Chris Betcher

Like you, I have also been inundated with updated privacy policy emails lately in the wake of the new GDPR rules ( General Data Protection Regulation ). Everyone wants to tell me what they are doing to protect my data. To be honest, it's not something that's been bothering me, but thanks for clogging my inbox anyway. It gets silly... I've heard that some schools are using GDPR as an excuse to avoid having things online, such as refusing to post photos or student work, not allowing students to use online services, etc. I've even heard it suggested that you can't read blogs anymore as it infringes on the GDPR rules! I am pretty sure that was not the purpose of GDPR (and we certainly should not allow some rule designed for the European Union to be affecting schools as far away as New Zealand!) I also heard that some bloggers are adding GDPR compliance statements to their blogs for fear of breaking the rules. Which I think is ridiculous, but here goes... This blog does ...

There is an advertisement on TV at the moment for an Australian car insurance company that encourages drivers to download an app to their phone to find out who is " Australia's Best Driver ".  When you download and install the app it starts by asking you a few questions...  your name, gender, email address, home address, etc. Then it keeps track of your driving using GPS location, timestamps, speed tracking, etc for at least the next 300km. In fact, it even defaults to an autostart mode so that you don't have to remember to turn it on. Every so often it will check in with you to make sure that you are in fact the driver of the trips it's been tracking. Then it scores your driving style in an attempt to find out who is the best driver in Australia. Think about it. As well as knowing exactly who you are, it knows how fast you're driving, when you're driving, where you've been, who was driving and how long for, and even what your phone was doing as you dr...

You hear of so many security compromises and hacks these days. There are major security breaches happening, with millions of passwords being stolen and used to steal or damage your stuff. So what can you do about it? With so much of our lives now being lived in online spaces, losing a password, losing an account, having someone get into your stuff online,  would be a nightmare. What would happen if someone got into your Google account? Your Facebook? Your bank account? I lost my original Twitter account (betchaboy) last year after a password breach and have never been able to get it back. These security breaches DO happen. The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to turn on Two Factor authentication. Sounds complicated? Its not. It basically means that there are two passwords required to get into your account instead of the usual one... there is the normal password that you usually use, plus a second one that changes every 30 seconds or so. Even if the bad guys were to get your...

I was talking to a couple of people today about the way we use blogs with our students.  At my school we have a number of students and classes blogging, and every one of these blogs is completely open and visible to the public web. These folk were asking, with an obvious degree of concern, how we deal with this public visibility of student blogs and what steps were we taking to prevent them being seen by "just anyone". I've tried to convince many people to try blogging over the years. Usually, their biggest objection is "why would anyone want to read what I write?"  Their concern is usually about the huge waste of effort that blogging will be because they don't truly believe that anybody will ever read or take any interest in what they have to write. They imagine that their work will go into the black hole of the Internet where it never gets seen by anyone. And yet, when we talk about getting students blogging on the open web, the usual concern is just the o...

Many people don't realise it, but if you use Google's search services while signed into your Google account (which you already have if you use Gmail) then your entire search history is automatically archived for you, along with statistics about how often you searched, for what, and when. It will track how many times a day you've Googled something, and even displays a little colour coded calendar to show you your overall search patterns. Some people may find the whole thing a little scary, a little Big Brother-ish maybe. Perhaps it is, although it doesn't actually bother me at all. I find it useful to have a complete history of what I've previously looked for, and there have been a number of times that being able to go back through my search history has been very useful. If there are negative aspects to this sort of tracking, then, for me anyway, the positives have far outweighed them. I pretty sure that I  function far more effectively by being able to turn to a se...

As you may have noticed, Facebook has been copping a great deal of flak in the media lately for recent changes to its privacy policy. There is growing evidence that Facebook as a company has few scruples or ethics when it comes to the way they view and use your personal data. The company has continually “baited and switched” the privacy settings in Facebook to the point where they have become so confusing and complex that few people truly understand them. There are something like 50 choices leading to about 170 different privacy variations possible, all needing to made in multiple locations in Facebook, with very little consistency or “expected behaviour” between them... consequently, there could be significant parts of your personal data that is being made public without you realising. Facebook seems to be working on the principle that most users never look at the default settings or take the time to think through their options. The most recent changes made to their privacy polic...