We do owe Tim Berners-Lee a great vote of thanks, for the internet he spawned is a great tool.
But sadly it’s also a hive of criminality, duplicity, depravity and, on a more prosaic level, a huge bank of disinformation and error. And I’m not just talking about Wikipedia here.
Take the recent case of the controversial mobile directory service 118 800. Somebody out there in the ether decided they didn’t like the idea of their mobile phone number being on a list somewhere so they crafted a falsehood that the BBC was encouraging people to complain about it or at the very least insist they went ex-directory.
It also claimed that it was ‘an invasion of privacy’, an ‘infringement on human rights’ and would lead to a plethora of companies ‘cold-calling’ mobile phone users. All of which is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
But like emails from Nigerian widows claiming to have pots of money to give away to UK citizens with bank accounts, or missives claiming ‘you’ are the lucky winner of the Lithuanian state lottery, some people are taken in by virals.
The fact is that the 118 800 service is merely an organic development from the telephone directory which first appeared in New Haven, US, in 1878. There wasn’t the availability of a viral campaign in those days, so it wasn’t possible to tap into people’s latent fears. That came with the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896.
For years people were quite happy to have their numbers listed in a telephone directory because they were under the impression it might aid somebody who wished to get in touch with them. The ex-directory option became more popular with the advent of cold calling, but it didn’t stop it entirely.
Now we all have mobile phones, so it was only a matter of time before a mobile phone directory was launched. What’s the difference? Why the uproar?
It is neither an invasion of privacy nor an infringement of human rights, for to be on the databases purchased by 118 800, a person must have, at some stage, somewhere, either ticked a box to allow their number to be passed on to a ‘select’ group of commercial partners or failed to tick the box stating they wished to be excluded from such an agreement.
As with insurance policies, holidays booked through Teletext, or shares in the Padstow Oil Company, the caveat always remains the same: read the small print. As my mother would have said, if she understood any of this new-fangled technology, “if it goes wrong don’t come running to me”.
And of course the last bit of misinformation is that those on the database – rumoured to be around 15 million – will be inundated by cold calls. Only if the company doing it is really bloody stupid will you…
The 118 800 service merely brokers the call rather than giving out the mobile phone number. The service costs £1 per number bought – so by the time they’ve made around 300 calls they could have bought their own database with 100 times that number of users.
See what I mean about disinformation? Basically, if you get a text message saying that a number or name you are unfamiliar with wishes to speak to you, don’t act on it. Rather like I don’t act on messages from O2 offering me an early bird opportunity to buy tickets for the Pussycat Dolls or some such non-entity.
The bottom line is that for a large section of the community, 118 800 is a valuable service. Controversial its June launch may have been but within a month it was the 111th most visited web brand in the UK with almost two million unique UK visitors. And they weren’t all trying to go ex-directory.
The furore wasn’t helped by people like London MEP Syed Kamall, who said: “This is one of many examples of breaches of privacy becoming commonplace. The government is sanctioning the construction of a mobile phone directory without anyone’s permission. It is wrong that decisions that affect us all are taken so lightly without a proper public debate.”
Tickboxes mate, that’s all I’ll say to you. Tickboxes. That’s all the ‘debate’ required.
The 118 800 service is currently still off-line but you can be sure it will return and will prosper. A similar service has been operating in Scandinavia for some years now with none of the public outcry we’ve experienced. But then again, scare-mongering isn’t quite as popular over there…
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