John Fender's Website

An e-mail arrived in my inbox today from Google that got my attention, and from what has started appearing in the media, it seems to have got a lot of people's attention. Google has announced that they are scrapping over 60 different privacy policies on their various websites and services and replacing the lot with one that they say is "a lot shorter and easier to read". I'm all for simplicity with these things as some I have come across are both long and tortuous to read. The e-mail goes on to point out Google's desire to "desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google".

However, when I had a good look at the new policy, I noted they will link user data across all of their websites and services, so if you use, for example, Google Docs, YouTube, Gmail or Google+, then everything you do on these can be collated with the aim of serving you targetted advertising. After all, advertising is how Google makes it's money. But more than that, it now means that it will know a lot more about you and what you do online. Currently Google's Chrome web browser and Wallet payment service are not included, but I suspect that as some time in the future it will be brought into line with everything else.

You can use Google's dashboard and ad manager to control the level of information Google gleans and you can still use Google search anonymously, but if you sign in, then data can be collected about you. One way to minimize information being collected is to make sure that when you go on line, set your web browser to delete cookies at logout. It will be interesting to see what those who are concerned with privacy on the web make of it all.

If Google's new privacy policy is not enough, Facebook is making it's "Timeline" feature mandatory and users will get just 7 days to check to see what will be included giving you the chance to hide anything you may not want included. Up until now the feature was one where you had to opt in if you wanted it. Now you have no choice - you are getting it whether or not you want it.

The way it works is that unless you specifically click on "Hide from timeline" everything will be included and visible depending on your privacy settings. Your old photo albums use to be in an archive. With Timeline they will be right up there on your timeline and pretty large sized too. Photos and albums can be tagged, so if you do not want this feature, you will have to untag yourself from every photograph.

Those third party apps can also pose a problem because if you give them permission to add activity to your timeline, everyone will know what you are doing or what you are buying online. Do you really want that? Yes, you can manage everything to control what happens, but it's a pain and time consuming. Then there is the advertising and quite frankly I can do without being bombarded with adverts everytime I log in. Although I have used it, I am not a big fan of it and I can think of a simple way of dealing with the issues and have taken the necessary action. Goodbye Facebook!

With news that Petroplus, owners of the Coryton refinery in Essex is filing for insolvency, prices look set to shoot up as production has stopped. No doubt there will be panic buying as well, causing shortages as well. The refinery accounts for some 20% of the fuel supplies in the south east, but there are other refineries working normally and it just means that supplies will be moved around the country, so there is no need to panic. No doubt the news tomorrow will have reports of motorists scrambling to fill up, creating an artificial shortage.

A bit more worrying is the latest economic forecasts and these show that the economy is not improving as much as had been expected. The IMF has revised it's 2012 growth forecast downwards and the Eurozone is predicted to slip into "mild recession". If that was not bad enough the UK economy growth figure has also been revised downwards to only 0.6% this year and government debt has now passed the 1 trillion mark.

That's £1,000,000,000,000 or put another way an estimated £16,072 of debt for every person in the country. In order to get this under control, the austerity measures will have to continue and things will not get better for some quite time to come. Given all this news, it's no surprise that the markets fell today too.So ends a day of gloomy news and the weather was crap too!

Another study has managed to point out the obvious again - that when people are plugged into any device with headphones, they lose concentration of where they are going. The latest study in the United states looked at 116 accidents involving pedestrians wearing headphones. Of the 116 cases looked at by the study, 81 resulted in a fatality (70%) and more interestingly, in 29% of the cases a horn or other audible warning was sounded to warn the pedestrian of the presence of the vehicle that was about to hit them.

I had thought that the majority of cases would involve cars, or other road vehicles, but this study showed that trains accounted for 55% of the incidents, which bearing in mind that in the US, there are more crossings than in the UK, is not so surprising. Other findings were that 68% of victims were men and 89% of the incidents occurred in urban areas, which on the face of it is not surprising.

What the study does highlight, is that when walking along, plugged into a music player, be it a iPod or mobile phone, pedestrians are not paying attention to where they are going. This is not a phenomenon limited to the US, it's universal. You only need to walk along any busy street and see how many people blindly wander around, oblivious to their surroundings. Perhaps in such cases, it should be the pedestrian that is held wholly responsible for the resulting accident, with them footing the bill for the resulting costs.

I got on with the cooking today, preparing soup, making bread and making more pizza. That took most of the afternoon, but the weather was not too good, so it was an ideal time to get on with re-stocking the freezer. So that lot should last a few weeks. Of course, one of the pizzas was tried, along with a bottle of beer this evening, and very nice it was too!

It looks like the threat of having to adopt what has been dubbed "Berlin Time" has receded again when MP's who are against the measure made sure that the Daylight Savings Bill ran out of time in the House of Commons. If this Bill had been passed we would have had a three year trial adopting Central European Time, in effect being BST plus one hour in summer and GMT plus one in winter. This would have meant that we would not see daylight until around 10 am here in the west of Scotland and even later further north.

We tried using BST all year round between 1968 and 1971 and over the 3 year period, there was a net increase in the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads. This goes against what those who want to change the clocks claim as they maintain it would be safer as it would be daylight in the evenings in winter. I witnessed an accident one dark morning when schoolchildren crossing at a light controlled pedestrian crossing, supervised by a crossing patrol were hit by a car. That would not have happened if the clocks had been left alone.

So I'm not in favour of any changes and if the Westminster government does vote to try such a daft scheme out, I'm sure it will mean that the SNP who are against it, gaining more support, something which both Labour and the Conservatives do not want with the question of Independence now firmly on the agenda, with a referendum to be held in 2014. The Daylight Savings Bill could be reintroduced but would need the support of Ministers and I can't see that happening any time soon, but I'm also sure the question will come up again in the future.