Posts Tagged ‘privacy’

I was asked to comment on the fallout from Tiger Woods’s bad week in the press by the Guardian last week – the resulting article appears in today’s Media section and online under the headline In Need of a Tigerish Attorney. I took a critical look at the way he and his lawyer, Mark NeJame, are handling the story. Here’s an excerpt:

“Tiger Woods’s nasty bump on the head after his car’s tussle with a fire hydrant has rendered the golfer mostly speechless. It’s all very well that he’s admitted “transgressions” and muttered an apology, but at the heart of the press release he put out is a cry for silence and privacy. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Orlando attorney Mark NeJame, who has made his name defending drug offenders and people accused of murder, is the man behind this strategy. The ‘Johnnie Cochran of Central Florida’ has thrown his weight behind the Tiger Woods brand at the formerly squeaky-clean golfer’s darkest hour.

“Attorneys are the new breed of tough image protector – PR spin technicians are losing out to hard-nosed lawyers. But will NeJame’s strategy help his client to regain his flawless veneer of celebrity? Woods’s ignominy is fast becoming one of 2009’s top trending topics and has exposed the media-shy golfer to the dark side of ‘improperganda’.”

To read the full article, click here.

I was also asked for my opinion on the Tiger Woods affair and whether or not he can rebuild his brand’s reputation by Channel 4 News – to read the article, click here.

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.