An often overlooked but excellent feature of Gmail has a great application for consumer protection: the ability to allow you to track which company sells on your personal details. Firstly, I’ll explain how the feature works:

Firstly, Gmail email addresses are only based on the alpha-numeric characters only (ie numbers and letters). Anything else is discarded. So, if you own john.smith@gmail.com, you also own johnsmith@gmail.com, j.o.h.n-smith@gmail.com and so forth, and these will automatically come in to your usual inbox if mail is sent to them. Additionally, anything you include after a “+” sign at the end of the username is also ignored. So, in  something like john.smith+extrainfo@gmail.com, the whole “+extrainfo” is ignored.

Therefore, what this feature allows is for you to create “unique” addresses at the companies you do business with, at the same time allowing the emails to come back into your usual inbox. This will allow you to track which companies have sold your email address. For example, say you sign up to your bank with the email address “john.smith+bank@gmail.com”. Then you know that if you are contacted by another company that sends you a mail to “john.smith+bank@gmail.com” that it was your bank that initially sold on your details. Then you can challenge them on this, especially if you asked them not to share your details with third parties.

A simple feature, but one that has great implications in the fight against the illegal selling of your personal data.

Much has been said about the features that the iPad does not have and I agree – I can’t quite understand why you’d want an oversized iPod Touch unless you’re a granny with poor eyesight. Hewlett-Packard also agrees, as their 30 second promotional video for their Slate tablet PC points out all the features the Slate has (or rather may have) that the iPad does not.

Slate: Nice Roc

Apple has responded – finally – by announcing that the iPhone OS 4.0 will finally provide users with a much sought after multitasking feature. While this is a good step forward, it is not true multitasking in the sense that the user has full control over what applications run. Missing from the array of allowed multitasking applications are anything to do with Instant Messaging or Micro Blogging. Like Twitter. And the upgrade will only be available in the third quarter of 2010.

This is where the Slate may succeed – assuming HP actually set a release date for the device. Engadget recently obtained a slide, apparently leaked from HP directly, containing the specifications for the Slate, and how it compares to the iPad. Notably, the slate has a faster processor, a proper operating system (Windows 7 with an HP enhanced touch user interface), 1080p video playback and two cameras – one front facing for video conferencing and one rear facing for photo’s. Where it loses is in battery life – 5 hours is only half that of the iPad’s – and display size.

This may all end up being idle speculation, and the Slate could be cumbersome and useless, particularly if HP do not get Windows 7 to work well with a touch interface. Though if all that HP has achieved is to scare Apple into including multitasking then I suppose that’s something.

My only question relates back to the first paragraph, and it’s a question market analysts also pose: have these companies actually done research to see if there is a viable long term market for tablet PCs? They have some way to go before I’ll hand over a ton of my hard earned cash.

Virgin Mobile Call Centre Employee

You may be wondering what the National Consumer Database actually is. It is a database shared amongst all members of the Direct Marketing (read: Scumbag) Association of South Africa. Members of this esteemed organisation include all banks, all cellular providers, most insurance companies, all the large retailers and literally anyone else who pays the membership fee. All of the detail is available on their shitty website – riddled with spelling mistakes and bullshit attempts to make consumers believe that they have our best interests at heart.

So, for a small fee, any company in South Africa can have access to a massive database of consumer information. This includes your ID, phone numbers, address, and, in the case of your banks passing on the information such as mine did, details of your credit rating. This is how you get provided with “pre-approved” credit (Truworths is notorious for this).

The new Protection of Private Information Bill seeks to improve on the power that we have as consumers, and make the system more opt-in as opposed to the current opt-out. However, within the current statute, this is what we get:

Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. 2002
Chapter VII – Consumer Protection
Section 45 – Unsolicited goods, services or communications

1) Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications to consumers, must provide the consumer
a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the mailing list of that person; and
b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request of the consumer.

2) No agreement is concluded where a consumer has failed to respond to an unsolicited communication.

3) Any person who fails to comply with or contravenes subsection (1) is guilty of an offence and liable, on conviction, to the penalties prescribed in section 89(1).

4) Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications to a person who has advised the sender that such communications are unwelcome, is guilty of an offence and liable, on conviction, to the penalties prescribed in section 89(1).

This means a few important things:

• They must provide you the name of the source of your details – the scumbags currently just hide behind the National Consumer Database, so you have no idea WHO put your details on it in the first place.
• After you register to opt-out, if they contact you again, they’ve committed a crime and you can lay a charge.

Ok, now I’ll get to the damn point – how do you register to opt-out?

They ask for a lot of information – the only essentials are your name and ID number. Do not give the scumbags any more than they need.

• National Consumer Database: http://www.facilities.co.za/dma/dnc.aspx
• ETL (SMS Database): http://www.etl.co.za/donotcontact.aspx

Note: Companies that you do business with (eg your bank) can still contact you after you register  but companies that you do not have any dealings with may not, by the law shown above, contact you.

I have personally been registered on these sites for a few months, and have not had any unsolicited contact from any companies that I do not already do business with.