Earlier in the week I went to London to apply for a UK Identity Card. I have wanted one for over a year but it was only at the beginning of the month that they opened them up to the whole population rather than a few test groups.
Home Office - Identity & Passport Service
There is a lot of debate surrounding privacy especially the identity cards, large groups are opposed to the idea of a national database containing contact and biometric details.
I am certainly not one of them, I can’t see the problem to a national database and I am amazed there isn’t one already, the UK has a lot of lists or databases across various departments each of which contains a selection of the UK population but none of them contain a complete list. The National Identity Register will unfortunately add to this with another database but hopefully if it takes off and the Conservatives don’t get into power and scrap it it may eventually replace other databases and provide a single unified database.
If the National Identity Register does go ahead I would like to see some web based management and viewing for users. A lot of the worry is caused by the uncertainty people will have about who is viewing their information, there is an easy way to solve this. Every search or request for information by a government agency or business should be logged, this information should then be available for users to view. If you could log into a secure site and view all the information the government has on you as well as every company that has ever requested your information it would put people at ease.
I should get my card in a few weeks but I seriously doubt any kind of system for seeing what information is held on me is available or will be available for some time.
Yesterday there was yet another story in the news about the loss of sensitive data, this time records on all the prisoners in England and Wales as well as details on others with convictions were lost after a private company misplaced a memory stick. This is only the latest in a long line of data losses, earlier in the year CD’s and laptops containing details on others were lost as well.
This current issue raises several questions, first what was a consulting firm doing with information such as this? I can understand the need to view statistics and have information on prisoner distribution and the types of crimes committed but why wasn’t the data anonymized before it was given to this company and why wasn’t it encrypted.
There should be a simple policy for handling data such as this, never put it on removable media. Government agencies should have secure gateways, VPN’s or some other method that would allow those who are authorized to view this information without needing to copy it onto disk. Its going to take a serious incident (someone finding the lost data and doing something bad with it) before they really change there policies and way of working.
Last week Max Mosley won his case against the News of the World over the invasion of his privacy, today he announced he was going to sue for libel after the judge in the case ruled that there was no Nazi theme.
I am completely on the side of Mosley, what he gets up to in his own time with consenting adults is entirely his business.
What annoyed me was when the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey interfered in the case, this case has nothing to do with religion and this Carey person has no place interfering. Carey made the argument that as the Judge ruled in favour of Mosley the judge was setting a dangerous precedent and that free speech was a victim and secondly public morality was a victim. His first point about free speech is really stupid, what is he saying, papers are allowed to write what they want about people and invade there privacy to get the information they need. His second point about morality being a victim is his opinion, yes what Mosley was involved in isn’t to everyone’s taste but people can do what they want, if he enjoys it he shouldn’t have someone criticising it.
I am not a religious person but I do respect the beliefs of those people who are, providing they don’t interfere with other peoples lives and that is clearly what they are doing here. Religion should have no part in government, the law or anything that affects the public as a whole, it should be something that people can choose to be a part of.
I hope that Mosley wins his libel case and this whole situation sets the dangerous precedent that consenting adults can do what they want behind closed doors.
Over the past few months there has been talk of the BBC opening there content up to 3rd parties, this seems to have been spurred on my Mike Butcher the editor for TechCrunch UK in several differentposts. Mike has been calling for a public debate on the matter and he has got his wish, next week there will be a debate at Broadcasting House between several people from the BBC and the tech world.
The BBC is a public company which we all pay for so it only seems fare we should all have access to the content it has produced, the BBC recently announced plans to digitise all of their content and make it available on line which is clearly a step in the right direction but there are calls for them to go further.
Rather than just letting people watch the content it needs to be available for people to take and embed, edit and create better things with.
Having the ability to take TV shows or even entire series and embed them say into a fan site for that show would be a great thing for all the shows fans, the website and even the BBC as it all aids in the distribution of the BBC brand.
