Today is Data Privacy Day and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner issued a press release to mark the occasion. The focus on lack of compliance within the public sector is timely, as this area is just as at risk as the private sector of leaking people's sensitive information. A strong independent overseer of data held and processed by both private and public sector organisations is just what is needed. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is in a particularly important position here as so many multinationals which use personal data as a de facto commodity are headquartered in Ireland.

Meanwhile the Irish Times tells us that Digital Rights Ireland will be serving papers on the Irish Government and the Attorney General shortly, questioning the independence of the Data Protection Commissioner's office.

The papers note that the office of the commissioner, Helen Dixon, is integrated with the Department of Justice and that the commissioner and all her office’s employees are civil servants.

The story goes on to mention the repeated criticisms that have been levelled at the commissioner's office for being 'soft' on regulation. That so many data-thirsty multinationals provide so many jobs in Ireland may contribute to this light touch. An added irony is that this comes just a day after the report into the banking crisis, caused and fuelled in part by a similar lightweight regulatory regime, was published.

So we have a watchdog staffed entirely by civil servants which is responsible for policing the civil service's data protection practices, in a state which is highly dependent on multinationals whose entire businesses are based on loose data protection controls. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's some more recent food for thought.

• Amazon customer support giving out your private information
• Number plate scanning, data retention and the power of combining public and private databases
• As the drive to Internet-enable EVERYTHING continues, security is still bad to non-existent

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'FLATLAND'

Totally Confused

Regrets, they've had a few, a very sick unicorn, no ads Twitter, crying children and failure as a pro gamer.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

Well now. Gerry Adams is publishing a book of his best tweets. This is a thing that is actually happening.

As the surveillance row involving GSOC rumbles on, Karlin Lillington took her colleagues in the media to task for ignoring the issue until it was about them, and then making it all about them.

Presumably Irish political strategists have read this. If you want to reach people online and you have the budget, Facebook ads are the way to do it.

Oh, and there's a new PJ Harvey album on the way.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Illustrated Portraits of Famous Artists by Irina Kruglova

Totally Confused

Leaky thermostats, lost phones, transplanted monkey heads, fuck off funds and spin me right round Palin.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

Slim pickings today as I've been busy removing all the Amazon apps from my cheap as chips Fire 7 in case I purchase something I don't want by mistake. I'm willing to bet this is a not uncommon occurrence.

Anyway, re: that tennis thing, remember when folks used to mock Buzzfeed because they thought it was all listicles and cats and Internet-friendly content ready for rapid delivery straight into the maws of an unimportant audience that wasn't interested in serious journalism? Much of the mocking came from older media who were also very jealous of the massive traffic Buzzfeed was getting. Many of these outlets are now creating or repurposing their own readily clickshareable junk content, and usually not doing it as well as Buzzfeed was in 2010 or so.

Sean Penn and journalism went head to head and journalism came off worse.

The Gsoc snooping kerfuffle continues. For some reason this article doesn't mention that the underlying law is the subject of a High Court challenge by Digital Rights Ireland.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Images of Afghanistan'

Totally Confused

Palin in plain text, Palin on a loop, TrumpScript, terrorist house, and Area Satiric Publication The Onion Sold To Univision (Seriously).

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

Fake Bundy. Fake journalist. Fake rats. It's almost as if you can't trust anything you read and rebroadcast on the Internet these days.

Apple wants to know how you feel. The FT article, which is paywalled, quotes Emotient as having the ability to harvest faces. I'll bet that's an ice-breaker at parties when someone idly asks what you do for a living.

From the Mildly Eyebrow Raising Desk, T-Mobile's CEO took a somewhat unorthodox approach to corporate communications yesterday. Don't know about you but I'm looking forward to this brave new future of executives swearily shouting about civil rights groups who they feel are being mean to them.

Oireland

The Indo tells us the Gardai have declared war on nerds. Because the only people who use near-ubiquitous consumer technology are nerds. This is also very much not a new development.

• 'Man Drowns Following GPS Instructions Into Lake'
• 'BMW left teetering on 100ft cliff edge after sat-nav directs driver up steep footpath' [DAILY MAIL WARNING]
• 'GPS Tracking Disaster: Japanese Tourists Drive Straight into the Pacific'
• 'GPS sends Belgian woman to Croatia, 810 miles out of her way'

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Painting Two Boeing 737s

Totally Confused

Good picture tweets, trade show boilerplate, owl pics, pissroach and hunter drone.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

Rather than going on about Twitter floating the idea of unleashing walls of text, or Facebook deliberately breaking its own app to make people anxious, or even the puddle in Newcastle, here are a few small things you might find useful or at the very least distracting from the drudgery of it all. As I'm currently doing that 'new year tidy up yer bookmarks thing' there could be several more of these collections to come …

Listen to music from the command line, sort of. Forget about your streaming players with their fancy interfaces and try cmd.to.

If you like watching postage stamp sized videos while getting other things done in your browser, the Sideplayer extension for Chrome is just what you've been waiting for.

Give yourself an atmospheric background with youarelistening.to, which mashes scanner streams from around the world together with ambienty music from Soundcloud and / or YouTube.

Maybe you're working on something that involves agonising over which would be the most appropriate font to use. Let professionals choose pleasing combinations of Google Web Fonts for you.

Make your own tunes with Soundtrap. It's the closest thing to a fully featured DAW in the cloud I've come across. Easy to tinker around with even if you're not familiar with this kind of thing.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Fifth Avenue Then And Now'

Totally Confused

Awkward adolescent tech, inventing Autotune, reincarnated microbus, design by tweet and 'beating' games.

Finally, here's a mix of my favourite cover versions from 2015. Contains One Direction.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

Two Oh One Six is here. The air is thick with commemoration smoke and the year only a few days old. The free calendar with last Saturday's Indo is so crammed with events that there's barely any space to write in any of your own. Anyway, back to the show.

Whilst the occupation of a Federal building in Oregon by armed militia members is obviously serious business and shouldn't in any way be sniggered at, referring to them as Vanilla ISIS is inspired.

• 'Oregon Was Founded As A Racist Utopia'
• 'Timeline: Land use and patriots'
• 'Reports from the front lines'

Back on the Internet there's a rumour that Facebook may have been sometimes deliberately tormenting users of its Android app by breaking it to see how they'd react. This seems a bit underhand, but Fast Company have found a man to quote who thinks it's brave, so what do I know? Incidentally, how long has Fast Company not been bothering to put dates on stories for? That's sort of OK for company blogs if you want your posts to resurface occasionally (hello Intercom!) but not OK for news.

• 'Facebook just gave us one more reason never to trust it'

3. Where do you see marketing going this year?
That's easy. To a conference in Las Vegas.

The above taken from '5 Questions For The New Year'. It's all you need to know about advertising for the year ahead.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Buildings That Look Like Stacked Boxes'

Totally Confused

Cat plus monkey plus banana, fireball, pink flamingos, the George awakens and 1,000 horsepower electric car.

Finally, I made this mix of mainly miserable music that I felt was the best of 2015. Enjoy, if that's the right word 😉

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.