Part of the reason why our email boxes are constantly filling up with promotional messages is that we’ve given companies our details and can’t change them easily.

Now there are 2 new apps that combine to help you to take back control.

The Problem.

Once you’ve signed up for something or ordered something online, you have given your email address and telephone numbers to companies who you may then find it very difficult to unsubscribe from. It is also unlikely that you’re able to keep track of all those companies who you have given those same contact details to over time. The result is a stream of seemingly endless emails, phone calls, and possibly even having your credit card charged each month where it may not have been clear that this would happen.

The Sudo Solution.

One possible solution comes in the form of two new apps from Anonyome Labs. The SudoApp and SudoPay apps enable you to create and delete temporary identities as and when you need them, and protect yourself from credit card fraud.

The SudoApp enables you to create different identities and fully customise the name, email address and phone number for those identities. All communication happens through the app where you have an email-inbox and threaded SMS messages just as you would on your phone. For extra privacy, the app also has a web browser with built-in ad-blocking and private browsing.

The SudoPay app allows you to create a pre-paid debit card that can be used with any of the identities you create in the SudoApp. What this means is that you can give credit card details that will enable you to pay for something but have no actual connection to your real credit card. This allows you to completely avoid credit card fraud or problems with overcharging.

Aimed At Two Types of Customer.

Reports about the apps appear to show that they have been developed with two types of target customer in mind. The first is the technically minded / frequent web user who would like to maintain their privacy, and who may benefit greatly from being able to easily set up separate identities to help them achieve this.

The second type of client is the domestic user who needs to organise and keep the different parts of their life separate.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Keeping your business email box free from clutter and keeping the business phone free from unwanted calls are of course important.

Being able to communicate with another person / business or to sign up to receive / download content without giving your true contact details can also sometimes be helpful.

It is also particularly important to protect you and your business from credit card fraud.

Although things like disposable emails have been available for some time (e.g. 10minutemail.com), these new Sudo apps have the advantage of having the identity / privacy and credit card protection available in an all-in-one, easy to use package.

It also appears to be an affordable solution and you can have 9 identities for free, which includes unlimited calling and texting and 1 GB of email.

It is thought that there are more than 75 million unused mobile phone handsets currently in the UK, so rather than leaving it the drawer or even binning it, many people are swapping their old handset for money and / or the feel-good factor.

Binning Phones …  A Bad Option.

The worst option from an environmental point of view is putting them in the bin. It is estimated for example that 75+ million handsets contain enough toxic substances to pollute over 3 trillion litres of water, and therefore if we can’t just keep leave them in a drawer or throw them in the bin, what other options are there?

Here are some tried and tested options:

Sell or Recycle The Handset.

Nearly 80% of your old mobile handset is recyclable i.e. the metal and plastic, and components such the memory and circuit boards. This means that even if it’s broken it has some value, and if you have it recycled you could be helping the environment.

If it’s a simply a case of selling it for financial return you could get an idea of where you could get the most for it on a website such as http://mobilevaluer.com/. You could choose to sell it through popular channels such as Mazuma or E-Bay provided the phone isn’t locked and you’re not breaking any laws.

Whatever you decide to do with it, make sure that the handset is cleared of your own and your contacts’ details as well as all of your other personal details and digital property e.g. photos.

Swap It For Food, Airtime or Points!

A Tesco scheme enables you to exchange your old handset for its recycled value in vouchers for the store or airtime on their network. You can also get Tesco GreenClub points.

Donate It To Charity.

Many charities are happy to receive old handsets as donations which they can then recycle and use the money for their charity work. For example, see Oxfam.

Companies with large numbers of devices such mobile handsets can choose to use a suitable commercial waste recycling company.

Take It Back To The Shop.

Many mobile phone retailers e.g. Carphone Warehouse have a recycling scheme in place whereby if you take your unwanted mobile phone into the shop they will recycle it and make a donation to charity.

Give It To A Member of the Family Or A Friend.

