Category: Privacy

Crisis helplines move online; why Bletchley Park couldn’t happen now

Guardian Voluntary Sector Network has published my piece on crisis helplines moving from telephone to online: the NSPCC’s ChildLine now handles half of its contacts online, the Samaritans receives 18% of contacts through text messages and emails and BB Group, which runs advice services for young people, is entirely digital.

The Samaritans, which has just turned 60 – see also this BBC News report, which covers its use of new channels – finds that those asking it for support through SMS or email are more likely to have suicidal feelings (almost half, compared to one in six of those calling). Elaine Chambers of ChildLine said the NSPCC helpline sees something similar, although it depends on the individual:

There is some evidence that the more high-risk things come to us online, because it can be easier to express yourself about the really difficult things in your life online. Continue reading “Crisis helplines move online; why Bletchley Park couldn’t happen now”

How to DuckDuckGo out of Google’s shared endorsement adverts

If you use Google+ to ‘like’ something (or +1 in Googletalk), you could soon be helping to advertise it. Google is introducing ‘shared endorsements’, through which the adverts on its site and on thousands of others may include the face and comments of Google users. (If you only use Google to search and don’t log in then don’t worry, this doesn’t apply to you.)

As the Register says, “it sounds about as enticing as going to a pub with your pals to discover all they want to talk about is the products they have bought since you last saw them”. However, it is at least possible (and easy – follow the instructions here) to opt-out before this goes live on 11 November – unlike Facebook’s latest anti-privacy move, meaning that all user profiles can be found through a search. Continue reading “How to DuckDuckGo out of Google’s shared endorsement adverts”

Police ANPR: Ring of steel for MATTER, sieves of steel for rural cops

MATTER, each issue of which consists of a single long feature article on science and technology, has run some great stories since its launch last autumn (as well as trying to find new ways to make journalism pay).

In my humble and biased opinion, I think it has just published another one: ‘Ring of steel’ by James Bridle, which I co-edited and is based partly on my Freedom of Information-based research into how the police use automatic numberplate recognition. It’s available from MATTER. Continue reading “Police ANPR: Ring of steel for MATTER, sieves of steel for rural cops”

For The Register: is the government smart meters plan clever or dumb?

It’s great, unintentional timing to have an article about smart meters published in the middle of a heat wave. One of the justifications for putting smart meters in every home is that they manage demand, both by charging variable rates depending on time of day and also by turning down some appliances when demand is high. Doing this can dampen spikes in demand, stopping brownouts (a reduction in a local grid’s voltage) of the kind that have hit parts of the US during heatwaves.

The thing is, the main reason for US brownouts is the use of air conditioning. And as many people in Britain will be aware after the last fortnight, we don’t generally have air conditioning, at least not in homes (and although it has not felt like it during the last fortnight, we don’t really need it given our usual climate). This, I write in a piece on the subject for The Register published last Friday, is among the reasons why the UK government plan to put a smart meter in pretty much every home by 2020 may be flawed:

Firstly, many houses use gas for their big adjustable power needs, such as heating and cooking. Secondly, Britain’s clement climate keeps domestic power needs relatively low, whereas Norway (say) uses four times the electricity as Britain per person through heating, and Texas using five times due to air-conditioning. Continue reading “For The Register: is the government smart meters plan clever or dumb?”

Internet surveillance and NHS reconfiguration: making today’s news

It can take years for a story to go from being something that ‘everyone’ knows, to becoming today’s news. I was writing about government internet surveillance a decade ago, and was hardly the first. (The online world is not built for secrecy.) The piece comes from a 2002 Guardian supplement that also included a piece on how tabloid newspapers gained illegal access to personal data, including through police officers. But again, that story didn’t take off until the Guardian fingered the News of the World over Sara Payne’s voicemail in 2011. It takes a long time to get to critical mass.

At the NHS Confederation conference last week, you could see another story that, probably, will some day become today’s news. It’s almost a cliché among professionals that the NHS needs have fewer, bigger specialist hospital units, known in the health service by the code word of ‘reconfiguration’. Such units tend to have better results (as in, more patients survive), be more sustainable (it is easier to attract highly-skilled medical staff, who would rather work in centres of excellence than in outposts) and be more efficient. But because this means closing smaller units, such plans are often politically toxic, such as with child heart units. Continue reading “Internet surveillance and NHS reconfiguration: making today’s news”