7 posts tagged “privacy”

If you thought the story of Amir Massoud Tofangsazan was embarrassing, what if something similar happened to a celebrity?
   Over the last few weeks, the Edison Chen scandal has rocked Hong Kong and even affected the Beijing Olympics.
   Chen, a Canadian-born actor about to make a big US début—already he’s a Pepsi spokesman in Hong Kong—took in his laptop for repair but forgot to take down his home-made porn, which includes 12 female celebrities.
   Just as with Laptop Guy (Thomas Sawyer) in the UK with Amir’s photos in 2006, someone at the computer shop decided they would post the 1,200-plus images and videos on to the ’net.
   If we think the Britney Spears Machine is bad, Hong Kong tabloids make that look like a old world gentlemen’s club.
   PC World offers this analogy: ‘Imagine photos of, say, Matthew McConaughey popping up on the Internet, showing him in various states of undress and sexual acts with, say, Alicia Keys, Kelly Clarkson and Kirsten Dunst.’
   One of the celebs implicated is Gillian Chung, who was supposedly going to perform at the Olympics. Not any more. Prior to this month she had a wholesome image—now she may be more associated with performing and receiving oral sex. (The logical thing now would be to revamp her image as Madonna does regularly, but whether that will go down well in the innocent Cantopop world is another matter.)
   Batgwa summarizes the other celebs:

The biggest female stars implicated were Gillian Chung (鍾欣桐) and Cecilia Cheung (張栢芝).
   Other less well known female celebrities were implicated too, including Bobo Chan (陳文媛), Rachel Ngan (顏穎思), Mandy Chen (陳育嬬), Candice Chan (陳思慧) and Edison’s current girlfriend Vincy Yeung (楊永晴).

   Chen has basically announced, at 27, his retirement from the Hong Kong scene. He might have to: some of the celebs may have Triad connections (there is some gang involvement in Hong Kong moviemaking) and he’s received death threats.
   Cops have arrested nine people so far in connection with the unlawful distribution of the images.
   While Chen is no saint, he deserved his privacy. The poster has essentially brought down the careers of several people. I suppose this is a reminder that when you are in the public eye, you need to take precautions. Putting your own porn on to a disc or a flash drive would be an idea—or simply be a role model and being less promiscuous in relationships and never fear these leaks.
   We may criticize Chen for his behaviour and we certainly should criticize the breach of trust from the shop, but the problem is wider. We need to ask ourselves just where our values are—and the way the Chinese people have reacted shows that they have not fled the free and occupied parts of China.

I was disturbed to note that the video showing Lauren Richardson responding to her father and her dog on YouTube has been removed from the service. The Life for Lauren website states:

Due to an Injunction against Lauren’s father, by the court appointed lawyer ad litem (allegedly representing the interests of Lauren), we may no longer link to the video which showed Lauren responding to family members.  This order, which was signed by Master Samuel Glasscock, asserts the right to privacy of Lauren by the same lawyer who consented to terminating her life.

   How does this work? The folks who say that Lauren is a vegetable and somehow less than human, and that she should starve to death through the removal of her feeding tube, also say that she has the right to privacy.
   So in Delaware I guess the right to privacy is more important than the right to life and to food.
   Sounds like someone doesn’t want the public to have the facts. Can you say, ‘Cover-up’? I knew you could.

This seems to happen every now and then and it’s got me paranoid.
   In 2006, I posted some photos here on Vox privately and they still managed to show up publicly. Last week, the first private Lucire Thailand post still wound up visible to Google—where I saw it today—even though I had marked it ‘Friends and family’ here.
   Be very careful of private posts. I suspect it’s because I post to groups that the Thai post became visible, but I don’t ever remember that happening before.

