Over the last few days, I’ve been sending several emails to Virtual Surveys to ask some questions I had about a few issues. So to keep you in the loop, here is what I have found out.
Firstly, and probably most importantly - Virtual Surveys will have no more interaction with the MyLifeMyID users. That means there will be no discussion of the report, no reinstatement of the forum in any form, and generally no further action whatsoever. They will provide a link to their report on the IPS website when it appears from the current blank MyLifeMyID page. Virtual Survey’s position seems to be that they have fulfilled their obligation to the Home Office/IPS in terms of collecting the research, and therefore will not dedicate any further resources as it isn’t in their contract.
Secondly - Since VS themselves are effectively abondoning us, I asked if it were possible for them to send out an email to all (ex) users with a link to here or any other site where users could continue to discuss the ID card issues and the VS/IPS report. Although they sympathised that users no longer had a means of discussing the report, they refused to do so on the grounds that it would apparently not be part of the research project, and therefore their use of the email addresses for this would violate MRS guidelines and the Data Protection Act.
Now, I fully understand some of their positions here. Obviously, linking to what is essentially my personal blog would be almost an endorsement of it, and that isn’t really acceptable. I didn’t want this to occur, nor was I expecting it to, it wouldn’t be good practice. However, considering the total deletion of the MyLifeMyID forum, I thought it would have been perfectly legal and reasonable to provide a number of links to users of pro and anti ID sites where they can continue to stay informed and debate the matters. For them to have done nothing strikes me as a bit callous, however, I’m not a legal expert on this, and they may indeed be forced into this hand. It is however hugely disappointing that VS will not provide a forum for discussion of their report. I believe it would be beneficial to them in many ways to do so, but they have made their position clear.
I have since had the idea that providing links on the mostly blank holding page at MyLifeMyID would mean no problems with email addresses and the DPA. However, I do think this is likely to be met with the same response. I think Virtual Surveys simply aren’t interested anymore.
Finally - following up on the last post, I have sent an email off to Virtual Surveys asking for Ray Poynter to comment on or clarify what exactly he meant in his comments to the Economist. I will post a follow up to this as soon as I can…
EDIT: Ray has responded - please check the previous entry for details.
22/10/2008 at 11:29 am
Here is part of a post I have made on the Economist website correcting what one of my colleagues describes as the worst typo of the week!
“Oops! What I meant (and what I thought I had typed) was ‘It is hard to describe a website which hosts so many anti-ID Card comments as Government propaganda.’”
No, this was not a revelation, just really bad checking/typing.
Regards
Ray
22/10/2008 at 04:41 pm
Thanks for the clarification Ray, I’ll update the posts to reflect that
22/10/2008 at 04:53 pm
[…] comments AND Government propaganda.” You said it, Ray.” EDIT: Ray Poynter responded here and on the Economist website regarding his earlier […]
01/12/2008 at 01:00 pm
Anyone who had though of hacking the MyLifeMyID site would have come across a programmer’s note-to-self that read “generally we don’t want to be indexed”. This note appeared in the “robots.txt” file, a file that sat on the MyLIfeMyID web server and basically said to search engines “move along now, there’s nothing to see here”.
Refer to: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12432440&mode=comment&intent=readBottom
for full details.
Within days of posting that comment in the Economist, the incriminating code was removed from the MyLifeMyID site.
Coincidence?