Have you read the Terms of service?
26 January 2012
I am a huge fan of 37signals, their products, their work ethos, their office. I have both their books and have followed their blog for as long as I can remember. I am not going to bore you with how much respect I have for the company and what they do.
One reason I follow them quite closely, is that they are open about the stuff they do and share this information on their blog. Being a company who produce web applications used by hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis, I find their openness and willingness to share stats and information regarding the setup, and how they run and manage their company a great insight to their company. Maybe I am slightly nosey, but I do not expect them to share how much money they are making for example.
While this is not a blog post aimed at 37signals, it was what happened on their blog the other day that made me finally write it.
So, in 37signals’ usually manner of being open, they blog some insight to the numbers their company/apps/business deals with in things like support cases, requests, files stored, etc. See blog post here
One of the bullet points was
And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file (It was a picture of a cat!)
While a lot of people may take that as quite funny, it seems a lot of people have commented about their privacy is now under threat as 37signals maybe looking at users data.
This leads me onto the bigger picture…
How many of you use online services, such as Google? Facebook? Dropbox? Well, pretty much any online app that you store, share or post information to? I am guessing most of you do. Next question, how many of you have actually read the Terms of Service for these services? I am guessing about the same number as if you have then the number to the first question would be VERY low.
Lets look at the Google Terms of Service, I am guess a lot of you use either GMail or Google Apps, I know I do.
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
The above, was taken straight from the Google Terms of Service, let’s look at this more closely. Google states that you remain copyright and any other rights to the content you submit to their services. By the next sentence is where it gets good.
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
Here they are saying what ever information you submit, post or display you are giving Google free rain to do what they like with it. You are even giving them rights to publicly display your information. So if you are sending sensitive information across GMail for example, you just gave Google the right to reproduce this information and publicly display your content. This also means Google employees are free to poke their nose’s into your data and you have agreed.
While Google have this in their Terms of Service, and I am guess many of you are unaware of this, other companies have stricter rules for example Dropbox who state:
We guard your privacy to the best of our ability and work hard to protect your information from unauthorized access.
Dropbox employees are prohibited from viewing the content of files you store in your Dropbox account, and are only permitted to view file metadata (e.g., file names and locations). Like most online services, we have a small number of employees who must be able to access user data for the reasons stated in our privacy policy
Even though you are using a third party service which in some cases you are paying for, your information is being stored on someone else’s hardware, and in some cases being transmitted across a couple of providers (ie, from Dropbox’s server across to Amazon’s for backup). While 37signals meant no harm in what they posted (they have since posted a reply), it did create a riff in the comments, but what you are doing is putting your content into someone else’s hands and while 99.999% of people/companies have strict rules regarding privacy and data encryption and the rest there is still a chance someone is able to see your data.
But you must remember that all these companies will have monitoring software in place to watch how their applications/services are performing and to make sure customers are not breaking their Terms of Service. In 37Signals case the filename is logged and they saw the name of the 100,000,00th file was name cat.jpg, big deal, maybe they were not clear in their post that all they saw was the filename, they thought it was funny and decided to share it. But at least all they are seeing is the filename unlike Google for example who you are giving full access to your data.
I am a massive internet addict and use all the services I have talked about and more, and I will still carry on using them to store my information in the “cloud”. But will you? Maybe next time you sign up to some new service you will read the Terms of Service first.
Blog - on or off site
22 January 2012
The other day I tweeted:
On a corporate site, would you put blog on the site or use third party ie. Blogger ?
— Matthew Roach (@faxtion) January 19, 2012
The reason I tweeted this was I overheard some people talking about having a blog on their website, but then they where instructed it would be best to set it up on blogger. The reason behind the person suggesting them to use blogger was it’s free. Nothing else was taken in to consideration, use blogger as it’s free and we can link off to it just like you would to your Twitter or Facebook.
This got me thinking, why would you suggest to use a third party service for a blog, and if your were why blogger, especially when the person requesting a blog is going to be having a nice site built showcasing their work, which also would be added to over time. The blog will be getting used to document projects, up and coming, and in progress, then once the project has been completed it would be documented in the correct section of the website.
So again, why suggest using blogger? I am not 100% sure.
But, if I was suggesting something it would be to keep it on the actual website, add another navigation item named, wait for it! “Blog”.
A couple of reasons for this are that the blog is going be used quite similar to news in this instance, documenting projects that are coming up, and a place to keep users up to date on these projects, so the blog is located on the site as it’s completely relevant to the site and the company.
As “Content is King” having the blog on site would also help with the SEO of the complete site.
Also, building up the brand of the company and sharing insightful information related to the industry the company is operating in by having the blog on site will raise awareness of the company.
One other point is that if using social media to promote your brand/company, having a website and a blog in two different locations it’s going to become confusing for users on where to go for the information, also while using social media to push out your message’s you’ll end up duplicating the same message over and over as you have two channels to which you are putting information.
