I’m used to labels on bottles of wine telling me that I should expect a ‘hint of blackcurrant’ or ‘subtle aromas’.
But in Portugal recently I had a (very drinkable) wine from a vineyard whose marketing department had, perhaps, become a little over-excited.
It’s nice to know there are still jobs out there for people with Literature degrees, isn’t it?
I left Facebook a little over a year ago, and hadn’t really felt any desire to return even before the recent round of news stories.
This NYT piece by Kathleen O’Brien gives an interesting and more positive viewpoint, though. But where are the ‘lifeboats’?
Is it time to revisit some of those other social networks on which I’ve had accounts in the last few years that never quite made it? I wonder how many of them are still in business…
Here’s a handy site: TinEye. It’s a reverse image search.
If you’ve got an image on your machine and don’t know where it came from, or you find it online and wonder where the original lives or who uploaded it first, this can help.
I learned about this from Terence Eden, who has a great example on his blog showing how it can be useful…
This is either fascinating, useful, or scary, depending on your point of view.
I’m usually logged in to my Google accounts on all of my devices, because I really appreciate the synchronisation of my history, finishing YouTube videos on one device that I started on another, and so forth.
Subconsciously, we all understand that Google therefore knows a lot about us. But if you go to:
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
you can see it all laid out before you.
For me, amongst other things, it shows things I’ve searched for, YouTube videos I’ve watched, posts on StackExchange, areas I’ve explored on Google maps, and so on. I generally use Safari, but if I were a more regular Chrome user, there would be a great deal more of my online activity listed here. (If you try this, then switch to ‘Item view’ for a blow-by-blow account.)
This timeline is also searchable, which is very useful for the more forgetful amongst us.
Now, if you subscribe to the ‘Big Companies are Bad’ philosophy, especially in light of recent Facebook news, this would be terrifying, though if you’re of that frame of mind you’d probably not log in to accounts on these services anyway, in which case your record will be less detailed, but you’ll use a lot of benefits too. And Google does offer you plenty of control over what they store, how much ads are personalised, etc. And you can delete your record of past activities.
Wherever you come on the paranoia scale, it is worthwhile and educational, I think, to visit such pages from time to time to develop a clearer understanding of what’s being recorded behind the scenes.
Ah, so here’s why my shiny new lawnmower isn’t getting as much use as it might…
Our spaniel is sitting looking out of the patio door, and positively quivering with excitement…
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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