You can, of course, pass your old handset on or give it as a gift to a member of the family or a friend.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

A business could choose to sell and /  recycle unwanted or old IT and comms equipment. This can bring in some funds to be used towards new equipment, or any money or equipment donated to charity could translate into some positive publicity for the business if mentioned in the website news / blog section and social media.

This story also highlights how quickly new technology hardware needs replacing as well as highlighting the many business opportunities and new market segments that have emerged and continue to feed new ventures in and around the technology sector.

The IoT generally looks like creating many more opportunities over the next few years.

Far from being something confined to the world of games or being something that has potential for the future, virtual reality is being used now in important and beneficial ways.

Help With Understanding Autism and Dementia.

Autism is thought to affect more than 1% of the population which equates to over 700,000 people in the UK alone. Its prevalence and its regular appearances in the media spotlight mean that 99% of people in the UK have heard of autism. The complicated and multi-faceted nature of the condition, however, means that very few of us know what autism actually is, and a lack of knowledge about the effects of the condition means that people with autism are frequently treated poorly in public situations e.g. in shops and restaurants.

Virtual reality has been used to help spread awareness and understanding of the nature of the condition in the form of a VR film made by the National Autistic Society. The film was made using Samsung Gear headsets to show a journey around shopping centres through the eyes of an autistic person.

VR has been employed in a similar way by Alzheimer’s Research UK, who have made a VR film intended to help people to understand how simple tasks can become huge challenges to dementia sufferers.

Sales / Retail.

Virtual Reality has also been used to give customers virtual walks / tours and experiences that can help boost sales. For example, estate agents offer potential customers walks around properties while shopping centres and fashion stores offer virtual tours using VR headsets.

Furniture retailer IKEA has also made an app (using the HTC Vive) to enable virtual tours of (and virtual experiences in) its kitchens.

Medical Training and Treatment.

VR has also proved its worth in providing vital medical training in the form of virtual surgery experiences at Royal London hospital back in April this year. For example, iIn a VR operation  a surgeon was able to deliver a virtual surgery experience to Some 5,000 people in 14 countries. This led to the formation of a start-up that will use VR to reduce the cost of training doctors.

VR has also been used to help treat patients with post-traumatic stress phobias.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Virtual reality tours and experiences can help potential customers to really engage with, discover more about, and really understand products and marketing messages. VR can help potential customers to really picture themselves with products and therefore feel the need and desire for them which can lead to more sales.

They can also help people to gain an understanding of complicated things, or to see future situations which can help with the marketing communications process in a unique way. VR can also be applied to at least some aspect of all industries which means that it is very flexible, and it could prove to be a very effective tool in reaching the technically proficient, ‘try before they buy’ Generation-Z customers.

In a worrying change of tactics, hackers have used the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) to launch an online distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the DNS service ‘Dyn’ with global consequences.

Domestic ‘Smart’ Household Devices Used.

Although DDoS attacks using botnets are certainly not uncommon, the fact that this latest attack used smart household IoT devices as such as CCTV cameras and printers to launch last week’s attack does make it unusual and cause for concern.

High Profile Customers of Dyn Among the Millions Affected.

Another reason why this latest DDoS attack received such attention in the media was because in attacking Dyn, some of the very large customers of Dyn were affected or temporarily put out of action including Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit. This is because Dyn’s service involves directing users to the internet address where websites are stored, and an attack on Dyn essentially disabled this function.

As well as the high-profile names, it is estimated that tens of millions of internet addresses were affected in the attack which meant that the hackers were able to use household devices to cause a disruptive event on a global scale.

How Could Household Devices Have Been Used?

Security experts have said the common denominator in this case is that the household devices used were likely to have been made in China, where they would have been given usernames and passwords that could be easily guessed but difficult to change by the user.

