Data Protection – Europe versus Rest of World?

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the EEA unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.
Article 8 of the EU Data Protection Directive

We've warned in the past about checking whether any data you transfer to non-European countries conforms to European legislation on data protection. Data Protection practices vary throughout the world and we have to make any data gathering conform to European legislation and check that any other countries that we deal with interactively will agree to conform to European practices. This has usually been done using the safe harbor principle where clients or suppliers in countries such as in the US have agreed to hold the data in a protected or safe mode that will conform to European legislation. You need to take care of this in any contractual agreement you enter into where data gathering will be part of the process.

However, in the last month things have been stirred up by Norway suddenly deciding that Google Apps, in terms of their data protection, may not be legal in Norway or by implication Europe as a result of the US Patriot Act. See: Use of Google Docs or Google Cloud Services is illegal in Norway, Shaun Ellerton (18th February 2012). Of course it won't just be Google who might present a problem as a result of the act.

The use of cloud services generally may also pit the principles of safe harbor against the Patriot Act. That allows law enforcement agencies access to personal data: but the US is not alone here. See Clouds and Law Enforcement Access, Andrew Cormack (9th March 2012). This blog gives useful insight into progress with the proposed EC Data Protection Regulation that was announced in January 2012 and will take a couple of years to be made law.

Of course Google are no strangers to privacy controversy at the moment and it appears that their privacy policies may themselves be in breach of the safe harbor principles, which arguably demonstrates just how difficult these things are. Hawktalk (5th March 2012) states 5 areas of concern over these issues, and interestingly uses the Leveson Inquiry's data protection example as a parallel case.

The present position of what practices the EC follow for data protection are summarised by James Lappin in his G-cloud update (18th February 2012), where he outlines safe harbour, model contract clauses and binding corporate rules as examples of the legislation in action.

Well, it seems that data protection is truly back on the agenda after a lull. We need to keep an eye on developments as none of us want to be found in breach since the consequences can be mega!

Web accessibility and legal requirements update

Accessibility has always been a consideration for websites because if your users can't access the information the website isn't doing its job. But not all users can relate to a website in the same way, perhaps because of physical or educational disability. It used to be that website developers could just try to adhere to the Web Accessibility Initiative embodied in the W3C guidelines, but things have got more complicated.

The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) has been replaced by The Equality Act 2010 according to the RNIB who are currently suing BMI Baby over poor accessibility of its site.

If you are developing government sites then you might be interested in work done for Broxtowe Council by the Shaw Trust, who employ disabled people and were used to test the council's web site over 60 hours. Broxtowe's site has just won the Shaw Trust Plus Accessibility award.

If you have educational establishments as part of your portfolio, they have extra accessibility issues since they have to consider The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001). Durham University's web page gives some pointers for this area.

If you are developing pharmaceutical sites then you might be interested in the article by Nick Austen and Ben Deebie-Rogers, Legal Issues for Pharmacy Websites, as pharmacists have their own code of practice along with the e-commerce directives for selling online, the distance selling regulations and security data protection issues.

For more general info about legal requirements see The COI (Central Office of Information – but it will close on 31st March). And be aware that ethical requirements as well as legal requirements are beginning to find favour.

Windows pi and a new pad

Lots of interesting things on the horizon, ranging from new versions of old 'friends' to a bit of deja vu all over again.

Both Apple and Microsoft have announced new versions of their operating systems. Apple have found a new beast in Mountain Lion, otherwise known as iOS X Mountain Lion ... inspired by the iPad, they say. The shift away from a friendly front end to a heavy-lifting Unix-type OS (as some see it) towards ultimate user-friendlyness continues and is generating some controversy. (MacinTouch, as always, is a good place to check such things out). Are Apple moving away from the professional market with a consumer-oriented OS? Given where they make their money these days it wouldn't be that surprising, but the flak against the current OS, Lion, is enough to give me pause. Have your designers taken the plunge? What is your experience?

You might have thought that Microsoft would have provided a haven of professionalism (as IT support might put it), but perhaps they have also been bitten by the tablet bug. Windows 8 is available to preview, and it also slides and swipes its way around the screen.

