jeremy This week’s Loose Wire column is about Flash drives: I LEFT YOU last week in the capable hands of Ethel Girdle, the fictitious octogenarian who took her accusations of built-in obsolescence to the technology giants. One of her beefs was about so-called flash drives–small devices that store data, for example as memory cards for MP3 … Read more
More on Alastair Rumpell’s response to my privacy concerns about his new email monitoring service, didtheyreadit. (Here’s the first one.) I wondered how the email addresses harvested by Rampell would be used (These would include all emails sent from and to recipients via the service since as far as I can understand it didtheyreadit, unlike … Read more
Further to my posting about Didtheyreadit, a service which allows the sender to know whether/when/where the recipient opened their email (and even how long they read it), here’s a response from the company’s owner and founder, Alastair Rampell, addressing my concerns about the serious privacy issues it raises. Alastair acknowledges “you are right in that … Read more
Was Plaxo just a Trojan Horse into Outlook? Plaxo, the controversial contact management service, never really came clean on how it was going to make money, a fact which has contributed to user suspicion about its motives and its commitment to keeping secure and private all the contact data it handles and stores on behalf … Read more
The whole WhenU story gets weirder and weirder. Last week Ben Edelman, the privacy hound, pointed out that the besieged pop-up provider WhenU was ‘cloaking’ itself. This means, in Ben’s words, ”using prohibited ‘cloaking’ methods to make search engines think certain WhenU servers offer content of interest to readers seeking certain search terms, when in fact … Read more