Puffbox

I don’t disagree with the thinking described by Simon Moores in a piece on silicon.com:

While being joined-up may offer a real advantage to government departments, the privacy risks to the rest of us are even greater. Until the public sector can demonstrate a better track record of success with personal data than it has in the past, I’ll support my spooky friend in believing that some things are best left alone.

But I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. If we can’t provide sufficient degrees of security, we might as well give the game up, here and now. I’ll stop shopping online, and I’ll withdraw all my savings and store them in a box under the bed. As I said the other day, it’s risk vs reward.

Robert Andrews has picked up on comments in the Commons yesterday, which asked the perennial question of where to draw the line between ‘speaking as a minister’ and ‘speaking as a politician’. As I’ve commented, I fear the only reason for the Tories pursuing Purnell and/or Miliband is because that’s what oppositions are there to do, plain and simple. And I think that’s sad.

Cameron and co, be warned. It’s easy to take potshots like this when you aren’t actually in office. What future for Webcameron, one wonders, if/when Dave wins the next election?

(Incidentally… I think I mentioned it before, I’m really enjoying the post-PMQs videos which Cameron is offering on the Webcameron site. Here’s today’s on-the-hoof example. But it does feel disturbingly like a Sky Sports post-match interview. How long before we see party donors’ logos on a backdrop?)

I’ve always been inclined to agree with the view expressed by Downing Street recently (no date given?), ahead of a seminar yesterday: ‘Overzealous data sharing rules may be an obstacle to improving public services… Laws and procedures that prevent different public services from sharing their customers’ personal details should be reviewed to bring customer care in the public sector up to the best private sector standards.’

The only catch which seems to stand up is that any joined-up system has to be very, very, very good on security and reliability. When it’s all held in one place, you only have to crack one system to compromise everything… and that certainly isn’t an appealing prospect. But it’s a trade-off like anything else. Risk vs reward.

I’ve been trying to find the provenance of a quote which – I think – is attributed to Jerry Garcia. It goes something like: ‘I used to worry about the CIA until I met them.’ (If anyone can give me chapter and verse on that, I’ll be very grateful!) Whoever said it, and whatever they said, they were spot-on. If you think the evil Civil Service is ready, willing and able to build a super-snooping megacomputer to track your every move, you’ll be disappointed.

If you’ve ever wanted to calculate the value of something in real terms, removing the effect of the inflation rate over time, it can be a real pain. So I finally got round to building a little web app which does precisely that – for prices as far back as 1750. Why? Because I fancied the challenge.

You can use it in two ways. One is the ‘Time Machine’, taking the price of an item for a given year, and calculating the equivalent price for a different year, based solely on the effect of inflation. So for example, I remember CDs costing 12 quid each in the mid-80s. If they had kept pace with inflation, they should now be costing nearly double that.

To calculate the ‘real terms’ movement in an item’s price, removing the effects of inflation, there’s also the ‘Up or down?’ tool. Type in a ‘before’ year and price, and an ‘after’ year and price, and the tool tells you the percentage rise or fall over that period.

It’s all relatively simple, I suppose, but I’ve used it as an opportunity to experiment with some exciting new technologies: namely Scriptaculous, Prototype and a bit of Ajax. It uses some basic PHP to do the various data lookups behind the scenes, rather than any database. I’m especially pleased with the slider controls to let you select a year (with conventional text boxes if you don’t fancy that). The design is a bit old-school, but it wasn’t meant to be a design challenge. 🙂

Update: It’s entirely coincidental that this should be on the same day that ONS launches its own interactive personal inflation calculator, with the aim of ‘(allowing) individuals to see how differences in spending patterns affect inflation rates.’ It’s all done in SVG, but I’m having real trouble using it in Firefox. Surely plain old HTML (souped up with ajax goodness), with a dash of Flash if necessary, would have been better?

There are a few documents explaining all about it available from here but be warned, you’re going to face usability issues, with or without documentation. (Simon’s first law of usability: if it needs instructions, it’s too complicated. A two-page PDF is a pretty spectacular breach of this law.)

I wasn’t very nice about the new MI5 email alerting service thing… but it was even worse than I thought. According to a BBC report:

Campaigners’ ‘found that data gathered was being stored in the US leading to questions about who would have access to the list of names and e-mail addresses… The activists discovered that the whole system had been contracted and some of it was being run by a company called Mailtrack that specialises in handling large e-mail mailing lists. More worryingly when people signed up to use the alert system, the standard encryption software had been disabled. This would have scrambled personal data, such as name and e-mail address, to stop others eavesdropping.

Even the US company operating the service admitted: ‘we would always encourage people to move it to their own country.’ Whoops. There’s even a suggestion that ‘one of the digital security certificates used in the scrambling process between the MI5 site and a user’s browser while they sign up was only issued two days after the mailing list was unveiled.’