Posts Tagged ‘conspiracy’

There’s been quite the hoo-ha regarding the undercover policeman who penetrated the Green movement and ended up a member of the Ratcliffe Six, and the more recent revelations about an undercover WPC who had done pretty much the same, both at great cost to the tax payer. But honestly, what did people expect?

There are shadowy powers all around us, as there have been for decades, if not centuries, insinuating their way into, and manipulating the progress of, groups who run counter to the establishment. Why are we surprised?

Danny Dyer’s been cut from his role as Zoo magazine’s Agony Uncle after apparently dishing out a receipe for vengeance instead of advice – his column advised one dumped correspondent to “cut your ex’s face, and then no one will want her” if all other options failed.

So is this a “regrettable production error”, as the magazine insists, or a full-scale PR fail?

Dyer claims he was misquoted, but his protestations have been lost in the tsunami of complaint – and, unsurprisingly, Dyer’s lost his job.

What grabs me, though, is the possible conspiracy theories implicit in this. Did someone truly believe that this was an ironic suggestion? Does Danny Dyer believe his own hard-man hype? Did someone want rid of Danny Dyer from Zoo magazine? Did someone think that putting in an offensive quote would cause outrage for PR purposes without having the knock on effect of losing Dyer his job? Who was this good PR for?

I could go on for hours. Conspiracy theories; don’t you love them?

In a world rife with the ability to keep an eye on where we are, with posters that are embedded with cameras that register how many people look at the poster for more than ten seconds and GPS phones that can traced their owners to within a yard or so, why is that that complaints are so few and far between?

Alright, there are the net conspiracies about social networking brands and how they are allegedly linked to information-gathering for the NSA (that’s the USA’s National Security Agency of course, not the UK’s National Sheep Association) but this is not a serious, concerted force; there are people leaping up and down about blind emails and viral marketing, but no complaints have really registered about how technology is monitoring people.

Monitoring is back in focus at the moment, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude, which is based on the Google Maps service. It allows people, through their computers and mobile phones, to keep tabs on their friends and family by pinging out their location to anyone who’s part of the service. Given that this is Google, and that they dominate the tech market, there is some fear as to what latitudes Google will allow themselves with the gathering of information and how they may use the data that such an application gathers.

In light of these concerns, Google have announced that they will not be keeping information on Latitude users who wish to hide their location, but is this the most effective way of managing the potential crisis in confidence for a company whose ideals were once trumpeted as being pure as the driven snow? The PR machine behind Latitude, both on and offline, is to be congratulated on the way it has so effectively quelled any seeds of unrest.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been greater outrage about Latitude, however; Latitude seems to me to be little more than a covert widget to make Google’s advertising model more effective; one that impinges on the privacy of anyone using it. Added to that, a Latitude-enabled phone could be easily stolen and used against the person the phone belongs to. It’ll be interesting to see if any human rights group make like French lorry drivers and park a protest right in the middle of Google’s information superhighway in the near future.