Perhaps I am just being overly sensitive to this but I have noticed that there is a prevalence of late for website sign-up forms to ask for not only the usual information such as a user name, but the ever ubiquitous and completely useless date of birth and now, this week, your gender! And it isn’t just optional either, it is mandatory. You will have a gender, damn it! Yahoo! Mail, Google, Skype, SightSpeed, Windows Live, and at least two popular social bookmarking sites and a Firefox plug-in all have a mandatory “gender” field.

Why do you need to know my gender? For marketing purposes? I don’t want to be marketed to. For sales analysis by your staff? That benefits you, not me. So you can uniquely identify me? Choose something else. My personal details are my own to reveal not yours to own.

I find being forced to reveal gender, sexual orientation, date of birth, or most other details about me, involuntarily, is an annoyance and offensive. And I am not the only one I am sure.

The information I divulge is entirely up to me, not you.

Requiring name, date of birth, or gender does only two things, it pisses me off, ensuring I won’t be giving you my business, and if I do go to all the trouble of informing you of this information, you now have a polluted database because I just signed up with completely false details showing that I am a female Doctor/Baroness/Sir born on January 1st 1901 who loves the movie “Go fuck yourself!”* whose first pet was called “And your dog!”

I love telling people in customer support at my bank that one when they ask for my secret pass phrase so they “verify my identity.”

Customer Support: “And to whom am I talking to right now?”

Me: “Justin Lloyd. The account holder.”

Customer Support: “You’re a man.”

Me: “You are very observant.”

Customer Support: “Can you verify your date of birth for me?”

Me: “Yes, January 1st, 1901.” (or whatever earliest date that their dumb computer system will take)

Customer Support: “And can you answer the question, What is your favourite movie?”

Me: “Go fuck yourself!”

*pregnant pause*

Customer Support: “And how may I help you today Baroness Justin Lloyd?”

The moral of the story is, if you are in business and in the habit of collecting data to benefit you, you’re an idiot and your data is worthless.

* Actually I use an equally interesting, equally childish but completely different “favourite movie” now.

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I have been tinkering around with the software I use for image feature extraction in my large collection of SenseCam images.

Using OpenCV, a SURF algorithm and Python I have been able to create a small command-line application that can accurately determine places I have visited before based on the captured images.

The Python script is also capable of tagging images such as “Venice Office" or “Home/Bedroom” or “Local Coffee Shop” very accurately. I am quite pleased with the results.

By automatically tagging images I can group them in to similar sets of images, and quickly locate pictures of an event or location. Next I want to start working on automatically recognising and tagging people.

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Andy Ostroy at the Huffington Post writes about how he hates Facebook. Well Andy, you’re late to the party on that one, and trust me, nobody gives a damn about your 40-yr old pre-pubescent photographs. No, seriously, believe it or not, not one single person, not even the guy who found them.

*heavy sigh*

Lazy journos writing utter shite about things they don’t understand and never will.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/i-hate-facebook_b_178867.html

Andy writes: “The site is overcrowded with attention-starved grown-ups essentially screaming "look at me… look at me!" all day long.”

And so is the Huffington Post press desk apparently.

Andy Ostroy, belonging to an exclusive club of 1 billion and growing, a membership which includes yours truly. Andy also belongs to the exclusive narcissist’s rant of the month club where you get to pick an obvious topic, such as “I hate Facebook” and write long-winded rants about it on a well trafficked “journalistic” website to get their own 15 minutes of fame.

May I get you a little more whine to go with your spam, sir?

Wait a minute, I think I just wrote a lazy blog post about a lazy journalist, does that mean the Universe will now implode?

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