Link: Ulises de la Cruz

I just came across this blog through an FB update from someone I (vaguely) knew years ago in school but who I’m quite sure doesn’t remember me:

Friends of Funde Cruz
http://friendsoffundecruz.blogspot.com/
“Ulises de la Cruz has for many years been supporting the development of his home village in Equador. Ulises donates 10% of his wage to his foundation ‘Funde Cruz’ towards the development of his hometown in Afro-Ecuadorean village Piquincho, in ‘Valle de Shota’ This is a day by day account given by three business students from Cass Business School, of their trials and tribulations during their 15 day fact finding trip to Ecuador.”

He’s also linked to an article from the Beeb about Ulises de la Cruz which talks about how the ‘South American footballer playing in the English Premiership is spending his high salary not on fast cars and big houses, but on rebuilding an entire community where he grew up’.
Talk about one person making a difference!

Link: Rape Recovery Journal

“January 26th 2000 Oh these flashbacks are killing me. My heart is hurting so badly. IF this is HEALING, I dont want to do it anymore!”
http://www.angelfire.com/ok3/AmysAnger/Journal.html

User-generated Content: Facebook v. Wordpress

Facebook’s Terms of Service [1] inter alia say:

“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”

I’m pretty sure that not too many people know that by posting their content on to Facebook, they automatically licence it to the company in such a broad manner. I’m not sure what fully-paid means in this context though since no money changes hands — I would have assumed that the consideration for the licence was the provision of a service but the words ‘fully-paid’ have left me a little confused.

This is in contrast to Automattic’s Terms of Service [2] which say:

“By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.”

Links:
[1] http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
[2] http://wordpress.com/tos/

Bitching Online and Privacy

The urge, especially when someone does something nasty, to bitch about them online whether on one’s own blog, on a site such as juicycampus.com, in comments to some article or somewhere else entirely can be very hard to resist. I know that there are times when I’ve done it.
I’m not entirely certain whether it’s a good idea though even leaving aside the legal issues: possible defamation, incitement to violence, hate speech etc. It isn’t as though once you’ve vented your feelings, you’ve vented them and that’s the end of the story: what you say could come back to haunt you years later. Search engines have particularly unforgiving memories and unless you have have a name like ’Mary Smith’ which you share with a million other people, all it is ever going to take for someone to dig up what you’ve said (assuming you haven’t said it anonymously) is a thirty second search online, not a thirty-month long search at the archives of twice as many publications.
An example Daniel J. Solove gave in his book ‘The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet‘ was of a man who’d written about his ‘brush with the law’ at the age of seventeen had it follow him for the rest of his life whether at job interviews or on dates despite the fact that, officially, his record was unavailable.
I’ve come to believe that whenever one gives out personal information online, even if it is entirely in the form of a vindictive rant, it constitutes an invasion of one’s own privacy and while it certainly is sometimes productive such as when you want a company to honour a guarantee it’s made to you and your bitching online leaves them worried about their reputation being damaged, I’m not sure it’s often advisable.

Background Checks

One of the strangest comments (which Akismet tells me is spam) I've seen reached a post about torture:

I wonder how many of these scam artists have received our money…. I become acquainted with Woman'sName on dating site and after some letter she start to tell about love I agree of the feelings. She wanted to visit me, she needed $1500. 00 for agent and airfare. I had doubts about money requests and found an investigation service that does background checks and provide a scam check service. That company is called DetectiveAgency( http: //www. detectiveagency. com, I am not advertising here, I just do a report about my experience. It cost me about $19, and it was much less than I might have lost in other case. I really enjoy this service. I saw that now they do some free service. Maybe it relly can help somebody like me. Buy. But as to me, I will pay for a background check before I ever send any money. Tom

I've cut out the agency's name because I'm not advertising it either. :)
I did rather enjoy reading the comment though -- it reminded me of a friend who is a non-native speaker of English. And it doesn't seem like a bad idea i.e. doing a background check. I first thought of it when a lady -- an actress though I can't remember her name -- said that she would do one to check the history of potential partners on Oprah. It made sense to me then and it still does. If not anything else, you wouldn't have to deal with suddenly discovering that the oh-so-perfect chap you're interested in has two wives, a conviction for culpable homicide and no job.
That could be a bit of an exaggeration but in today's world, who knows? Sometime ago, for example, a friend of mine got married to a chap whom she knew next to nothing about and whom she didn't check up on at all. Her marriage, while it lasted, was a disaster.