Never one to drop a story before I’ve completely chewed the life out of it, I went to check on the Faceparty situation, and found a message from the administrator in my account. After some blather about a new webcam service, it says this:

“There have been rumours and press stories saying we are deleting everyone over 36. This is not true (as you should notice by browsing and seeing people over 36). Nobody has been deleted because of their age, but we have deleted 7 million accounts for hundreds of different reasons… most importantly to get all the spammers, fakers etc out. Our plan has been working really well, and we’ll soon be opening our doors again to those who got deleted by unavoidable accident.

If any of your friends were deleted by accident, you can apply to have them re-instated in the Gossip section, under the thread “Friend Deleted?”.

All for now,

*hugs*

Admin x”

While it’s true that there do still appear to be lots and lots of members over 36 on the site, that’s really not what Faceparty announced about its policies. Is this some rapid backtracking, then?

I’ve written in the past about the impossible demands people have been making of social networking sites, forcing them to somehow make sure that sex offenders and paedophiles can’t contact children on them, and I’ve always said I wasn’t sure how anyone could ever expect to enforce something like that.

Well, it looks like Faceparty has found a way:

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website. This has been due either to new legal requirements, violations of our terms of service, the non purchase of your account by the new company who is running Faceparty.com, or any of the following reasons. Information on refunds is also on this page. Please read this page in its entirety.

Over 36 years old?

New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list. This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme. Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Um. Well, I think some people would think they’re wrong for doing that. This part of Faceparty’s announcement is interesting, too:

Unfortunately some of the creators of accounts who were deleted, of an older age group, have been creating new accounts with a younger age (which means that government legislation classifies them as a sex offender by lying about their age on the Internet, even though most who have done this may have done so with good intent and purely to be a part of a site they love and without any intent to manipulate younger users)

Really? Is that actually the law? Anyone know?

I’m baffled. Read their whole justification here.

We’re constantly being told that we need to be vigilant online, protecting our bank details, only using our credit cards on reputable sites, watching out for phishing scams, using electronic card readers and PINs and passwords and security questions and all the rest of it. And, y’know, yeah, fair enough, we should be careful with our information online. But what about offline?

My mother always, without fail, shreds documents containing confidential information, so that no-one could steal post from her bins to rip her off. I use a slightly less high-tech method known as “ripping stuff up” whenever I throw anything away, and when I moved house, my bank was one of the first to know about it. (Though, granted, they still reckoned it’d take weeks and weeks before my change of address actually kicked in.) Yet I’m still getting bucketloads of post to my new flat addressed to the previous tenants.

Very often, this post is just spam - letters from Weight Watchers begging the previous tenant to come back to them, for instance, or appeals from charities. But in the last week or so, I’ve started getting slightly more important mail. Like a credit card (which handily signalled its presence via a clear window in the envelope). And bank statements.

I moved into this flat at the end of February: seven weeks ago. Even taking into account delays in getting things changed at credit card companies and banks, I shouldn’t still be getting this stuff. I’ve been diligently writing “no longer resident at this address, please return to sender” on all the envelopes and entrusting them back into the care of Royal Mail from the beginning - now I’ve started writing “no longer resident at this address, please return to sender SO THAT THEY MIGHT UPDATE THEIR RECORDS” on things. I actually got a letter back from one company addressed to “the occupier” telling me that their records showed Miss A. Previous-Tenant lived at my address, and if that was no longer the case and I had information about her present whereabouts, I should contact them and let them know. But of course I haven’t got any such information — I never met the previous tenant. She’d moved out before I moved in, and so all I know about her is that she used to be a Sky customer, used to be a member of Weight Watchers, and, oh yes, which bank she’s a customer of.

If I were inclined towards identity fraud, though, it really wouldn’t be difficult to take her for a ride. She’s dropped all her information into my hands. I have all her bank details, and I know her name and address. I had, before I sent it back, an actual credit card, and probably the PIN for it in another letter, too. No matter how obsessively she might check her credit card statement, she wouldn’t know if I’d run up a debt of several thousand pounds, because the statement? Would be delivered to my address.

This is starting to drive me batty, quite frankly. I’m fed up of my mailbox being full of someone else’s mail, and it makes me cringe when I realise how careless she’s being with so much information. What’s the point of being careful with your credit card online when you’ve delivered all your personal information to someone else - someone you’ve never met, wouldn’t recognise on the street, someone you know literally nothing about? Please, if you’re out there, and you know you recently moved and didn’t update any of your records: LET YOUR BANK KNOW YOU’VE MOVED. I’m not going to rip you off, I’m going to keep returning your mail to sender and hoping they somehow manage to get in touch with you, but really, this is beyond a joke.

I can understand the appeal of e-cards: they’re free, instant, and if you want to send them internationally, it’s not a problem. There’s no messing about at the post office or trying to figure out when you need to post a card in order to have it delivered on the right day (does Valentine’s Day affect the post office in the same way Christmas does, for example?) - an e-mail is unlikely to get lost in the post, though it might conceivably get caught up in a spam filter.

