Your own personalised stalker
It always seemed slightly creepy that your computer shows advertising that is strangely accurately targeted at things you might have been interested in. On the surface, that seems quite useful. If you have to tolerate ads on your screen, at least having them show things you were interested in seems helpful.
Instead, we wonder how the system knows. It feels like a breach of our privacy.
It all starts when you install an app, and it pops up a question asking for permission to use your location, and/or your camera and/or your microphone.
This is useful for advertisers. For example, they can use your location. If the app reports this back to the content provider, they can match up your location and compare you to other people nearby. If you tend to go to the same places as other people, you are probably interested in the same things, so an advertiser might use that assumption to present advertising to you, or other people that you spend time with.
That does sound a bit overreaching, but we reluctantly agree to the presented terms simply because we want to use the app. If that is a condition of use, and we want to use the app, then we agree.
So, now we are seeing consumers getting the choice to push back.
Apple
Now, with iOS15, Apple are saying that you will get to see what apps are accessing your data. You will be able to see when an app used that permission, and there it was sent to. Whether that list of third party sites is any use or not is meaningful is unclear.
Not quite as advanced but following quickly behind is Google Android. With Android 12, you will have the option to de-personalise your data. They will still track usage, but won’t link it back to you.
Is there any truth to the rumour that your phone or TV is listening to you, and presented content based on private conversations it overhears?
Given how poor the voice recognition is on phones , cars, or tools like Alexa or Siri, its pretty evident this can’t be reality. If it, is, then heaven only knows what it thinks it’s hearing. The voice recognition tools are getting better all the time, but there is a long way to go.
FREE Covid-19 Health Contact App
Are you ready for the move back to COVID-19 Level 3? Are you ready to track visits of your staff to other workplaces, or visitors to your workplace? It's not just tracking visits. You have an obligation to check you are not exposing your staff to COVID-19 either in...
Americans Report US$13 Million in Losses From Coronavirus Scams
The United States’ Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has received more than 17,000 complaints from U.S. consumers who reported total losses in excess of US$13 million from COVID-19 related scams. The crime that was reported the most was the rather broad category of fraud...
Fancy a date?
How many working days are there in a month? For many of us doing budgeting, the number of days matter for either income or costs. For years, I have spent a few moments as part of our budget setting exercise to look through an annual calendar, count the days in each...
Are your staff struggling with technology working from home? Who are you going to call?
Who are you going to call? When you are stuck on an IT problem, you are working from home and the only person next to you is a pet! Out of sight but not out of mind - IT Training is MORE important now than ever How do you offer training remotely? How do you...
LOCKED DOWN, BUT NOT OUT!
Life must go on, irrespective of the Covid-19 disruption. With our staff, our clients and our various stakeholders relying on us, we simply have to make sure we use this time to come back stronger than ever. Many of us have been through these challenges before, and...
WARNING – COVID-19 ISN’T THE ONLY PANDEMIC RIGHT NOW
There’s more than one infection going on right now. There’s an avalanche of cyber-criminal activity as well – the crooks are faking websites to look like official WHO ones, sending fake emails that appear that to come from authorities – health departments,...
OFFICE 365 IS DEAD. LONG LIVE MICROSOFT 365
This week, some guy we hadn’t heard of made a big change to the products we all use. He renamed them. So in reality, everything keeps working as it did before. But what appears on invoices and quotes will change. We’ll take a little while to get used to these new...
Kinetics provides an Essential Service!
As updated by the Cabinet yesterday, helping you to work from home is an essential service. That doesn’t mean business as usual though. We’re well aware that we need to fight this virus together. KINETICS is able to visit customer sites when necessary to ensure work...
Remote Working Tips and Tools
Working from home is different. Managing staff working from home is also quite different. Here are a few tools to assist: 1. Is everyone working ok? Do we know where they are and what they need? How do we discharge our Duty of Care to our colleagues? Introducing...
Slow Cloud? The race to Remote Work
Coronavirus in NOT a conspiracy by the tech-industry to get everyone to the cloud. Imagine trying to get your workforce to work remotely without the cloud, and without ubiquitous connectivity like UFB. Those screeching dial-up modems that disconnected all the time...