If the content was there to access, developers could build new websites and services to access and display the material, rather than the BBC spending millions of pounds on content delivery systems they could build an archive, a series of API’s and focus on creating better content. There are clearly big copyright issues involved, there is generally a third party who has made the show for the BBC who would want a say or it may be a show the BBC has bought the rights to show either way this is probably where the problems will be and why the shows in the BBC’s iPlayer are only available for 7 days.
I will do a followup post next week after the event.
Today the BBC have a news article on there site talking about the closure of 77 of the Currys.digital stores as there leases run out over the next 5 years. The Currys.digital stores used to be Dixon’s before that brand abandoned there high street presence in favour of a web only operation.
Up until the beginning of the year I was working at PC World where I spent 2 and a half years working as a customer advisor for what initially started as a summer job, despite not expecting to be working there for long I stuck with it over the last few years of my uni course just working at weekends. I found the job interesting and it gave me an insight into how a large company works, I only really ended up leaving due to a change in management.
While I was working at PC World there was concern about the future of the company, during my time The Link retail stores closed down and they moved to an online presence only then shortly after than the Dixon’s stores changed to Currys.digital. This last change left DSG with a lot of locations with both a Currys store and a Currys.digital store, they should have really taken the opportunity then to remove these duplicates rather than to try and support both of them up until now, they should have taken one big negative hit with the press and markets rather than stretch it out.
The market for electrical items has changed significantly over the past few years, more and more people are buying online and becoming more and more tech savvy, this is presenting problems for Currys.digital and PC World because sales staff rely on the naivety of the buying public. When dealing with customers years ago the sales staff would tell them what they wanted, so in addition to buying the camera, computer or other electrical item they would also go away with a selection of accessories such as a case, cable, printer, batteries, software, etc… It was these accessories that made the sale profitable, the base product is generally very competitive in price and as such makes very little profit in a retail store, certainly not enough to support the general operations, this is why the accessories were and still are so essential. When I was working in the store the target was an additional £60 on top of a camera purchase and £100 on top of a computer, these would be high margin items adding £30 and £50 respectively of profit to the sale, generally a lot more than was made on the main item. Towards the end of my time there this was becoming more and more difficult as customers realised they didn’t need these bits or they already had them. And of course the other profit making item was the extend support agreement but that is a topic for another time.
Anyway, as I was saying the customer was becoming smarter and not purchasing these items which I image is why DSG took 2 brands out of the high street into a purely online operation where the sale of just the main item can support the operations of the brand.
So far this hasn’t happened for Currys and PC World, this is because of the type of items being sold. In Currys they generally sell large items like fridges, washing machines and ovens which people like to look at and measure to make sure it will fit in there house, they are also not very glamorous items so don’t suffer from a huge amount of competition as people aren’t as interested in selling them. In PC World the computer is the item keeping the store alive, but barely, a computer is still seen as a large purchase by many and people like to spend time looking at the different machines and talking to people about them. As time goes on more people will become comfortable with these purchases and be happy to take them online although I wouldn’t expect to loose the computer on the high street for a long time. As I alluded to the PC is no longer enough to keep a store in business that is why PC World has spread into anything and everything, at a conference I was at for the store one of the speakers (PC World management) said there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t consider selling, and this can be seen by the changing product lines. PC World tried selling stationary in a fairly big way (an attempt to compete with Staples) but this only lasted for a short period before they scrapped the idea, they then started with TVs this range has now expanded and become a significant range for the store.
While I was working at PC World I had to complete a financial analysis of a company for a university course, with the permission of the store manager I analysed several years of store financial data, whilst I am obviously not going to post it here it did reveal an interesting trend. Over the 2 years I covered the stores profits remained fairly constant although the turnover was increasing, this shows that the store was having to sell an increasing amount of stock just to keep profits level. I don’t know if this was indicative of the whole chain or just a poorly performing store but it clearly wasn’t a sustainable situation.
The next few years will be an interesting time for DSG and the other electrical retailers; I don’t expect much to happen to DSG, they have been expanding significantly into Europe so are in a better position to survive the changing consumer buying patterns but they will need to be quicker at adapting if they are going to be around in the long term.
