If you have a count right now, how many social networks are you on? And how much information do you disclose to those people you know and those people you don’t. Or how much information did you forget that you disclosed or didn’t think is visible to all the world.

On my last count I have probably signed up to more than a dozen “Social networks” over the years, where I’ve been asked to disclose personal information about myself. Some of these I still use and others have closed, been merged with other organizations or I’ve chosen to no longer use or delete. These include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySPace, Flickr, Digg, FourSquare to name only a few and the more well known.

All these sign-ups seem to try and justify why they’re asking for your personal data, including for ‘Security’ purposes to secure your account, to enhance your experience of their site, to share with other social contacts and the final one (which is normally hidden in the small print); to disclose / sell to the marketing department, associated companies & third parties so they can farm everything they can about you, then stalk you, advertise to you and try to sell you stuff!

In-light of the latest Google Privacy Policy from earlier in 2012, which in summary means that Google can share all the data it holds about it’s users across all platforms & products it has, where-as previously each product Google released came with it’s own T&C’s which totaled approximately 70, but meant just because you G-Buzz’d, G+’d, Emailed, watched on YouTube or searched for things, it could only keep that data within that arena to push advertising to you or share with it’s authorised associates. The new Policy now it means if you’re logged into your Google account and search for something, it can be stored then used to show you an advert in any of the platforms about that same subject, or if you search for YouTube video it can store that search or watch history and use the information to advertise to you within Google.com of the Banner in your GMail.

It’s all a bit Big Brother and Stalkerish. Google will justify it as a way of enhancing your online presence and experience, others will say storing that much information by one company is a fraud waiting to happen and I agree that with online identify theft & fraud growing, simply having all your eggs in once basket can be a dangerous thing. Companies don’t express the need for Users (that’s you and I) to ensure their password is difficult to crack and that their computer is protected so isn’t susceptible to Malware and Virus’ that disclose your details to someone who wants to take over your account. We’ve all seen the papers previous giants like Sony got hacked and more recently Yahoo, is anyone really safe!?

Google don’t readily advertise that you can disable some of these feature, the easiest is disabling Web History so they can’t store everything you search for on Google.com https://www.google.com/history/
The other option is make sure you’re not logged into your Google account when searching Google.com, use an alternate search engine, or install a 2nd browser i.e log into your Gmail with Chrome and surf the net Firefox.

Now, I’ve talked about Google alot, but there are other culprits Facebook has been in the news for it’s more recent advertising campaign of telling you what other people you know have liked to encourage you also Like it. Or Facebook will analyze what you like or information that identifies where you’ve been, such as a Check-In, location that a photo was tagged of you or even who you’ve messaged or commented on and will suggest new Friends. It’s all a little creepy, especially when people you knew from School from 20 years ago pop-up! Though in most of my cases if it was a someone at school who I didn’t care to stay in touch with, I sure ain’t fussed about giving them a ‘Poke’ or sharing stuff with them now… but that’s just me!

Unfortunately, if you’re like me and always question why something is asking you for personal information then you’ll either get knocked back and not be able to enjoy all that many services, because they make telling them your life story mandatory to let you in… or you tell a lie, create a false account or submit partially false information and you become one of the 83 million Fake Facebook accounts reported a month ago in various news sites.

Either way, people have various reason they want to have some anonymity. The bad people that just want to Troll and Abuse other users, which I whole heartedly disagree with…. if you have something to say / have an opinion, then say it to someones face and with an identity, don’t hide behind ‘RantyUser69′ or some other stupid alias.
Or the not so bad people like Me who know the value of personal privacy, have worked in sectors where I’ve been required to locate people and in one case had the tables turned and got a rude awakening from a bad/rogue client.

Also I feel I shouldn’t be forced to expose myself (not physically lol) to 3rd parties who I haven’t chosen to deal with – I don’t buy the small print of ‘we may share your information with our subsidiaries, partners or selected third parties’. Same as I hate when you innocently purchase an item from an online retailer and they suddenly assume they can spam you with product updates despite having no marketing opt out option on their website / checkout process. It really annoyed me recently when having to go on the annual hunt for car insurance and on a number of websites the Opt-Out buttons were not clear and you had to click on a drop down to display the options to Opt-Out and if I hadn’t have carefully scanned the small print I would have missed it.