This vulnerability meant that malware (possibly ‘Mirai’) was used to scour the web for IoT device targets, and then to mobilise them to make up a giant ‘botnet’ of devices that were then all instructed to send requests to the target Dyn servers. The sheer volume of requests from the devices overwhelmed the servers, thereby causing the disruption to the service.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Fears about the IoT being potentially used in this way have been expressed for some time, and it seems that cyber criminals have found a way to harness the power of the IoT for bad on a grand scale before business has been able to find a way to harness its potential in a productive and good way.

There are, of course, many smart IoT devices used in businesses and this attack shows that these can therefore be another vulnerable area that businesses may need to find an effective way to protect. (Changing default passwords can of course help)

There is also a free online IoT Scanner available (from BullGuard) that can check if check if your internet-connected devices are accessible to the public on Shodan (a search engine for the Internet of Thing) and therefore whether they are vulnerable to hackers. Click here.

There is also a free guide (pdf) to the IoT here.

When the GDPR data protection regulation comes into force on 25th May 2018, a Symantec survey has revealed that 9 out of 10 businesses are not confident that that they will be able to delete customer data on request.

Right To Erasure.

One of the many important impacts of GDPR will be the ‘right to erasure’ which builds upon the ‘right to be forgotten’ when it comes to customer data. Under Article 17, controllers will have to erase personal data “without undue delay” if the data is no longer needed, the data subject objects to the processing, or the processing of the data was unlawful.

In short, if a customer asks for you to delete all of the data you hold about them you will have to do so quickly or face steep financial penalties.

Unfortunately, a recent survey by security firm Symantec shows that 9 out of 10 businesses think it will be difficult for them to delete customer data if they receive a request, and only 4 out of 10 companies have a system currently in place that allows them to do so. This raises questions about how prepared UK businesses are for GDPR and how vulnerable they are to the risks of non-compliance.

Not Ethical?

Another finding of the same survey is that 35% of UK business and IT decision makers don’t think that their companies take an ethical approach the securing and protecting of customer data. This highlights what appears to be a different attitude between companies and consumers about the importance of personal data security.

Data Protection … Very Important To European Consumers.

It is worth companies taking note however of what an important issue data security is to consumers across Europe. The Symantec report reveals that no less than 88% of European consumers think data security is the most important factor when choosing a company. A similarly high amount (86%) think that data protection is even more important than product quality!

Not Prepared Yet.

With the introduction of GDPR less than 19 months away, one of the worrying factors highlighted by the Symantec report is how unprepared many UK businesses are. 96% of companies for example don’t understand GDPR and 91% don’t think they’ll be able to comply with it.

It seems also that UK businesses have also given GDPR a low priority despite its potentially serious impact. For example, only 22% of companies have made complying with the European security demands a priority over the next two years.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The new UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has already stated publicly that she would support the UK adopting EU data protection laws, even after Brexit. The fact is that GDPR is likely to come into force before Brexit anyway, and whatever happens GDPR will apply to organisations anywhere in the world that hold and process data about EU citizens.

This means that UK businesses that haven’t started already should make GDPR a much higher priority and make sure that they are prepared to be able to comply in time for May 2018.

In fact, hardly any data will not fall under GDPR which means your business will need to become very familiar very quickly with GDPR it and its implications.

GDPR will mean for example that:

• Your company will need to be clear about getting consent to use a person’s data for just the specified purpose and not regard silence or inactivity as consent.
• You may need to prepare to select a DPO (Data protection officer) for appointment, and your company may require a lot of training so that everyone understands basic compliance. This could mean that the kind of human error that could cause a data breach is minimised.
• Your data security policies may need to be changed and the changes promoted across the company. You will also have to develop highly effective systems for monitoring for any data breaches. There will also be the need to design compliance into all data handling and processing systems, and could mean starting the analysis and thought process now to ensure that you are ready for 2018.
• You will have to develop effective systems that ensure fresh consent is gained before you alter the way you use data, and that all data on a subject can be easily and quickly deleted on request.
• If your company provides data processing services for anyone else’s personal data you will need to consider your liability and be compliant with the new EU regulations.