Oh good grief.

Hilary Clinton has no option now but to go after Eric Idle to counteract the gag-meistery of Cleese. I’m looking forward to her speech to the Democratic Convention where she reminds delegates that Obama “Isn’t the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” and other choice quotes from The Life of Brian.

This post is penned by the brother. If he would actually get off his backside and do a proper blog hisself (he lives over at “Another Crying Shame“) I’m sure the O Brien clan would soon be festooned with Obsessive Blogger badges from Fergal Crehan.

So… here’s the brother’s take on the Great Big Bertie Bye Bye:

While it’s certainly good news in a visceral ‘Death to my Enemies’ kind of way I think it will in the long run mean very little or even be a bad thing for the Irish body politic

And the whole thing will start all over again.

The specific purposes for which I believed I was providing the information was to allow the IBTS to administer communications with me as a donor (so I know when clinics are on so I can donate), to allow the IBTS to identify me and track my donation patterns, and to alert IBTS staff to any reasons why I cannot donate on a given occasion (donated too recently in the past, I’ve had an illness etc.). I accepted as implied purposes the use of my information for internal reporting and statistical purposes.

I did not provide the information for the purposes of testing software developed by a 3rd party, particularly when that party is in a foreign country.

The IBTS’s website (www.ibts.ie) has a privacy policy which relates to data captured through their website. It tells me that

The IBTS does not collect any personal data about you on this website apart from information which you volunteer (for example by emailing us or by using our on line contact forms). Any information which you provide in this way is not made available to any third parties, and is used by the IBTS only for the purpose for which you provided it.

So, if any information relating to my donor record was captured via the website, the IBTS is in breach of their own privacy policy. So if you register to be a donor… using this link… http://www.ibts.ie/register.cfm?mID=2&sID=77 then that information is covered by their Privacy policy and you would not be unreasonable in assuming that your data wouldn’t wind up on a laptop in a crackhouse in New York.

In the IBTS’s Donor Charter, they assure potential Donors that:

The IBTS guarantees that all personal information about donors is kept in the strictest confidence

Hmm… so no provision here for production data to be used in testing. Quite the contrary.

However, it gets even better… in the Donor Information Leaflet on the IBTS’s website, in the Data Protection section (scroll down… it’s right at the bottom), current and potential donors the IBTS tells us that (emphasis is mine throughout):

The IBTS holds donor details, donation details and test results on a secure computerised database. This database is used by the IBTS to communicate with donors and to record their donation details, including all blood sample test results. It is also used for the proper and necessary administration of the IBTS. All the information held is treated with the strictest confidence.

This information may also be used for research in order to improve our knowledge about the blood donor population, and for clinical audit, to assess and improve the quality of our service. Wherever possible, all such information will be anonymised.

Right.. so from their policy and their statement of fair use and specified purposes we learn that:

1. They can use it for communication with donors and for tracking donation details and results of tests (as expected)
2. They can use it for necessary administration. Which covers internal reporting but, I would argue, not giving it to other organisations to lose on their behalf.
3. They can use it for research about the blood donor population, auditing clinical practices. This is OK… and expected.
4. They are also permitted to use the data to “improve the quality of [their] service”. That might cover the use of the data for testing…

Until you read that last bit… the data would be anonymised whenever possible. That basically means the creation of dummy data as described towards the end of my last post on this topic.

So, the IBTS did not specify at any time that they would use the information I had provided to them for the purposes of software development by 3rd parties. It did specify a purpose for using the information for the improvement of service quality. But only if it was anonymised.

Section 2 of the Data Protection Act says that data can only be used by a Data Controller for the specific purposes for which it has been gathered. As the use of un-anonymised personal data for the purposes of software development by agencies based outside of the EU (or in the EU for that matter) was not a specified use, the IBTS is, at this point, in breach of the Data Protection Act. If the data had been anonymised (ie if ‘fictional’ test data had been used or if the identifying elements of the personal data had been muddled up before being transferred) there would likely be no issue.

• Firstly, the data would have been provided in a manner consistent with the specified use of the data
• Secondly, there would have been no risk to personal data security as the data on the stolen laptop would not have related to an identifiable person in the real world.

Of course, that would have cost a few euros to do so it was probable de-scoped from the project.

If I get a letter and my data was not anonymised I’ll be raising a specific complaint under Section 2 of the Data Protection Act. If the data was not anonymised (regardless of the security precautions applied) then the IBTS is in breach of their specified purposes for the collection of the data and are in breach of the Data Protection Act.

Billy Hawkes, if you are reading this I’ve just saved your team 3 weeks work.

What was the best invention of 2007? Invention, rather than product development is how I think of this. The Nokia N95 might be a contender, but it is simply an evolution of existing things. Likewise the Iphone. Neither are particularly unique.

My friends’ kid the O-meister is new, novel and unique – even though he is based on features from two slightly obsolete models which have been cunningly combined.