Also tip for all if you – get your own domain name and within that domain name have your main email address and the option to create delivery address’. You can add a delivery address within a few simple clicks – i.e carstuff@50percent.co.uk, use the address for it’s purpose to get quotes. Once you’ve chosen your supplier you can give them your Normal address and delete the delivery address – so all those companies that try to spam you, the deleted address just bounces and you don’t hear from them again until you choose to contact them. I like this way of working and it saves having to go through the process of signing up for a brand new email service ever time. I can add as many delivery names as I like and all the emails get delivered to my inbox then I can also use rules to filter them to sub-folders if I want.

That’s enough from me for this time… any questions or comments about data disclosure, data protection, and tips of protecting your personal information feel free to drop me a line or select one of the social network options on the right hand side.

For those that know me and those that have read my blog, or seen posts on my new 50Percent Facebook page, I do like my tech & gadgets.

Following about 6 months of frustration with my Nokia E6, which on the plus side had brilliant battery life (approx 3 days), fantastic build quality, lovely keyboard, amazing 8MP camera, nice looking operating system. But on the negative, the Symbian operating system is slugish and did lock-up sometimes, the twitter/facebook app was poor, No Spotify app and I find apps continue to run in the background and keep data open when not in use.

I had brought a Nokia E6 offline, so was now due an upgrade with my network provider, Vodafone UK.
When it comes to phones, I’m in the minority where although I like to have the latest tech, improvements in speed, screen clarity, picture quality, sound quality and a qwerty keyboard, a thousand different Apps don’t interest me. I have basic requirements but I want my phone to do them well…

I can tell you what I want in one sentence all the boxes my phone must Tick: Qwerty keyboard for Email / Text, Phone, good Camera, a good battery and can run a small number of Apps incl; Spotify, Twitter/Facebook, FourSquare, a GPS SportsTracker and if possible a built in Sat Nav.

It would seem the Market to meet my requirement is rather narrow as everyone nowadays is going for bigger, better and brighter screens… which you either need a man-bag to carry, or it looks like you have a semi if it’s in your trouser pocket!
Anyway, moving away from the phallic references, after looking around at what was available in my local Vodafone store, I’ve always preferred the hands on approach, I decided I’d give the Blackberry 9900 a go. I liked the Nokia E6′s combination of the Touch Screen and Qwerty and I’d heard some people rate the newer Blackberry OS, so thought why not.
The specs read quite well; 1.2ghz processor, 8GB onboard memory and space for a microSD, 5MP camera which can record in HD, Qwerty keyboard, Touch screen and it’ll run my basic requirements of Apps.. So I ordered one. It was the usual hard-slog of a trick having to go via the Vodafone retentions team and asking very nicely for the best deal while leaning on the fact you might leave them… and I was fortunate the nice lady took kindly to my charm, gave me a free handset on a tariff that they’d normally want a £99 handset charge, on an 18month contract! Though it still annoys me that A) they’ve abolished 12month contracts and B) that you HAVE to ask for the best deals, why can’t they just look after me, their loyal customer whom they love so dearly and want to keep….

The first handset failed to materialise after a package on the courier van carrying it exploded and covered all the other packages, including my phone, in a toxic liquid. I only found this out because the package didn’t arrive, I chased the courier, who advised me. I then told Vodafone who did nothing about until 24hours later I rang them again to ask where my replacement was, to then be told… “oh, I see your note, let me ring the courier and check…” I hung around on-hold and was then advised my new handset would be dispatched shortly. I did ask the customer service agent why I had to chase them instead of them acting on my phone the previous day, to be advised that he was sorry, he’d feedback my concern, la la la… the usual customer service bullsh*t to get you off the phone.

The day then came when my handset arrived. I got home from work Friday to a package containing the little black box and my new Blackberry Bold 9900. I unpackaged it, put in my sim card, MicroSD card and turned on the device. After it had finished loading I went through the Set-Up process, selecting a BB UserName etc and attaching one of my email accounts to the device. At this point the battery was around 70% and I proceeded to set up my Twitter & Facebook accounts, along with Spotify and FourSquare. I had a look on the Blackberry App store for a Tweetdeck type tool but couldn’t find one, but while looking around the phone discovered “Social Feeds” which had automatically associated my Facebook & Twitter accounts to it, when I logged into them via the pre-installed Apps. I then added a few other of my favourite Apps including LastPass, GoogleMaps & WordPress. I noticed that in the hour or so of using my phone the battery had dropped by over 25%.