What The Register lovingly calls the fondleslab may be due for some updates soon as well. The image on an invitation to an Apple event next week has us anticipating an iPad3 and possibly an announcement of a smaller version of the iPad. Several of our clients have incorporated the iPad into their workflow, with one making good use of it as an inventory tool when roaming their giant 'zoo' of test equipment.

But for me, the delight of the week is the Raspberry Pi, which looks set to bring the 1980s fun of computing back to a classroom near you. Shades of the BBC Micro for those of us old enough to remember it (and I was quite adept at programming it in machine code!) it even has a Model A and a Model B and uses an ARM processor that is a direct descendant of the Beeb micro. At £22 it went on sale yesterday morning and sold out in nanoseconds. More on the way.

I'm excited by the Pi's possibilities as an educational tool but it should also have application as an embedded processor and general gizmo. I can't wait to see what people do with it. As Yogi Berra also said: "You can observe a lot by watching".

Prince2 and iMedia Project Management update

Prince2 Project Management training has moved to a new level called Prince2 Professional in January 2012. We've discussed the previous 2 levels, Foundation and Practitioner, before. Just to put things in context though, Prince2 qualifications are often stipulated for any UK government projects and for any contractors that they may employ in the course of a project. Hence the knock-on effects on iMedia project management since the UK government spawns a lot of work for our industry.

In our previous discussions Prince2 - the name arises out of Projects in a Controlled Environment - took the lead for project management training because it organised any project into controllable pieces, it gave a common language and approach for people across disciplines, and it gained credibility through its moderated exam paths. We backed it as giving you an edge in the employability stakes too. Our own project management methodology reinforces and extends Prince’s. iMedia project managers found it useful to apply the Prince2 methods to iMedia projects instead of mythical mainstream business projects.

So, here we are a few years later and over 250,000 project managers have the qualification in the UK. Now people are saying that it doesn’t provide the 'differential' for employability anymore because of its popularity. Enter the new level qualification: Prince2 Professional. It has a new-style exam based on assessment of applying the Prince2 process to a case study. But you have to work on teams/groups, it doesn't involve multiple-choice questions, and you will be assessed against competency criteria by moderators interviewing you as well as assessing your interaction with your team colleagues. See Balance Global, Jackie Hewitt, 6th February 2012.

This qualification takes two and a half days at an assessment centre. Sounds tough and apparently it is. On top of that, the pass rate is projected to be worse than the Practitioner rate of 73%. See Digital Arts 31st January 2012.

I tried to find information for you on the costs of this new Professional Course but failed. The closest I got was through the APMG’s (Association of Project Management) pdf describing the course and saying that assessment centre fees varied! However, seeing as the Foundation and Practitioner courses were, by reputation, expensive ... hold onto your proverbial hats!

Interactive Media: what's that?

This term still poses problems for definition because the technology enabling interactivity keeps evolving. Here we are in 2012 with computerised access to the web: including social media sites and gaming, interactive phones and interactive television. But looking at the technology alone doesn't give all the answers either. Many feel that the interactive bit is all about the user experience not the technology features. The integration of text, audio and graphical information that users can control is now taken for granted, when once this wasn't the case.

There are spin-off areas of note that depend on fields of interactivity too. So we get ludology. Yeah really! This is the study of the interactive gaming experience based on the Latin ludus for game. See Ludology.org’s blog What is ludology? A provisory definition. Forget luddites (as in workers against technology) here which is where I started unfortunately.

Then there's media literacy. This looks at how people relate to and absorb interactive information instead of static information - and the information can be any media-based content. For an introduction, see Media Literacy in an interactive age by Art Silverblatt (July 2000).

But even all this doesn't encompass the reach of interactive media. Skillset have tried hard to segment the interactive sector into groupings that demonstrate its pervasive nature. They talk in terms of creators, enablers, clients and end-users. See Our definition of the Interactive Media and Computer Games Industries, for a useful overview of how they see the movement in the UK.

The user experience has proved to be a driving force, since positive interaction can lead to more time spent, more receptivity to what's on offer, better sales and brand awareness, among other key drivers. Facit Digital in Germany seem to have a strong view on this type of interaction at: www.facit-digital.com.