070521 Farewell to Good Morning

Jack Yan

No more Good Morning for yours truly. As some of you know from the private posts here at Vox, I felt that things haven’t been right with the show for some time. I probably stayed a lot longer than I wished, primarily because I had a pretty good rapport with my co-presenters. 
   Those of you who’ll choose to listen to my little voice post at left will get filled in on the nitty-gritty—which has not been denied or disputed by TVNZ. And I do have a photographic memory that is better than most people’s.
   At the beginning, I agreed to go on the show to promote my work, and my right to do this was taken away gradually. The interesting thing is that Good Morning never managed to contribute to my profile: I had a lot more press coverage before I was on the show. Now free of Good Morning, I have noticed things such as invitations to speak and other public appearances have increased domestically.
   Good Morning, with hindsight, never fulfilled my motivations—and actually caused the opposite. The invasions into my privacy—the subject of written complaints and telephone conversations by me—were, at the end of the day, inappropriate and dealt with unfairly.
   I stressed to the producer, Sally-anne Kerr, in my request to have my contract terminated, that I did not hold her personally accountable. I believe she had had her hands tied by those further up the food chain.
   However, there is no hard and fast rule that says that if you appear on TV, you open yourself up to public inquiry. As I said at the beginning of this month, I am no Judy Bailey (even if some people took that the wrong way). I’m just a regular bloke who did between eight and seventeen minutes of live TV a week, on a show that even I did not watch, except in review situations.
   I thank those who read the private posts for their support and their vows to never watch Good Morning again!
   You will likely see me or one of the team on C4 in New Zealand next month anyway, while Lucire’s US editor Summer Rayne Oakes continues her media exposure. Stefan Engeseth recently was on TV in Göteborg. So we are continuing to be out there, doing things that are far more relevant to the work that we are trying to do at Jack Yan & Associates. Good Morning, sadly, was very incompatible with that: it came to symbolize the trivial in my life, and even the annoying.
   Perhaps unlike Judy Bailey and other people who are actually known by the general public, I don’t want the gig back—so please don’t take my posting as anything but fuelled by my usual desire to share with readers. Except it is regulated by me—not through prodding. Most of you came to my blogs through my real work, not through TV, but I did feel I owed some explanation to those who did come via the show.
   And for those who came via my work, I have always advocated transparency in organizations.

Firing an email off to Vodafone, after they told me via text (sic):

From 17May we're improving our systems for u.There may be delays in bills, plan changes & balances.See vodafone.co.nz/changes or the letter to yr biz next week

   Now, I respect the right of people to use cells. Secondly, I believe cellphones are necessarily evils in emergencies, or for those parents who want to be reached by their children. I, personally, have found them useful in courting. But I do not see any necessity for them in any other context, certainly not for my working environment when I am in my city.
   But do not send me coded messages that I have to decipher! Thus:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Two things, both related.
   I know you’ve some changes ahead with your system upgrade. But you don’t need to text me [number censored] about it. Unless you are prepared to text in English (you know, where the pronoun is you, not U; where there are spaces after full stops—that crazy stuff which makes messages comprehensible). 
   But to be really honest, I’d just rather not hear from you through a cellphone at all, when your letter of the 11th does the same job.
   If you could, please just keep me on your paper mailing list. I detest cellphones, and I see them only as an occasional evil where I am forced to make calls when travelling. The last thing I want is for a cellphone to be an advertising medium, when I do not permit that with my regular telephone.
   Secondly, I note that when you texted me with news of this system change, I could not reply or see your number. Please can you modify my settings accordingly? I have no wish for people to know my number, otherwise they will begin replying to or calling me on it.
   I have been told by your people that putting 0197 in front of numbers will hide mine, but I have tried this with text messages, and none of them will go through.
   If it's at all possible, a blanket hiding of my number to all and sundry would be ideal, please. I could find no setting on the phone to do this, so I assume this is done on your end.

Thank you,

Sincerely,

Jack Yan

   If email wasn’t full of spam that could be filtered out, then I would have suggested they email me with changes, but I doubt I would receive their messages.

New Blogger’s site feeds do not work, if an email from my friend Johnnie Moore is any indication. He is right: I just put my mouse over the old Atom feed button, which used to be correctly linked at old Blogger, and it gives the wrong URL—regardless of whether I have this set right in my new Blogger settings. I have just hard-coded the URL into the template code, rather than rely on the string that Blogger’s template uses (as it seems that old templates and new templates do not appear to be compatible).
   In the old days, I could choose for only the home page to be updated. I no longer have that choice, and I am going through the process of waiting for the entire blog to be republished in another IE7 tab right now. Only thing is, as I typed this post, the following came up at Blogger:

Not that long ago, I wrote a post on a commercial and added some photos. It was meant to be a draft, though I accidentally saved it as for ‘friends and family’. Theoretically, only those marked as friends and family in Vox could see it, right?
   Well, apparently not. The friend I wrote about—who had not given me permission to post those images—contacted me as he could see the post on his mother’s computer in Canada. He may be my friend, but he was not “marked” as such on Vox. Now I am deeply worried about the privacy we have here: as many of you know, there have been posts of a very private nature surrounding my relationship plans that I thought I was sharing with around 10 people. Now, I worry that if a lady in Canada has seen private posts, what else is public?
   Anyone else had such an experience? I don’t want to accuse Vox of anything till I get to the bottom of this.