PRIVACY ON PARADE

There’s a fair amount of chatter on the wibbly-wobbly-web these days about privacy and so forth. Only yesterday there was an item on Radio 4 about a girl who’s face had been nicked out of a photograph she once had taken and slapped onto the cover of a pornographic video, and another family who’s Christmas photo had been swiped and used in an advertisement for a  supermarket in an Eastern European country, both with the usual “hilarious” results.

Well, I guess it would be considered “hilarious” in a 1980s sitcom, but I guess the reality is a little more sinister if it’s you it actually happens to.

The copyright in photographs you’ve taken apparently belongs to you and you can control who gets to see them, but if you get “tagged” in one by someone (which I believe to be the vernacular the bright young things are using nowadays), apparently that can then get posted absolutely anywhere by anyone, so if you’ve photographed yourself doing something you shouldn’t and posted it to the wibbly-wobbly for “a bit of a laugh” (a phrase, by the way, I still associate with some of the worst crimes in history…) it can pretty quickly get around the whole of the webiverse before you’ve had the chance to put your pants back on and look for the Rennies. If someone else decided to take a snap or a video of you as you hung on to that lamppost for grim death as the last tequila of the evening made a sudden lunge for freedom, then your chances of keeping that quiet are now virtually nil. You can, of course, discontaginate yourself (as I suspect the B.Y.T. probably don’t ever say, although G.W.B. might well have done once) but by then every news outlet is already showing you to the world as the latest “internet sensation”. These days, everyone can be a superstar whether they want to or not, and why wouldn’t you?

Oh yes, because you’re not insane.

We all take risks poking our heads above the parapet in this strange new electronic world we are all loitering in, and it’s not like being well known around the village. In the wibbly-wobbly-world everyone can be your “friend” whether you like them or not, and more to the point anyone and everyone can see what you think you’re showing to just your best mate. It’s like getting your wallet out in the pub to show someone a photo of your kids, if that pub was centre-stage at the biggest news story in history and the camera had just moved in for a close up. Only worse. Granted, it seems to be generally assumed nowadays that we all now seem to share a desire to tell everyone in the world the minutiae of our daily lives whether they like it or not, and thankfully, for most of us, the world shows a gargantuan amount of sensible disinterest, but it’s still something to bear in mind. (“Bear in mind” – wasn’t that a TV show I saw you on? You know, the one with the Grizzly doing card tricks? Oh, that wasn’t you. So sorry.)

Having rather reluctantly joined the strange world of FizzBok (You still did though, didn’t you? Twit!) I was very careful to make sure that the details that are broadcast to the world at large were the very minimum I felt I could get away with (not, I’m sure, that that makes any difference whatsoever and you probably know more about me than I do, although I’m sure you’ve got a million and one more important things to occupy your thoughts. If you haven’t, well you bloody well should have). Those who know me know all they need to know about me anyway, and for the rest of the world, well, it’s not really any of their business.

My bank rang me up the other day. Well, I think it was my bank, but you can never be totally sure these days, can you? Someone rings you up out of the blue and claims to be from “customer services”, but they really could be anyone. Anyway, after a bit of nip and tuck to-ing and fro-ing as to whether it was a convenient time for us to be having that particular conversation, we came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t the worst time because, well, any other time they called was likely to be just as inconvenient.

So the poor girl starts with “Can I confirm your full name?”

Well, you see, that’s where the problems started. To me, they should already know who they’re ringing and it’s not for me to confirm or deny such things. So often recently we’re told that banks will never request personal information in an email, and I sort of assumed that it would really be the same in a phone call. Granted, I’m sure that these “customer service” calls are pretty impossible to do without asking for some personal data, but I can’t see an easy way around it. Anyway, I refused to confirm who I was and the call ended pretty quickly after that.

Actually, if you’re on your guard to that extent, it’s a pretty sure-fire way of fobbing off those kinds of cold-calls that you get during the day.

I suppose I could have asked for their number and offered to call them back, but then how can you be sure the number they give you isn’t just the number of a Portacabin on the back of a lorry in a lay-by somewhere off the A1?

Now I wouldn’t want to appear paranoid, but you might also have noticed that I’m fairly full of obfuscation techniquery when it comes to the specifics of my humble little life in these witterings. Of course, those of you who know who I am know who I am, and my proper full name is pretty obvious to anyone who comes to these things via the FizzBok links. Oh yes, I know there’s an awful lot of the intimate details of what’s happening to rattle around in my bizarre psyche to be found hereabouts, but I try very hard to keep the actual physical detail of life here at MAWH Towers as obscure as it possibly can be. Phrases like “our little house on the brink of Disaster (a small village just outside Chelmsford)” are about as close as you’ll get to a confession of location.

So it did slightly irk me when some of that preciously guarded information got accidentally spilled recently in a comment left by an unidentified reader who we’ll hereafter refer to as “Batman” so as to preserve their hidden identity. “Irk” might be an overstatement, but I was slightly peeved. Miffed? No matter. I’m sure this happened in the most unintentional way. All of the occasional comments that get added here are generally very gratefully received. Sadly, my ham-fisted efforts to subtly edit a few key words out of Batman’s comment led to something appearing which looked to be a much harsher penalty than I intended: “This post has been removed by a blog administrator” when really it was just little old me making a mess of things as usual. It was a bit of a blunder because I'm still a bit of a novice with these Blogger tools and such and I thought I might just be able to edit one particular reference out of the comment by clicking on "remove content" which of course just removed ALL the content and "could not be undone" as the phrase goes.

So I’m sorry, Batman, whomsoever you might be, that your - probably very valid - observation got unceremoniously whipped off to cyberspace heaven. It was a genuine mistake on my part to get rid of it so brutally. “Coo, that’s brutal!” I remember thinking right after it disappeared (just moments before the thought of “The power! The POWER!!!” sent me hurtling over the edge). Not that I wouldn’t do it again if anyone chooses to inadvertently broadcast my PIN number or something similar to the Magnificent Seven (what will I call you if someone else turns up? The “Erudite Eight”? Heaven help us if we ever get to the giddy heights of “The Dirty Thirty”) who "follow" me here, or the wider wibbly-wobbly-world beyond. I mean, I'm fairly sure that you (you know who you are) must be someone I know from what you mentioned, I just wish you'd remove the mask and reveal yourself so I could feel a tad less freaked out by it… unless of course you are Batman, and then, of course, your right to a secret identity is understood, Mr. Wayne…

D’oh!

You see how easy it is…?