Perhaps an invention could be an existing thing brought about in a new way? Like how we used to cook dinners on a stove, with pots and now we just bung something that looks vaguely like food in a microwave and get back something that tastes vaguely like the slimy residue of the Slugs of Evil in return. Yummy.

I’d have to go with Monkey cloning. Yes, cloning isn’t new. Technically we’ve been doing it the old fashioned way since the dawn of time. However there is something “Island of Dr. Moreau”-ish about cloning monkeys. However, I’m not citing this as the best invention of 2007 simply because of the possible benefits to medicine from being able to clone and ‘grow’ spare parts for the body or the range of treatments that it may make possible for illnesses such as MS (which a friend of mine struggles with) or Parkinson’s disease (which has probably robbed the world of a 4th Back to the Future movie). I’m not voting for it because it opens the possibility of cloning other higher mammals while we perfect the technology for use with humans. Animals such as whales, dolphins, lawyers and accountants. All coming close to humanity but not quite reaching it yet.

No, I’m voting for this because, at the current level of the technology, the process is inefficient. It took many thousands of monkey eggs to make the one viable clone embryo. This means that there is scope for a lot of exciting future developments in the field of biotechnology.

But that’s not the reason…

…no, the reason is that it gives me the chance to remind everyone that…

…
…
… “You can’t make a monkey without breaking a few eggs”.

In case they’ve fixed the error, the headline as of 15:00 today is “More than 17,000 new heroine injectors in scheme”.

The question is, what are they injecting? The full “Lara Croft” (or other famous female heroine), liquidised Lara or just “essence” of Lara?

The implication for the quality of information presentation, and the quality of communication, is quite significant. I have a large extended family with cousins in far flung regions of the world. From time to time we might meet up and chat face to face (often it co-incides with family holiday or business travel). I can remember going to visit my cousin Carrie in Birmingham when I was 18 (just after my leaving cert). Her friends all spoke in a strong Black Country dialect. I didn’t have a frikin’ clue what they were saying for the first few days.. It sounded like english, I could follow some of it but some of the idiom and dialect were frankly baffling.

I got my own back when Carrie came to visit in Dublin. “Story bud?” in North Dublin patois roughly translates as “hail to thee and well met fine fellow”.

Microsoft’s goal is to reduce the amount of ‘red ink’ that Office displays when people write emails or documents and insert local slang or words from their local dialect. For personal communication that may be fine, but for business or professional communication the red ink is a useful warning that perhaps you need to rethink your wording so that your message is better understood.

I can remember learning about the Ems Telegraph Affair in school. In this historical incident the wording of a telegram was edited by Otto von Bismark and resulted in the Franco-Prussian War. The dialect and idioms were interpreted by the public in France as being an insult to the French king while in Germany/Prussia the feeling was that the communication was an insult to Germany.

• The likely fate of the newly discovered national monument in the middle of the M3
• The divisive nature of FF’s proposal on stamp duty (what about people upgrading or relocating due to decentralisation?)
• The constitutional challenge to the electoral constituency boundaries (trial adjourned on thursday… what else was happening that day?)

And as for the party being the victims of an “orchestrated campaign”, some may call that paranoia. I think they’re just jealous that someone somewhere has a better orchestra and conductor then they have.

In the week that scientists tell us they have discovered a planet that might support alien life, I got a response from a live person in Dell. And not in their off-shored outsourced Call Centre neither… this one was from ‘Dell Central’. Rick (for that is his name) reached out to me from Round Rock Texas as that is his job – he is part of an Internet Outreach team. I’m impressed – it took 3 days for Rick to respond to me but I’m still waiting for Samuel (the phone support supervisor I eventually got to speak to last week) to get back to me after a week.

They never write, they never call… don’t they love me anymore?

Also, there is the small matter that Dell have not responded to my “Unresolved Issue” report (via Dell Support on-line) which was raised on the 13th of April – that’s 13 elapsed days… If I hadn’t heard from Rick I’d have started to think they just didn’t care, that they had my money and that was all that mattered. But Rick has, thus far, restored my faith somewhat. At least he was proactive in reaching out to me.

Dell Wars Part IV – A New Hope (?)

I’ve taken Rick up on his invitation to contact him about my issues. Hopefully he’ll have read the various blog posts here under Dell Hell and will be up to speed on the issues I’m having. I’ll keep my readers posted on how this Soap Opera plays out… of course, a soap opera is usually a work of fiction – this is a painful case of fact.

Over on the IQ Network site there is a short article about the importance of timeliness of information as a measure of its quality and accuracy..

Also, on the Labour Party website there is a piece about issues uncovered in the door to door scrap and rework cleanup that was done late last year on the Electoral register…

All in all I have an uneasy feeling, particularly as the fundamental root causes don’t seem to have been addressed.