I then explored the phone and made some commonsense tweaks, like disabling the Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, lowering the screen brightness, putting the phone into 2G (not 3G/2G) and also disabling the polling & notifications on Facebook. I noticed almost immediately that Facebook had ignored my notification settings as I was getting told that people had “liked” and commented on my status about the new Blackberry… I continued to try and tweak this but it ignored my request, so the only resolution was to go through the profile and disable the sound on Facebook, to remove the annoying pinging! Looking on google this seems to be known issue…

I charged the Blackberry full that evening and went to bed around 2am.
I woke Saturday morning to find that the battery had decreased by around 25% in 6 hours!

I tried to make further tweaks and changes over the weekend and despite hardly using the handset on Sunday and the phone being in a state that was less active than a student on a weekday morning, the battery was almost dead after about 7 hours, which is frustrating, confusing & disappointing that considering Blackberrys are renowned for their long battery life, mine couldn’t even manage half a day!

So I charged the phone again over night and unplugged the handset at around 8am this morning.
I received 2 short calls and read no more than 3 emails on the Blackberry, yet by half 9am, the battery had decreased by 12%, which by my calculations, even in a dormant state the charge wouldn’t last til 5pm!! So I called Vodafone UK and spoke to a member of their brainless (yes, you’ll see why) technical support team.
The first guy I explained the problem to said he wasn’t aware of a battery problem with the Blackberry Bold 9900, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Google and the million+ results when you search for Blackberry 9900 battery problems…  I then explained all the settings I had tweaked and I mentioned the facebook notifications, he decided I needed a software / firmware update. He checked on the Blackberry page and told me that version 7.1.0 was available and I should install the Blackberry Desktop manager and update! I had already seen articles about this update in the USA / Canada and that users had comments it improved the battery, but I’d also seen another article from mid January from a UK user saying the update had yet to be released to the UK. I asked the technical support guy 3 or 4 times, whether he was sure this update was available to me and he said Yes.

So despite my better judgment, I downloaded the 117MB file from the Blackberry website, backed up my phone, clicked Update, to be advised that I was on the most current version! I was now rather p*ssed off.

I rang back Vodafone Technical support, asked for a Manager and was advised none were available, but I could have a call back within 24hours! Which I declined and brainless Techie number 2 asked what the problem was… he read the notes of the previous guy, then decided that I had a faulty handset or battery and would send me a new one! I did explain that there were hundreds & thousands of articles online about this issue, which he refused to acknowledge and said that Vodafone had sold over a million Blackberry Bold 9900′s and this was not an issue affecting other customers!!

By this time I was fed up with the Vodafone Tech departments ignorance and narrow-mindedness so just agreed to swapping the handset. However I wasn’t done with accepting a swap was the only option and while scouring another Blackberry Forum I found a thread between a few users that said they believed the in-built Social Feeds was the cause of severe battery loss.

SO, I thought f*ck and decided to kill two swans with one monkey wrench and deleted both Facebook, with it’s annoying ignorant notifications, along with Social Feeds! And would you believe it, in the 2 hours that followed, I received a couple of phone calls, read a few emails and lost only 3% battery!

I rang Vodafone UK back to tell them they were morons and was put through a Manager on the Tech support desk, a foreign lady (had a very strong accent that wasn’t British) who reviewed the notes, apologised a lot and accepted that I found out more in 3 hours of research online than the Tech support desk at Vodafone knew!! She spent the entire 20min conversation telling me she’d address the problem with the individuals line manager as a training issue… but as I repeated several times, I spoke to more than 1 Techie and they were both using the same Vodafone Tech knowledge database! So why after releasing this handset 6 months, were they not aware of this problem, why are they ignorant to the Blackberry online user forums, why was I being mis-informed & wasted time downloading computer software and why were Vodafone wasting their own money sending out a handset that wasn’t required!

Needless to say, the conversation ended with the Vodafone Technical Support manager thanking me for identifying this issue, would pass my feedback to the rest of the team and she credited my account with a month’s free line rental!

I’m also happy to advise, that it’s now almost 9pm, my phone has been on for almost 13 hours and apart from a 15min window around midday when I plugged the Blackberry into my Laptop to back-up and check for updates, the battery is at 64%! Which is a massive improvement.

