AV Rant #282: For the Record
Tom starts with a listener complaint. Hopefully that will be sorted. Feel free to report back if there is still a problem. So, if you don’t want to hear Tom insult the entire Internet, make fun of a colleague’s name in an extremely inappropriate way (he really is sorry for that one), and mock pretty much everything, you should skip this episode. Someone must have slipped something in his coffee. To start with, Tom takes a peak at CloudOn, a FREE app that gives iPad owners (and soon others) access to Microsoft Office. How is this legal exactly? Tom doesn’t care, it works and he loves it. Steven Spielberg proves that you can release a movie on Blu-ray, remaster it, and not add 3D (take note Lucas). Tom is taking the credit for the new Nook (and whatever Amazon comes out with that has a light). Tom takes a stab at CE Pro (again). Here is the source article. You judge. CE Pro’s article on HDMI problems was a little better, though. D-Link MovieNite gives you (up to) 1080p streaming from Vudu, Netflix, and Pandora for less than $60. Oh, and YouTube but seriously, who cares? Tom reviews the OtterBox Defender Series Case for iPad 2/3. Review on Audioholics on the way. How much is your privacy worth? This article doesn’t answer the question at all, draws dubious conclusions from the cited data, and generally confused Tom and Liz. What’s your take? This week in Netflix – a new PAC. Too little too late? We’ll see. Thanks for listening. Now, don't forget to:
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On the privacy study: Tom, you are right that the one of the authors of the study, a privacy zealot, has for his own purposes, misrepresented the results of his own study. For thios interested, the study can be downloaded here (the first 35 pages or so can be ignored, except for the literature review which discusses some other studies that have been done, none of which suggest that people value privacy):
http://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/identity-and-trust/library/deliverables/monetising-privacy
Liz’s concerns are not really a problem here: the extra information requested is your cell number, and participants were told that provision of a fake cell number would mean that they would lose their tickets.
So the question really comes down to whether you’d give a merchant your cell phone number if you could save 50 Euro cents — and the answer from their study is that all but a third would do so. The author citing this is really focusing on the third — these are people who are willing to pay to turn over less information, and his point is that a vendor can extract more money from these people *if he can find them*. Interestingly they cite another study which reaches a similar conclusion — people just aren’t willing to pay much to avoid turning over info.