pass them on the street?

Apparently not. The internet has revolutionised the way in which we communicate (some features, such as ‘Chatroulette’ more than others). A decade or so ago for example, if you wanted to bore somebody into displaying narcoleptic-like symptoms with your holiday photographs you had to paste them into an album or, holy God and fuck preserve us, pitch up at their front door with a screen, a slide projector, two carousels of 35mm slides and a pointer. While if you wanted to share your random innermost thoughts with everyone, immediately, you dressed in a filthy raincoat, shit your pants, and shouted them to strangers on the street.

Happier, simpler, times.

Now, through the magic of the world wide whatever (which, don’t get me wrong, has given us much, like being able to book flights on-line and seeing Porn Of Many Lands) we can subtly bully people without ever having to leave our fetid pits.

This is because, thanks to Facebook changing their privacy settings faster than their users can click ‘don’t accept’, users can ‘let’ everyone see their photographs, including the many, many holiday photographs of the view from their hotel balcony of cats and construction sites, while twitter means that we can now share our bigoted views of, for instance, BBC coverage of a national event, or somebody featuring in a documentary about disabilities (‘She may have type 2 diabetes but she could still wash her hair’) and so on, immediately.

In an age when you bored your neighbours with your photographs, slipping in a nudie pic of your wife or cock shot every twenty snaps or so to see if they were paying attention and were possibly swingers too, you at least had to make an effort for your audience, practicing your patter such as the drunken argument that you and the missus had about whether or not she had enjoyed that dance with the waiter a little too much.

Twitter seems free of quality control. Reading tweets is like being cursed with telepathy and seeing into the mind of the nation. Randomly browsing, what seems to be ‘trending’, that is, being mentioned the most by the sort of fucking people who tweet, are the following subjects:

1. Biscuits (well, actually, I’m with them there, biscuits are not only important but make up around 30% of my waking thoughts, 70% of my subconscious ones).
2. Outrage about removing Blue Peter from BBC1. Again, have to agree with this. I know that since the digital switchover there is no reason not to relocate BP to CBBC, but by the same token there’s no reason not to relocate the Royal Family to fucking Salford, except that IT WOULD BE WRONG!
3. A celebrity. Unless any celebrity has been caught fucking a jar of marmite that they have warmed specially for the occasion, then anything they are doing is not worthy of comment. Commenting on new albums, hairstyles and celebrity relationships is what God invented forums and teenagers hanging around bus stops for.
4. What that bitch Alison said to Jason about me, yea? An odd one this but it appears a disagreement about romantic intentions in a comprehensive school in Rotherham is drawing worldwide comment.
5. Eastfuckingenders. I’d rather discuss Alison and Jason’s problems.
6. The Olympics. Trying to ignore it is like waking up on Alderan, seeing the Death Star in the sky and pulling the curtains in the hope it will go away.
7. Shredded Wheat. People love Shredded Wheat, or shredded wheat. I am as yet unable to determine if this is a reference to breakfast cereal or a depraved sexual practice. Likewise…
8. Kicking the back doors in. Thought this was a misquoted reference from ‘The Italian Job’. It’s not. Don’t Google this.
9. Trevor Eve.
10. Facebook privacy changes warnings.

While Twitter has been credited with helping organise democratic uprisings (‘Tanks on lawn. LOL’) it also appears to be the main communication method of despots (‘Just sweated through Levinson evidence session. :-0’). Not so much how users use the tool, but how the tools use it.

Comment on: 'The UK census, it's just a big box of ticks'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/lucy-mangan-uk-census-politics

As anyone who, after a simple misunderstanding, has had their binoculars confiscated by a magistrate can attest, the English are peculiar about their privacy. At the start of the century it was predicted that the largest single issue facing the on-line community was going to be privacy. And that prediction was right, but in exactly the opposite way that the bearded social scientist crossed with Mystic Meg making it intended. Instead of us all jealously guarding our privacy, there seems to be a rush by certain people to push the details of their private lives at anyone that will pay attention or, to give it its technical name, Facebook.

The Government could save a fortune by getting Facebook to undertake the census rather than Lockheed Martin (a company more recognised for delivering ballistic missiles than forms that allow you to consider yourself quite the wit by listing your religion as 'Jedi'). Not only would this allow everyone to list their personal details, but to make the exercise self financing this information could then be sold on to marketing companies the next time Facebook updated its privacy settings and all the users ticked the 'I accept these terms and conditions - even the one about using my photographs as 'before' images in adverts for weight loss pills, face creams or self help books on fashion and grooming' box, without reading them first.

Not only that but social networking gets into a lot more detail than: 'How many VHS box sets of 'Buffy the vampire slayer' do you still have knocking around?' or whatever else they are asking in the census this time round, and in real time too. If the Government wants to know how many people are: 'in a relationship, but increasingly irritated at my partner's habit of sucking Quavers until they dissolve while watching telly, and building up to Do Something about it', right now, then social networking can deliver.

Of course, while people are quite happy to share their snapshots, opinions, thoughts and details of their relationship status with the world, they are rightly reticent to share any personal details, at all, with the Government. This is for two reasons. The first is the fear that the data will somehow fall into the hands of an twisted megalomanic and be used for evil. This is an entirely reasonable fear if you substitute the treasury for the undersea volcano base that said twisted megalomaniac resides in. The second reason is that the government will collate the name and address of everyone in Britain in a handy DVD form that can be left on a train, where it will be found by somebody who works in marketing and, as a result, you will spend the rest if your life receiving direct mail about yoghurt.

The biggest problem with the census in it's current form though is that it has no feature that allows you to include a photograph, or even a simple line drawing, of yourself. This ironically neatly illustrates the gulf of understanding that exists between the snoopers and the public. The government values a census because it provides data on who lives where and so on. The public values a census because it not only gives middle class people who are researching their family tree hours of fun and an excuse to use the internet for reasons other than download money-off coupons for biscuits but, vitally, is key to producing that moment in every episode of 'who do you think you are' where a well spoken but slightly irritating thespian discovers that they are directly descended not from Latvian nobility as they always believed, but a instead from somebody who was common as muck and who spent a spell banged up in Strangeways for Lurking Near Duckponds.

Such a moment is always accompanied by a grainy snapshot of some cross eyed rickets riddled bloke in a battered hat and disgrace boots and that's what the census lacks, a chance for us to record now for posterity the images that might pop up centuries hence to mortify our ancestors. And if you can sport a huge stove hat and whiskers while doing so, then so much the better.

Who's that girl...or is it a bloke?

Depending on your status as a celebrity and your relationship with the media, if you are famous you can expect to see pictures of yourself in the paper either smiling on some red carpet somewhere or reeling drunk in the gutter showing your knickers.

If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.

Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.

The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.

The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.

Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.

Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.

So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.