In this morning’s news, there is a rather long and informative interview with CEO of security company AVG, Gary Kovacs.
Appearing on The Register interviewed by Tim Andersen, Kovacs issues a challenge to other software companies to get their privacy policies down to one page.
He said that by way of experiment, they took his phone and examined the privacy policies of all the apps and web pages on it used within a two week period. The resulting wordage would have taken 76 days to read, he reports.
He said AVG has already gotten its own privacy policy down to one mobile page. And not only does he exhort everyone to get down to one page, he also challenges them to ensure that it is in plain language.
He said that by way of experiment, they took his phone and examined the privacy policies of all the apps and web pages on it used within a two week period. The resulting wordage would have taken 76 days to read
The challenge echoes my own experience recently where I blogged about visiting a company and having to read and sign an 890 word NDA that had 10 sub clauses.
There are already a few companies that have done exactly this exercise, with Sophos topping the list.
Kovacs is in an excellent position to advocate this as AVG still offers a free consumer service that has tens of millions of subscribers who have to view and assent to its usage and privacy policies.
Kovacs has the full support of TechPro Towers.
Another heartening thing in the news today is on Techworld, as it reports that Google is to kill off its code development platform Google Code. After it was discovered that the majority of users of the free service were nuisance or abuse, it decided that other services such as GitHub, which it uses for its open source projects itself, or Bitbucket could do the job better.
Never sentimental about these things, it now joins several other services in the Google Graveyard such as Currents, Glass and Bump.
A Google exec famously said that it does not fear its rivals but it does fear the next start-up, and as an extension of that, it is acting here in pure start-up mode. Fail fast, fail better.
By recognising when something isn’t working, Google is doing what it should – killing things that are not either supporting the bottom line, or increasing its knowledge and capabilities. Fair play to the Chocolate Factory and long may it benefit from the wisdom to be able to say ‘we tried this and it didn’t work so kill it’.
And finally, one more thing caught my eye.
We have long lauded the quality of our education system, and many other countries have looked with envy at our position in the tech market, particularly with respect to FDI, and thought they wish to be there. Many such envious parties have looked at their own education systems, quite rightly and thought, let’s start there.
However, I thought that this had reached an extreme when the BBC News web site reported that an Indian bride had jilted her fiancé at the altar when he failed a maths test. Now India is famous for the quality of its maths graduates in particular, and a chat that I had with the CTO of HP storage confirmed that the value of an algorithm in storage can be as much as a pure hardware breakthrough, only reinforces the value of good grasp of mathematics in our sector. But even so, the prospect of being left by your beloved for having failed a maths challenge seems extreme.
Reading on, I asked what devilish conundrum had the prospective bride set for her intended. Was it perhaps asking for an elegant solutions to Fermat’s Last Theorem, or perhaps she asked for an algebraic expression of her favourite E8 shape? But no. Alas, the mathematical brain teaser she asked her prospective husband was to add 15 plus six.
He answered 17.
Good call, young lady, good call.
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