If you belong to back-end, harder-core computing, you might feel left out. Not at all. Your contribution is as key as the rest of this multi-disciplined sector. You only need to look at the incredible breadth and depth of the areas that need you in the call for papers from the IEEE Multimedia 2012 to appreciate that – Multimedia Systems and Architecture, Multimedia Communications and Streaming, Multimedia Content Understanding, Modeling, Management and Retrieval, Multimedia Coding, Processing and Quality Measurement, Multimedia Interfaces, Multimedia Security and Multimedia Applications. Shame it's still called multimedia but that means interactive media, right? See ism.eecs.uci.edu/ISM2012.

Well, it's true we haven't really defined social media within this romp through interactive areas. So to put this right we hand over to Heidi Cohen, May 2011, who has gathered 30 such definitions. Tickle the brain cells more at heidicohen.com.

Interactive sites and marketing – time for a review?

So your older clients are satisfied with their interactive sites whether internet, social media, or mobile. Perhaps you can suggest that in the present difficult market they might like a review of the efficiency of their interactive marketing. Does the site feature as high in the rankings for their type of product and service as it did at the beginning? Many things can change that can affect this: more competitors in their market can drive the ranking down, more companies might be paying to get higher in the rankings because the leads become more crucial in the erratic market, customer needs have shifted in response to the economic situation so they may be going elsewhere, the client's brand image might have changed in the marketplace, return business may have weakened, fewer leads might be generated as the market shifts and so on.

Even though companies get interactive service analytics often and respond to the feedback regularly, they may not fully appreciate how many aspects have changed over time. That's the value of a true review so that you can say, 'This is where you were and this is where you are now. Where do you want to be?' This type of review focuses the mind so that you get good data to help you tweak the site to operate better for your client. This should lead to more business for you, and better performance for them. Of course, with the spend on online marketing now outweighing non-interactive, specialist companies for online marketing exist. Are you using them? Shouldn’t you be? Do you have an alliance with any? Maybe it's time for you to recognise that expertise.

On a different tack, do any of your clients use Google Analytics? Are they using them optimally? Offer a review because people get locked in to a set way of analysing so when a system is updated, they do not take advantage of the new features. Are you using them for your own site? Are you using them optimally? Take a look at a hint and tip from seo.co.uk on February 4th 2012 , Are you using visitor flow?,

Then there’s the bounce rate to consider too at The Read Aloud Creative site, in their piece called, What exactly is a Bounce rate, and what can I take from it? by Richard Golding on January 26th 2012.

How are your Google Goals and Funnels then? PS Website Design discusses these posted on 30th January 2012 at www.pswebsitedesign.com/google-analytics-goals-funnels

More than enough to get you thinking and possibly doing! Any tips appreciated. Way to go!

Cautionary tales

Two legal items caught my eye this week, and reinforce the care needed when building web sites.

The first is a copyright infringement case heard in the Patents Small Claims Court, which provides a 'low cost' route to justice in intellectual property cases. In this case (Hoffman v Drug Abuse Resistance Education (UK) Ltd [2012]) a charity web site had included some photographs illustrating types of drug. The web designers and their client believed that the photographs belonged to the UK government (and they had been used on a government drug information site) and as a result could be used on this web site. Unfortunately this was not the case as they were copyright of a long-established photojournalist named David Hoffman and no permission had been given for their use in this way.

The photographer successfully took action for copyright infringement against the charity who published the web site and the judge calculated and awarded damages. The judgement is clearly set out and makes useful and interesting reading.

In the book we recommend that you don't necessarily believe it when your client says that assets are cleared for their web site. You are probably aware that most contracts that involve clearance of assets include some kind of indemnity and that this, in turn, should be covered by professional indemnity insurance. I should add that if whoever had used Mr Hoffman's photos originally had included correct rights metadata with the image this whole show could have been avoided. So that's another good reason for making sure images on your web sites have appropriate metadata.

A few days ago the RNIB initiated legal action against the bmibaby airline over accessibility (or lack thereof) on their web site. Apparently this has been ongoing for some time and the impression I get is that the RNIB felt the airline had been given enough time to fix the accessibility issues but there had been no progress.

I suspect many of us thought that accessibility was no longer the problem it was a few years ago and that the basic techniques were now common practice. In any event, with more and more web sites using content management systems the feeling would be that the CMS would do the heavy lifting on accessibility as it does on other things. Clearly we, and our clients, should not get complacent.