So the Tip at the end of this blog. Always question Tech Support, don’t take what they tell you as absolute correct, do your online research on user forums, a group of users is more than likely trial & error correct.
And if you have a Blackberry Bold 9900 that drops battery quicker than I drink rum ! (which is quick) then along with lowering the power consuming settings, delete Social Feeds and Facebook! Facebook can be accessed through a web browser on http://m.facebook.com which means no annoying notifications and it can’t snoop / steal your contacts on your phone either!

Incase you’re in any doubt, here is a pic with the offending App Highlighted:

I got a flyer through the post yesterday (Sat 28th Jan 2012) advertising a cheap electrical goods sale at the Irish Centre in Reading, Berkshire today Sunday the 29th. It was £2 entry, but I thought I’d take a look. It was apparently end of line / sale or return goods from Agros, Woolworths & Freemans.

I’m quite wise to “cons” & “frauds”, habit of a previous career, so from the flyer alone it seemed dodgy, but I thought out of curiosity I’d take a look.

So, now back home from this alleged “Cheap Electronics Sale”, it was crazy, people handing over notes for bits of card which were later exchanged for plastic bags that contained boxes heavily wrapped in black parcel tape.
The guy selling was all talk and sales patter, getting most the room to exchange £10 very early on for boxes of perfume which you needed to wave in the air to buy later items.

They had empty boxed PSP’s, iPads, iPod Shuffles, Nintendo Wii’s & cameras at the start on the display, all these went from view once “sold” and would be handed out later!
He kept engaging the audience of about 50 or so people, would talk about a product or offer, put it on the table, get the cash from those that accepted this ‘discounted price’, the items were then removed from view, to be handed out later (in the unmarked, heavily sealed boxes).
He managed to get a group of Indian lads to each pay £95 for unbranded camcorders. They also had this thing called a WeeGamer which the guy passed off at the new Nintendo Wii device not out til Easter and the new iPhone 5 which was apparently called the MP5 player and was in an Apple iPhone type box with the device pictured on the front.

They almost didn’t let me in because the guy didn’t like the look of me and asked if I was alone, til I told him I was with the mum & son infront of me in the queue. Towards the end when they started handing out stuff from the earlier sales one woman took three boxes off her fella who’d shelled out atleast £50… went to the back of the room and attacked the boxes with her car keys to find a microphone, some cheap looking watches and an unbranded crap electric razor, I looked over and she was sat there, head in her hands.

I managed to get about 5 mins recorded on the phone, but it was difficult with the orange light that comes on when recording with my Nokia and the 5 or 6 guys who were shuffling round the crowd plucking £10′s and £20′s out of peoples hands kept staring at me, they knew I wasn’t there to buy.

The event was brought to a close, the organisers were handing out sealed boxes in blue & green plastic bags and declared the hall was in use directly after the sale by a childrens party and we all had to leave.

I was talking to the Indian lads outside after and told them they’d been conned, one of the organisers saw me and shouted over “talking to ya mates are you”  I spoke back to him and asked him how he felt about being a Con-Man and selling fake / counterfeit / mis-selling goods.  He just said “so what, if they’re greedy enough to want to spend the money, then it’s their own fault…  and yeh I’m not disagreeing with you, they’re fakes, so what!”  At that point 3 or 4 of the large lads who’d been encouraging people to buy and taking money inside came to the door, so I made a sharp exit.

Other than the entry fee, I didn’t pay a penny, I knew the goods were fake and I would warn anyone to stay away from this sort of thing. The age old saying “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is!”

I still have the flyer for anyone interested in reporting / investigating this & wants a copy.

As with alot of people in the UK, I’m a big fan of both Music & Film.
I don’t have a particular taste or style, I just see or hear something that catches my ear / eye, find out what it is, then if I like it, it gets added to my collection.

My History with Music…
Back in my mid-teens (around the mid 90′s) I started DJ’ing and when I was 16, got a Job out of school, was still living at home, had a fair amount of disposable income and I religiously went to HMV on a Monday after work and brought up all that week’s new release singles. I did this every week for about 4 years until I discovered downloading on the Internet via a peer-2-peer service (early days of Napster I recall) and started getting music illegally, because it made sense to try before I brought music instead of spending £30 to £40 a week buying new CD Singles. So I’d download singles, burn them to CD and bands where I found I liked more than 2 singles I’d go buy the Album… so I was teetering on the grey area of legality, though in my mind at the time I had 6 flight cases of CD singles in my parents loft, worth several hundreds (if not thousands) of pounds, so had paid some dues to the Record Companies.

