Yes it really does seem that we’ve lost the plot as far as privacy goes. I’m not just talking about security breaches at companies, or government personnel losing sensitive information…. I’m talking about you and I sharing far more data than ever we surely should.

I’ve not been a huge fan personally of the massive fashion of social networking, and obsessive Twitter type behaviour, and a new site hitting the news at the moment just goes to underline my concerns.

The site is pleaserobme.com … and yes, it very simply uses a Twitter API to capture a list of people using Twitter and foursquare, and who are declaring themselves to be away from home at the moment. The result is a list of addresses that are currently ripe for a robbing! A scary use of the geo-location information that social networking sites just love us to share.

I’m glad to say from my own perspective that I’m not on Twitter or FourSquare, and even those close to me have no idea whether or not I’m at home or not, until they ring and find out… and frankly, I prefer to keep it that way!

So being serious for just one moment, we do seriously need to take a look at our activities these days, particularly on the Internet, and realise that we all share a lot of information online. The important question is, of course, whether the information we provide can be pieced together to provide more information than we would wish to provide.

Thanks to the guys behind pleaserobme.com, the general public maybe getting a slightly rude awakening to the consquences of social networking habits. Time will of course tell as to whether this site changes habits or simply provides a few minutes comedy for people.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit of an eco-fan myself, and I get really mad reading these constant reports that suggest world leaders won’t come up with a satisfactory way forward at the Copenhagen conference in early December.

It’s great to see world leaders making pledges before the conference, but nobody seems to be taking the size of step that scientists are saying we need to… it all seems politically driven, leaders striving to look good within their country, and within the wider community. Already it seems to be clear that they’re going to come away from the negotiations with a non-legal agreement at best.

I’d really like to see a country have the guts to stand up and signup to cuts of at least the size estimated by scientists, and be done with it. Sod the wider world, and trying to get the agreement of every leader in the world to tidy up their own acts… just take the step forward and lead by example. There seems to be far too much worry about some countries not pulling their weight, and then getting a commercial advantage over greener countries. Well at least from an imports perspective, there’s a very simple answer… bring back trade barriers. They were abolished in most countries to allow for “free” trade, but in my view, if some countries aren’t pulling their weight, this is an easy answer… add a trade barrier to imports of goods from countiries based on their “population per head” type of stats. Fair enough, this doesn’t help exports, but there are a lot of countries that want to make positive change; such a bold step would give a commercial benefit to countries who bought into large scale change.

Here’s hoping the EU, US, or another big player takes such a large step, to put pressure on others to follow suit.

Somewhat off the usual topic of this blog, but when we came across Spotify, we were extremely excited…

So what is it? Spotify is a new music streaming service. It can be downloaded for free, and features artists like The Killers, Lady Gaga, ColdPlay and other major artists, as well as independants.

Spotify can be used completely free because it will occasionally (roughly every 20 minutes) play a short advertisement in-between songs. This means the artists are properly creditted for their work, whilst you get to listen to whatever music you want to, absolutely free. In our experience, these were extremely targetted adverts, so very relevant, for example, while listening to The Killers, we received a Sony advert of 29 seconds, which advertised the Killers latest album.

This application is a very exciting move. The GUI is similar to that of iTunes, and the music choice is extremely good and comes with suggested similar artists.

If you haven’t tried it already, then signup today and give it a go… we’re loving it!