‘‘ I
In 2016 Apple introduced facial and object recognition to make it easier to find particular photographs.
saw in the news that Apple is storing photographs of – how best to word this – semi naked images that you’ve taken of yourself into a special folder on your iPhone. Is this true?
Not exactly, no. The story comes from a Twitter user who posted that if you type the word ‘brassiere’ into the search tab on your photographs folder it brings up nude or underwear photographs that you might have in your camera roll. In 2016 Apple introduced facial and object recognition to make it easier to find particular photographs. If you wanted to show a friend that picture of a horse that you took last year it was necessary to scroll through thousands of images to find it. What you can now do is simply type ‘horse’ and your phone can quickly locate it. So the ‘folder’ is simply a collection of photographs that match the search criteria you have chosen. Apple isn’t doing anything underhand; it’s just trying to be helpful, with perhaps some unintended results!
As it’s coming up to Christmas I’m spending time on Amazon checking out possible gifts for loved ones and friends. To my horror I’m of course realising that Amazon is remembering all of this and displaying it in future visits – I’m concerned that my surprises may actually be not that much of a surprise after all. Is there anything I can do? Yes, have no fear, it’s actually really easy to sort this one out. Log into your account on the Amazon website, and click on ‘Accounts and lists’ which is on the top right. Choose ‘Your recommendations’ from the drop down menu. Next choose ‘Your browsing history’ and on the right hand side there’s an option called ‘Manage history’. If you click on that you’ll see that you can toggle your browsing
December-January 2017/18
history on or off and you can also choose to remove specific items. Your secrets are now safe!
SearchLite
There have been a couple of fairly important changes to Google in the last few weeks and I wanted to bring them to everyone’s attention. Google has now decided that it will base its results on the country that you’re searching from. So if you’re searching in the UK you’ll get British-based results, but if you then go across to France, you’ll get French-based results. On return to the UK, you’ll seamlessly revert back to the British country service. The idea is clearly to help mobile users; there’s no point in seeing UK-based Pizza Hut restaurants if I’m in Paris or vice versa. That’s great for the one in five searches that are location-based, but not much use for the rest of us. The implications are important however. In the past, if I wanted to check out results from the Netherlands I could simply go to
Google.nl and run my search. Now however if I try and do that, Google will simply say that I’m still in the UK and will ignore my Dutch preference. Getting country-based results is now much more difficult than it’s been in the past. If I try and use something like DuckDuckGo and then search with Google, the search engine can still work out where I’m from (the UK) and give me country appropriate responses. I can go to
Google.com and add in site:. uk and I’ll get a different set of results. I can then go into the settings and change my region, then try Google. com – again, a different set of results. If I add in site:.uk it’s a different set again! I then went into Tor and Opera browsers and used a VPN (virtual private network) and Google decided that I was in the Netherlands. Different results again. To cut a long story short I tried about seven different ways of getting country-based results and got very different results. This really means
Phil Bradley (
philb@philb.com) is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author.
Got a question: If you have a question for Phil please email him at
philb@philb.com and title your email ‘IP Query’. Keep up to date with his work on his search blog:
www.philbradley.typepad.com; his Web 2.0 blog
tinyurl.com/philbradley; or his website
www.philb.com.
that searchers have absolutely no way of getting an accurate set of results based on country properties, but it does mean that Google can further personalise and monetise search in their advertising favour.
The next change that Google has made is to change the way in which info:<URL> works. It used to provide you with some useful information such as a link to the cache that Google had stored, web pages similar to the page in question, web pages that linked to that page, pages that contained the URL being searched and a snippet of the page in question. All that you get now is the snippet of information – all of the other useful information has been removed. You can still search for it, but it requires extra steps now, rather than having all that useful material in one place. A great shame in my opinion.
Site of the month Given it’s ‘that time of the year’, if you’re short of a card or two to send, try
www.cardsforcharity.co.uk which is ‘Cards for good causes’ and it’s the UK’s largest multi-charity Christmas card organisation. At least 70p in every pound goes to the charities they support. Merry Christmas and a happy 2018! IP
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 25
Internet Q&A
pp24-25.indd 3
07/12/2017 13:15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
