Day 52

Guten abend,

We have made it to München airport. We are a wee bit early, it is not quite 7:00pm here, and our plane leaves at 11:00pm. But, better too early than too late.

We had a good morning in the city of Linz.

Linz is an industrial city, and the number one industry is steel, which supplies the German car industry. Steel can be a dirty and smelly industry, but the city of Linz has done a lot to clean up the steel mill, reducing odours and emissions while still being cost competitive.

Steel is an old and unexciting industry and to move with the times the city of Linz has built the ARS Electronica Centre. Celebrating the merging of art and technology, it is partly a “museum of the future”, partly a digital art gallery and partly a research facility.

Koro spent a couple of hours at ARS Electronica ( https://ars.electronica.art/news/en/ ) while Grandma went shopping. Koro was very impressed by this museum, especially the the feature on online personal data.

We have noticed a very strong movement in Europe demanding far greater transparency about the personal data that large companies are storing about individuals and what they are doing with that information.

For example, any website that uses cookies (which is just about all of them) displays a message as soon as you start browsing their site. You have to explicitly agree to using cookies to make the message disappear. It does get a bit annoying after a while, but it does provide some transparency.

Facebook has come under huge pressure, both in Europe and and in the United States, to be more open about the data it is storing about individuals. In the last twelve months it has become public knowledge that Facebook creates “Ghost Profiles”. A Ghost Profile is data gathered about an individual who doesn’t even have a Facebook account, but that person is mentioned in Facebook posts.

A great example would be little India Brown who is only a few weeks old. Since her birth, there have been dozens of posts of from the very proud parents, and messages of goods wishes from friends and family. Facebook will almost certainly have started building a Ghost Profile for little India Brown.

You can bet that when when India turns five, because Facebook knows her date of birth, suddenly Ricki and Victoria will be seeing advertisements for school uniforms and school stationery. Leading up to her birthday next year, Nana Judy will suddenly be seeing adverts and suggestions for Barbie dolls and tea sets. Leading up to Christmas Grandad Stu will start seeing adverts for LEGO Friends… and it will damn well stop right there, because “times are tough” and Grandad Stu does not open his wallet for anyone. But, Facebook probably knows this about Grandad Stu already.

Another example of personal information being stored is telephone companies in Europe. Phone companies were forced to admit that they were storing the location of the user every time the user did something on their phone, be it check their emails, make a phone call, use Google Maps, browse a website, anything involving data transmission.

A German politician forced his phone company to release the location data they had stored for his phone. He then released a six month portion of this data to the public. It was amazing to watch a display that showed his movements day by day over this six month period. The data was from 2009, nine years ago! How long did the phone company intend to store this data? As a result, phone companies in Europe must now destroy all location data that is older that six months.

Jami-Lee Ross better hope that the phone companies in New

Zealand don’t store similar information. If his wife gets hold of it there might be some questions!

There are so many displays and technologies represented in ARS Electronica; virtual reality, bio-technology (cloning and gene manipulation), space exploration and computing. Most of the displays are interactive. In every area there are really helpful guides who explain a bit about the display and show you how to use it. For €9.50 it is great value, you could spend a whole day a there. Kids would love it, because they get to play with all the neat stuff.

After lunch we started our drive to München, about three hours away. The weather was spectacular again today, an unbelievable 21 degrees. At this time of year, the temperature should be single digits, with snow in the alps.

Traffic was heavy on the German autobahn, and we were heading West, towards to setting sun. So while it was a quick trip, we only managed to get to 185km/h on the unrestricted autobahn.

Alas, Koro has still not managed to get to 200km/h on the autobahn. He will have to try again next time. Koro might need a better car, such as a Skoda, if he wants to achieve his goal. And not from Hertz!

We are sitting in the airport now.

We have had some dinner, but still have about an hour to go before we begin boarding. We will get on the plane, go to sleep, and when we wake up we will be in Hong Kong.

Buzzy Bee is with us, looking forward to charming the air hostesses.

Love to you all from Grandma and Koro and Buzzy Bee. XXX OOO.