By keeping the blog on site it’s still a separate channel within the main site but it keeps it all under one roof, a consistent user experience can be achieved.
Moving on
20 January 2012
I am pleased to announce that I will shortly be joining the amazing team at AW2.0 Ltd. With this move comes a new learning curve, which I am very much looking forward to, I am still going to be doing HTML/CSS and jQuery, but everything will be built using OpenBD – the worlds first truly open source GPL Java and Google App Engine CFML runtime.
Lending a helping hand
22 December 2011
Many of you probably already know that I am an active twitter user, hell you probably reading this as I tweeted the link to the article. The majority of my traffic comes from twitter. So with that sorted…
Anybody who is a twitter user will realise that, twitter is not just about telling people what you had for lunch or when you woke up, what the weather is like, etc. Well it is for that, but it’s also has great deal more to it, it’s also a great resource for learning, or finding answers to questions quickly, or even provoking a conversation (bit hard I know, you timeline soon fills up).
Over the years I have been using twitter, I have tweeted about pretty much everything, hell I even tweeted I was going have sex in the shower, some people took it out of context, but I was not lying, I just did not explain myself correctly. I actually had a sex in the shower emotibomb it took some explaining, but it was all good fun.
So, what I am I getting at?
Put all the fun aside, twitter has been a huge help for me, not just making new friends online and having fun, but I have also learned a lot from tweeting questions to what I may of thought to be stupid questions. Being a front-end web developer (as you may already know) sometimes I hit problems with things, generally I’ll Google for a bit and see what I get, but I’ll also tweet my issue at the same time in order to get a more mix of answers, 9 times out of 10, somebody will reply with the answer I am after, great, somebody saved my bacon once more, so times I even get a twitter reply before I have had chance to scan the search results in Google.
These passed few months I have not asked that many questions on twitter in the vain of seeking help for a problem, mainly due to not needing to. Not sure why, maybe I am not pushing the boundaries enough, or maybe I am actually getting smarter. I would like to think the latter.
So with that in mind, these passed few months I have been the person on the other end, I have been offering support to people who have asked the questions, by doing this I have made a few extra friends, had some great Skype conversations with people and even been promoted by the person I helped. Each time I offer my help I am expected nothing in return, one of the main reasons I offer my help/knowledge is it will help you and it also helps me.
How is it helping me? You may ask..
Well, I would say about 20% of the help I offer is to questions that I feel I may be able to help with. You may say why offer the help if you are not sure? Well everyone has to learn somehow, so I see it as an opportunity to help someone out as well as help myself learn that bit more. About 90% of these unknowns I actually do know what the user is asking, this actually scares me a little as I am unaware of my own knowledge until it’s questioned, maybe I am becoming more complacent with my skills/ knowledge and am not pushing them enough.
What next?
Well I am going to keep offering my help why I see someone struggling. In the future I am going to document the problems and solutions so others can also learn from them.
Look forward to helping more people with their problems, also I hope people help me why I get stuck! If you are reading this and your not following me on twitter, maybe you should. My twitter username is @faxtion
A promise to myself
12 December 2011
I have never been a person to set myself new years resolutions, and do not plan on doing so. I tend to set myself small goals now and again as a way of improving myself, or learning something new. It just so happens to be towards the end of the year, that I am setting this little goal for myself, well it’s not really a little goal, more of a way to improve my skill set.
I am not setting a deadline or a start date, as for me these never happen when I try to enforce a timescale on them, another reason is that these particular goals are hard to define deadlines upon.
What and Why?
The reason for this is mainly due to my day time job. As you may be aware, I am the sole web developer at Weesleekit, in Dumfries. By web developer, I like to refer to myself as a front-end developer. I take the designers mock-ups and transform them into content managed websites. 99% of the websites I build use some form of jQuery plugin, and 95% of them are slider plugins, while I would say I am quite proficient at jQuery I tend to using plugin’s to accomplish what I need, this due to the timescale I have to complete work and I tend to use the same few plugins as I know which ones are able to accomplish what the designers are after.
So, I am going to write my own slider plugin that I am able to use on real projects. I am going to make a list of the basic requirements and then build upon it over time. This will not only benefit myself, but also benefit the company.
You may ask why write another slider plugin when there are literally hundreds out there that are free to use, the main reason is to further my jQuery knowledge but I also prefer to use my own scripts than rely on other peoples work.
Along with writing my own slider plugin, I am also going to release it on Github, as I have been wanting to use GitHub but don’t have anything at the moment to put up.
I feel these two things go hand in hand with each other, also I get to take my jQuery knowledge to another level, and also learn how to use GitHub to put back into the community.
As you may have guessed it I will be blogging my progress here. Hopefully I can pass some useful information to others in the same situation as me. This will also lead me to creating more jQuery plugins and realising more stuff on GitHub over time