UK website details legislation

As of four days ago, UK com­pa­nies now have to include cer­tain manda­tory busi­ness infor­ma­tion on their web­sites & all emails.

The linked arti­cle explains really well what this change entails (short ver­sion: not much for many web­sites, as nearly every­one will prob­a­bly already have these kinds of details if not in their footer then almost cer­tainly on a con­tact or legal info page), but I’ve still got a few burn­ing ques­tions — mostly to do with fairly inane stuff that only web geeks would think of.

Viral mar­ket­ing, for exam­ple. It’s ille­gal if you don’t say who you are, so no more viral web mar­ket­ing in the UK (and EU gen­er­ally?). Crampin’ style since 2007.

This point from the arti­cle is inter­est­ing, too:

It is not suf­fi­cient to include a ‘con­tact us’ form with­out also pro­vid­ing an email address and geo­graphic address some­where eas­ily acces­si­ble on the site. A PO Box is unlikely to suf­fice as a geo­graphic address; but a reg­is­tered office address would. If the busi­ness is a com­pany, the reg­is­tered office address must be included.

Say hello, email scrap­ing har­vesters. I realise that with fil­ters improv­ing this is the­o­ret­i­cally becom­ing less of a prob­lem, but even so — very few fil­ter­ing providers are up to the stan­dard of Gmail (usu­ally the poster child for “Feel free to post your email address on the web” exper­i­ments), and are unlikely to become such in the near future.

If you’re a sole trader, I imag­ine you don’t have to list your home address, as you’re not con­sid­ered a com­pany. IANAL and IANAL who lives in the UK, but if the ter­mi­nol­ogy is the same as in .au (which, given our com­mon her­itage, I’d imag­ine it wouldn’t be far from), that seems to be the log­i­cal interpretation.

If the busi­ness is a mem­ber of a trade or pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tion, mem­ber­ship details, includ­ing any reg­is­tra­tion num­ber, should be provided.

That seems… very hazy. If it means enti­ties such as ICAA, that’s nearly fair enough, but for organ­i­sa­tions like that mem­ber­ship is indi­vid­ual, not cor­po­rate. Same goes for trade unions, etc. The only equiv­a­lent I can think of here might be some­thing like CRICOS provider num­bers for edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions pro­vid­ing ser­vices to over­seas stu­dents — though there are prob­a­bly other exam­ples one could give.

Per­haps our gov­ern­ment has become more lib­eral than that of the UK, but, even so, it seems a rather odd stip­u­la­tion. For elec­tri­cians you might have green licenses and so forth — but, again, that is admin­is­tered at an indi­vid­ual level, so you’re only really effec­tively get­ting this infor­ma­tion out of sole traders: it seems unre­al­is­tic for larger organ­i­sa­tions to pub­lish this type of information.

Given the sur­prise it seems to have taken peo­ple by (the OUT-LAW pub­li­ca­tion is dated 20th Decem­ber 2006 at the time of access), it seems unlikely that it will ever be very strictly enforced, and appears to be EU-associated pol­i­tick­ing more than any inten­tioned pol­icy. Some of its stip­u­la­tions offer some­thing in the way of con­sumer pro­tec­tion, but, really, if con­sumers aren’t already on the look out for this sort of infor­ma­tion (or lack thereof) when par­tic­i­pat­ing in the web, then edu­ca­tion in this regard should be far higher on the agenda than leg­isla­tive mea­sures. But per­haps that’s just my inner lib­eral get­ting cranky.

# by Josh on January 4th, 2007 Tags: , , , ,
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Home

Finally got every­thing back home tonight (thanks for help Selo!) which was good. Not that I’m going to be around long enough to even setup these mix­ers. Oh, yeah, I bought mix­ers. Haven’t had time to blog about that yet. (Does any­one else get the irony of blog­ging about not hav­ing enough time?) I’ll be away at Kyck­start for the week­end, which seemed like a good idea at the time (it’s just that I later realised that’s this week­end, EU Arts fac week­end away is next week­end, and I didn’t really have a hol­i­day in “hol­i­days” at all). Mean­while, uni assess­ments hover over the hori­zon (I sup­pose), and par­en­thet­i­cal com­ments don’t par­tic­u­larly help.

I should sleep before mid­night some­time, but any chance of read­ing for plea­sure would be aban­doned in such an action. I miss that. It is now an expec­ta­tion that lit­er­a­ture will be bor­ing, the only enter­tain­ment aris­ing from an idea, a muse that stems from analy­sis: the magic of nar­ra­tive aban­doned. There is an expected path for all things, and no beauty is seen in the lan­guage employed – read­ings assume an antic­i­pated form, for they are read­ings, not things to be read. For those, there is lit­tle time. The light glows bright­est just before it blows… Ondaatje? I checked. The chase was thrilling, find­ing lan­guage that was not wholly alien and con­cepts that were beau­ti­fully expressed. There is no middle-english rhetoric for empha­sis. We mightn’t be the pin­na­cle of civil­i­sa­tion, but it’s easy for things to feel that way when jux­ta­pos­ing cer­tain texts (this is not a blan­ket statement).