But it seems Valentine’s Day, like every other event or holiday in the world, has become a target for malicious types. The latest incarnation of the Storm worm pretends to be an electronic Valentine’s card, and no doubt there’s lots of other malware and spam designed as shy greetings from secret admirers floating around out there on the interwebs. And all the warnings from security firms in the world won’t necessarily protect someone who’s feeling a bit down today and hoping against hope that that e-mail in their inbox might really be from someone they’ve got a crush on.

It all seems a bit mean, really. It’s cruel anyway, sending viruses disguised as news reports or greetings cards or whatever else, but somehow, malicious Valentine’s messages just seem that bit nastier.

It’s a bit late for this now, really, but if you’ve left it until today to sort out sending the object of your affections a token of your love - go and buy them a card from a shop, and deliver it by hand, okay? At least then they’ll know it’s not going to zombify their computer.

Photograph: Meredith Parmelee/Getty - taken from the Technology Guardian

It’s not just me, is it? That picture - it is absolutely hideous, right? I actually like the colour pink, and I find it offensive on the eyeballs. It’s actually quite difficult to look at, even before the red haze of rage covers my vision because yes, that hand, with its horribly over-manicured nails, is clearly meant to belong to a woman who is using a hot pink keyboard that appears to have no functional keys whatsoever except a shopping button. I barely know where to start, or how to structure a rant about it.

I know what you’re thinking, though. “So what? Why don’t you just ignore it?” Well, if it had just turned up on a stock photograph website, I would. I’d just scroll straight past. But it was used this week by the Guardian to illustrate a story on its website entitled How secure are your online passwords?

Now, in fairness, the article does talk quite a bit about shopping online. But it’s also, more generally, about how to create and remember a good, uncrackable password that can’t be guessed by random visitors to your MySpace page. It’s a really good article, actually, and it doesn’t seem to be aimed at readers of either gender, particularly - it’s just about encouraging the average Internet user to be more careful with their security online. Considering the Government is busy flinging all of our personal details to the wind, it’s quite important that we’re not leaving ourselves wide open here. But that picture is just so offputting that I almost clicked away from the page as soon as it loaded. It’s hideous, and it’s also completely unsuited to the article. The only link that I can see, the only reason I can find for including that picture with that article, is that the article was written by a woman.

(Presumably, she has a better keyboard than the one in the photo, or she wouldn’t have got very far with her article.)

Maybe it shouldn’t matter, and maybe I shouldn’t care, but quite frankly, I’m feeling pretty offended right now. I’m sure writing angry letters to newspapers is one of the universally recognised signals of getting old and past it (so I sent the Guardian an e-mail instead) but seriously, this is the Guardian we’re talking about. It’s supposed to be one of the more respectable UK newspapers - liberal, progressive, arty, and all that. It’s not the kind of paper you’d expect to be busy propagating sexism. And, okay, it’s only one picture, but the kind of thing is insidious. Sexism is widespread - you only have to cast an eye over the adverts on Tube platforms, or in the paper, or on television, to realise that we’re not living in a state of gender equality. Particularly when you’re talking about the IT industry: the Guardian itself has run stories this year about how women working in IT are paid less than their male counterparts, and that there are far fewer of them to begin with.

Maybe one picture accompanying one article isn’t going to set feminism back by several decades, but it really doesn’t help matters. The idea that women are all pink-loving girlies who do nothing more strenuous or challenging online than buying themselves something pretty (of course, they couldn’t do much more without breaking their nails) is not one that I’d be happy to see propagated anywhere. Let alone in the Guardian.

Not the Government, clearly.

This latest fiasco - two discs containing personal records (including bank details) of 25 million people got lost in the post - is almost too mind-boggling to contemplate. Not least because all the sources seem to say different things: I read an article this morning claiming the discs were password protected but the data wasn’t encrypted, and then another saying the data was encrypted but not password protected. Whichever it is, it doesn’t sound terribly secure, does it?

And yet there are protocols in place to stop this from happening, and it was apparently just an innocent mistake by a junior member of staff. There’s no evidence to suggest that anyone with malicious intent has actually got hold of the discs - they might just have got lost in transit somewhere along the line, and they’ll turn up eventually unharmed.

Or, they might not.

I really don’t know what to say, or think, about all this. I’ll be keeping an eye on the news as the story unfolds, though, that’s for sure.

So, Sophos has revealed that people give out way too much personal data on Facebook - it set up a sting operation in the form of a fake profile for a plastic frog, and set out to make as many friends as possible. And of the invites the frog sent out, nearly 90% buddied up with the amphibian.

How long is it going to take before people realise that putting personal information on the Internet might be dangerous? Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. For some reason, people seem to feel like Facebook is safer than MySpace and that they can give out more information (up to and including their real work and home addresses, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers) and nothing bad will come of it.

Let’s be clear here. If you fill out your profile fully, with all your real information, you had better be pretty damned sure that you really know everyone on your friends list, and that the information is restricted to only people you’ve accepted as friends. Otherwise, you will find yourself a victim of identity theft at some point. It’s crazy to think otherwise.

And a plastic frog..? Come on, people.