Then along came Mini-Disc players, which I discovered some time in the late 90′s and this meant I no longer had to burn CD’s but could drop the MP3′s onto the device attached to my home PC, my first Mini-Disc player was a Blue Technics player. It looked nice but skipped if it had any kind of movement, this was followed by Sony’s, which were smaller, ran of AA Batteries and were relatively Shock-Proof.

Then the MP3 player, which I probably first owned around the Mid 2000′s. I pretty much gave up buying CD’s, downloaded alot and over the next few years massed something like 40GB of music.

Then along came Spotify…. I first signed up to Spotify in October 2009 as a Premium Subscriber. The appeal for me, was the choice / selection of music, the ability to stream on both PC & Mobile and that it meant I no longer had to store my music collection. One of the biggest annoyances is downloading an album then finding you only like one or two tracks, but with Spotify I can stream / preview an album then choose which tracks I want to add to my playlists. In total now, I have about 6000 tracks in playlists of various genres and with the latest releases of Spotify and rise of popular SharePlaylist sites you can find new music and easily put together lists for any occasion with ease.
For me, Spotify is the perfect Music on demand service that works on all my devices including Windows Laptop, Android Tablet, Squeezebox Players and mobile devices (though mobile is a sore-point as Spotify are yet to develop for Symbian Anna on my Nokia E6, so I’m thinking of jumping to a Blackberry 9900, but anyway). Some people like having a Physical CD or even MP3 but Spotify gives me Music on-demand anywhere both online & offline and at £9.99 a month it’s a service I recommend.

Now… The Movies.
I am becoming more and more frustrated with the lack of available Movie Services and those that do exist are fairly Poor. As far as I am aware, at the time of writing this blog towards the end of Jan 2012, the only 2 subscription services available in the UK are NetFlix and LOVEFiLM.
The number of browser based illegal movie streaming services is ever growing and all I want is a good, legal, on-demand service which I’ll happily pay up to £20 a month for, that is comparable to DVD Rental Services. There are some other Stream services such as BlinkBox and HMV OnDemand but you rent per movie and I want a single subscription service. So the two options:
NetFlix – the Price Point of £5.99 seems fair, but the selection of new material isn’t great. If you are looking for 90′s and some 00′s British TV Series (and a handful of less popular US series) and will settle from good 90′s and early 00′s with a limited number of films from the last 2 years then your fine. But it seems the UK got the short end of the stick on choice and the US version of Netflix has alot more new material.
LOVEFiLM – the Price Point of £9.99 is Ok, which is their mid-level where you get to use both their DVD / BlueRay rental service and Unlimited Streaming service, though as I discovered it’s not unlimited and some titles are Pay per View! At the time of writing this Blog LOVEFiLM have 6414 films available for Streaming, of which 5361 are inclusive & 1008 are Pay Per View! A alot of this is new content costing between £2.49 and £3.49 per film! Now if I pay for a service I expect to use a Service, I don’t expect to have to shell out more money just because LOVEFiLM deem that it’ll be popular so will try and take whatever they can get!! I would never find that on Spotify where I pay £9.99 a month for unlimited listening and find that a popular artist releases a new album that I then have to pay extra to listen to, and this isn’t even owning the movie it’s Renting it! It’s Pathetic and in my opinion encourages Movie Piracy.

I was watching BBC Click on the weekend from the CES show in Vegas, where they were talking about Movie On-Demand streaming and the feedback from the reporter was the Movie Industry dislikes the streaming subscription model because it doesn’t generate as much revenue as Cinema, Rentals and Purchases. I think it’s narrow-minded, greedy and by preventing the distribution of their product to willing consumers, their industry deep pockets will develop even bigger holes and Piracy will be wider and more accessible. At Cinema costing £9 upwards for a standard seat, the cost of Rentals being high for low quality content and their being no good avenue getting movies into peoples homes on-demand regardless of price, it’s just making the little chinese man in the pubs job easier (not a racist comment, but ever person approaching me in a London pub selling DVDs has been Chinese, or maybe Japanese or Korean!) and the availability of illegal movie streaming or torrent sites more appealing.

So Film Industry, take your greedy thumb out of your Ass, follow the Spotify Model and give the consumer the services we can already get illegally in a legal way, for which people will happily pay for good quality, easily accessible movies & content.