This post is wind­ing down towards sleep, just clear­ing ideas. Anzac ideas are still there… again, not a blan­ket state­ment (I can’t think lucidly enough at present to post about it, so it may slip from my con­scious­ness for a while… later.). A sequence of ideas drawn from snip­pets of expe­ri­ence. Which is, really, all we have. Expo­si­tion will come at some point though we know not when. Is it futile to rush that expe­ri­ence of dis­cov­ery? Prob­a­bly. It will come as equal shock irre­spec­tive of age, per­haps, to learn that there is devi­a­tion from what one per­ceives as ‘real’, ‘nor­mal’. It is all fascinating.

Bal­anc­ing that dis­cov­ery with the devel­op­ment of skills is some­thing else alto­gether. Where is there time for pas­sive application?

Next week things will improve. Appar­ently uni stu­dents never develop nor­mal sleep­ing pat­terns whilst still study­ing. Tempt­ing not to bother trying ;-)

Now… I must pack and then sleep. Or sleep and pack tomor­row morn­ing. I know other peo­ple have far greater com­mit­ments and are jug­gling far more at present, which is… simul­ta­ne­ously hum­bling and incom­pre­hen­si­ble. It should be a good weekend.

# by Josh on April 28th, 2006 Tags:
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Verruckte Germanische Spammers

Has any­one else seen an influx of Ger­man spam lately?  I have, as has Sam… any­body else?

We’ve been duti­fully feed­ing it into babelfish and var­i­ous other online trans­la­tors, just to give foreign-language spam­mers an oppor­tu­nity to make their impact on their tar­get audi­ence.  Spam email IS effec­tive, ladies and gen­tle­men; whilst I wouldn’t nor­mally give any nor­mal spam a sec­ond glance,

*cat­e­gorised, mark as “read”, filed in the spam folder (4085 messages)*

for­eign lan­guage email (n.b. there are no images in ANY of these emails, only the occa­sional text-only link… if there were images, I wouldn’t have opened them.) gets trans­lated, and then read!  I even clicked on a link or two (after ascer­tain­ing that there were no iden­ti­fy­ing fea­tures to the URL — e.g. email cam­paign suc­cess tracking/address skimming)!!!

The actual con­tent of the emails is… inter­est­ing (or ques­tion­able.)  For the most part, they are polit­i­cal mes­sages of one kind or another — it is not imme­di­ately clear what they are try­ing to say — the gen­eral gist of it seems to be that EU immi­grants are bad, crim­i­nal peo­ple, and shouldn’t be allowed into the coun­try or welfare.

One mes­sage repro­duced here for your convenience:

Immi­gra­tion wave of East­ern Euro­pean peo­ple on social secu­rity fears Munich(rpo). Hans Werner sense, pres­i­dent insti­tute for eco­nomic research has inthe ‘Sued­deutschen Zeitung’ before a solid immi­gra­tion wave of East­ernEu­ro­pean peo­ple on social secu­rity to Ger­many warned. The Euro­pean Unionem­bod­ied tran­si­tion peri­ods for employ­ees, but unem­ployed per­sons migh­t­im­mi­grate imme­di­ately and would have from the out­set ‘Anspruch on all socialLeis­tun­gen’. This reg­u­la­tion is grotesque and the West­ern Euro­pean wel­farestates will destroy. Only a change of the Euro­pean Union con­di­tion can still­pre­vent. The con­se­quences of the lib­er­al­ity guide­line for migra­tions with­inthe Euro­pean Union, approved of by the Euro­pean Union par­lia­ment, are ‘von­pol­i­tics and pub­lic totally ueberse­hen’ , the econ­o­mist crit­i­cized. Eas­tEu­ro­peans may come dur­ing a tran­si­tion period of sev­eral years ‘nicht asem­ploy­ees. As inde­pen­dent ones and not an employed per­son per­sons may dothem itself how­ever imme­di­ately in Ger­many nieder­lassen’, explained sense.‘Von begin­ning on does not have also that employed per­son require­ment on all­so­cial achieve­ments of the state as more native. That becomes many, whichare in the poorer regions of Europe at home, arranges, into the rich wel­farestates of the Euro­pean Union wan­dern.’ The incen­tives are over pow­er­ful. TheGerman social wel­fare assis­tance is five times as highly as slowakischer­wages. The forth­com­ing poverty migra­tion made of East­ern Europe will erode­the West­ern Euro­pean wel­fare states: ‘Die states will back-screw theirachieve­ments in a kind deter­rence com­pe­ti­tion, because none become the goalof the wel­fare migra­tions will’, and ‘im final result could be Europe onlyas socially, as it Amer­ica today ist’. In order to turn away this, theEu­ro­pean Union states ‘das right of the migra­tion would have into the­Sozial­staat’ paint: The home­land would have to remain respon­si­ble for the­so­cial secu­rity ben­e­fits at not employed per­son immi­grant, demanded the ifopresident.

Babelfish’d, not human trans­la­tion, hence the… obscure… nature of it all.

All this poses an inter­est­ing ques­tion in terms of email-marketing/spam: would you get a higher mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion by send­ing foreign-language mes­sages, and a babel link?

Pos­si­bly not… not every­one is as weird as myself, and most prob­a­bly still wouldn’t bother.  I imag­ine they get a high enough click­through by sim­ply send­ing out pr0n email… sad, but prob­a­bly true.

So has any­one else been receiv­ing this kind of email?  Does any­one speak/translate Ger­man flu­ently and receive this kind of email (i.e. can you make more sense of it than babelfish’d eng­lish does?)

# by Josh on June 12th, 2004 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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