I’m not here at the moment…

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

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

Backupify backs up online accounts for free

For those who sign up before January 31st, Backupify is offering free backups of data stored in online services such as Flickr, Twitter, Google and so on. You can read more about it here.

Posted via web from Sam Lewis

Shake mercury and you get:

via liveleak.com

Posted via web from Sam Lewis

A good Apple parody advert for the Sun

via boingboing.net

Shame it’s for the Sun, and also that it’s supporting the wrong side in a losing battle (see buzzmachine.com for why), but I like this advert.

Posted via web from Sam Lewis

Intelligence Squared debate on the Catholic Church in full(?)

It seems that the videos I included in an earlier post on this subject were an edited version of the debate, not the whole thing. Here's an unedited (or at least, less-edited) version.

Posted via email from Sam Lewis

Intelligence Squared debate on the Catholic Church in full(?)

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via intelligencesquared.com

It seems that the videos of this debate that I included in an earlier post had been cut quite a bit. Here’s the thing in full, or at least with less missing.

Posted via web from Sam Lewis

‘The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution’ by Richard Dawkins

I’ve just finished this book, and on the whole enjoyed it. It does seem slightly lacking in structure, with a rather unfocussed stream parts of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the ‘theory’ of evolution. Those pieces of evidence are fascinating though.

One important point Dawkins makes at the start of the book is about the confusion over what the word ‘theory’ means, quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Theory, Sense 1: A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Theory, Sense 2: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.

Those who reject evolution often do so in the belief that evolution is a theory in the second sense, when it is in fact a theory in the first sense, just like the ‘theory of electromagnetism’ or the ‘theory of relativity.’

If you want to read the book, you can buy it here.

Posted via web from Sam Lewis

An interesting Radiolab episode on morality and how our brains work

Killing Babies, Saving the World

By Radiolab

November 17, 2009

To get this podcast started, Robert ambushes Jad with a question … a question we’ve all been dying to ask him since June 10th, 2009, when Amil Abumrad came into the world. But fear not, we didn’t do a whole podcast just to give the new dad a hard time. Robert talks to Josh Greene, the Harvard professor we had on our Morality show. They revisit some ideas from that show in the context of the big, complicated problems of today (think global warming and nuclear war). Josh argues that to deal with those problems, we’re going to have to learn how to make better use of that tiny part of our brain that handles abstract thinking. Not a simple proposition, but, despite the odds, Josh has hope.

Download MP3

Photo by: Flickr/ connieth

Comments [29] | Posted in: Podcasts | Shorts

via wnyc.org

Posted via web from Sam Lewis