I made a posting not long ago about a service being setup in Sweden to manage your virtual identity after you die. Almost like a virtual mortuary 🙂
My hard copy of Wired magazine edition for March arrived this week and lo behold was a whole page dedicated to these type of services. A really cool written article, the three companies mentioned were: AssetLock.net, Legacy Locker, and Deathswitch.com. There is also some service that keeps your digital self in some perpetual state. Capping IT off blog have touched on this in a short post, i.e. to live forever digitally and the behaviour of your digital existence is based upon parameters gathered during your existence by your chosen ‘digital immortality’ service 😉
I have made a few posts about privacy seals on this blog, however their integrity is being tarnished by Controlscan that certified the privacy and security of online retailers and other Web sites but has been accused of misleading consumers about how often it monitored the sites and the steps it took to verify their privacy and security practices. The settlements will bar future misrepresentations. The founder and former Chief Executive Officer has entered into a separate settlement that requires him to give up $102,000 in ill-gotten gains. Read more at the Federal Trade Commission’s web site for US consumers.
Picked up from Jack’s tweets….
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
This is scandel.. read more at boingboing.
Last Sunday here in Sweden was a 80km race over the frozen lakes between Sigtuna (north of Stockholm) and Stockholm on ice skates. It’s called the Viking-race 🙂
And as per tradition my Viking husband was out there with a total of 4000 skaters taking part. To get a true flavour of what this all about check out this link (http://www.vimeo.com/9451904) it is quite impressive. A really well done piece of work, congrats to the author!
And for those of you that know this Viking man in my life personally will see that he is there somewhere. You will recognize him from quite far because of his very nice skating style 🙂
Here I am sitting on the ferry. Travelling to and from my home is full with time to think and I like that.
Today one of the cars in the queue for the ferry stalled when trying to get up the ramp. So what you may think? Well some strong guys jumped out from several of the cars behind and pushed the car on. Anywhere else and they would be tooting their horns, but not here.
This is why we need social networking. The dispersed family unit, village community a remnant of the past. The feeling that we belong, the feeling that we are a part of something useful.
After all we all have this basic human desire to be liked. Whatever people say I believe that each one if us is fundamentally good and would in the same circumstances help that poor guy rather than toot their horn with impatience.
Like those guys helping the disfunctional car on the ferry. Whilst writing this post they’ve been gathered around working on a solution. One of them is on the phone calling for help. Now the ferry has arrived to the island and the combined force of muscles are pushing the car onto land where I guess it will be towed home
by another friendly island resident that received the phone call and has a towbar on their car.
I am sitting in my car waiting for the ferry that takes me and my daughter over to my island where my home is. The Baltic sea is covered in ice and I am thinking what an interesting day it has been.
We visited today the ICT conference here at Kista, Stockholm. A small conference but interesting because I was struck by the number of companies there were offering services to up your Google ranking. So for example if you Googled ‘privacy’ and I wanted this blog to be returned on the first page I can pay a monthly fee to one of these companies.
I wonder how they do this? I know that Google’s ranking algorithm (Google dance) is very secret. Clearly much research has gone into this so as a profitable business can be made from this.
There is a lot of activity going on in protest in Skåne (Sweden) whereby the Coop have decided to stop selling milk that is produced in Skåne in their stores and instead sell milk from Denmark. As soon as Coop customers heard that this decision was made a pressure group was set up in Facebook to complain on what grounds this decision was made. This is really easy to do in Facebook. This was going on in 2009. Now there are over 12000 members and it has made Swedish news on the TV.
This is one of those great examples where social networking tools empower the people! This forces the giants to listen and not just brush away this one single irritating fly that won’t stop buzzing. Instead they have a hornets nest to manage…
New business is booming in the virtual online worlds, with new needs surfacing as the needs of the physical world are found to be lacking online in the virtual world. One of these is a demand for a third party to take care of a person’s online identity and reputation after they have died. There is a new start-up for example in Sweden called “webwill” that are specialised in cleaning up after death. Even though clearly this type of effort could be done by some person near and dear to the deceased, by using an objective third-party, one can leave effectively a ‘will’ on how one would be seen by their children, grand-children etc., in their online persona after they have moved on to the other not so physical or virtual world 🙂
Webwill offer you the opportunity to take control of your life after you die. So think about this, check it out, it is quite interesting. Website is in both Swedish and English.
…one more related to Karen’s article “Facebook ID theft” posted earlier this week…
SNS? I didn’t know there was an acronym for Social Networking Sites (SNSs). Somehow by being in this branch (IT) you tend to be fed with lots and lots of 3 letter combinations that depending on the context you are supposed to know what they mean, hmmm I’m sometimes -very often- overloaded but anyway that’s not the main reason for me to write here today.
The reason is to give you all advice about a new set of rules that have been created to protect us!! when we (or those who do) access SNSs from our mobile devices. The organisation behind this brilliant idea is ENISA (again another set of letters -sorry!) what stands for European Network and Information Security Agency. An extract comes here:
“The paper also gives a comprehensive view of the SNS world under the lens of the European directive on data protection (Dir. 95/46/EC).The Executive Director of ENISA, Dr. Udo Helmbrecht, comments:
“This report provides practical, hands-on advice to the users of how to more safely be online, anywhere and anytime, when enjoying mobile social networks.”
So this is in indeed gold for us users, worth to at least take a quick look at the full 49 pages report, specially if you are uch a user; here is the link
Here comes also the link to the whole article “Instantly online -17 golden rules for mobile social networks“