I'm not here at the moment...

...but you can find me at samlewis.co.uk.

A walk in the country

Having slightly misjudged the time when bluebells would be appearing (should have left it a week or two), we set off for a walk from Coulsdon South station. Great views, but very cold and windy. You can find the route in Time Out's book Country Walks near London vol. 2.

View Coulsdon South Circular in a larger map

TalkTalk/Spotify competition email faux pas: what's the appropriate response?

I recently came across a competition that, in association with TalkTalk, offered the chance to win a year's subscription to Spotify in exchange for entering your email address and a Spotify song to a collaborative playlist. You can find the competition here if you want to enter, but when I first saw it it was only possible to sign up to be notified when entries were being accepted. So, I entered my email address and promptly forgot all about it.

I was reminded of the competition when I received an email telling me that I could now enter it, but my concerns were raised by one or two things. First, the email contained only a .jpg, and no link to click. Second, although it was mailed from the spotify.com domain, the sender was listed as an @gmail.com address, so I was suspicious about replying to ask what had happened. But the main problem was that my address was surrounded in the To: field by a large number of other email addresses.

This email faux pas is often committed by email users, through carelessness or a lack of understanding, and it certainly is annoying. When a business does it, however, it gives a particularly bad impression. People don't want their email addresses unnecessarily exposed to others, and I received several group replies to the original email saying just this. There was talk of the Data Protection Act, people demanded compensation (in the form of a year's Spotify subscription, which was the competition prize) and someone even set up a Facebook group to indignantly complain about Spotify's breach of data protection law.

It seems that this law may well have been broken, and distributing email addresses in this way certainly goes against the standard "sign up for this and we won't give out your address" spiel that (I think/assume) was included on the registration page. But what information was given out? Email addresses? Well, yes, but I googled a random selection of the addresses concerned, and found quite a few of them on the web, ready to be crawled by any nefarious email-gatherer out there. More to the point, most of the email addresses of those most loudly demanding compensation (including that of the guy who set up the Facebook group) are there to be found on the web, in plain text. I even found that one address was given to offer help with the PC game torrent the user had seeded via the Pirate Bay. And this was one of the people who had threatened legal action against TalkTalk.

If you're going to demand compensation, you have to have experienced a loss, injury, or suffering. For most of the people making this demand, this did not happen: their email addresses were already freely available online. For those who had not previously chosen to publish this information in this way, some damage certainly was done, but exposing email addresses (and nothing else) is far from the worst that could happen. I didn't like it, but I understood that it was a mistake – a human error. Spotify apologised, somewhat half-heartedly at first, and it has now provided a month's subscription as compensation. The outcry may well have played a part in encouraging this move, but these people's anger seemed somewhat unfair, and based on a poor understanding of online privacy. A human made a foolish mistake, which, while annoying, caused little or no real damage; some people overreacted; and now I have a month's worth of advert-free Spotify. Not the end of the world, and even slightly positive. I don't think I'll bother entering the competition though.

Posted via email from Sam Lewis

Democracy in action: wind turbine will (hopefully) be built on Hackney Marshes

A few months ago, I voted 'yes' on the proposal to build a wind turbine on Hackney Marshes. I didn't hold out much hope of it eventually going ahead, but I did what I could and placed my vote.

And it turns out that 87% of the people who voted agreed with me!

It will now be built (if it gets planning permission), and should be providing the power for Hackney's street lighting and council offices for about 25 years.

 

I ♥ Hackney. 

Posted via web from Sam Lewis