From Private Eye #1667, January 2026:
In 2023 TikTok was fine £12.7 million in the UK for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform without parental consent. Later that year an Amnesty International report showed how TikTok‘s relentless pursuit of young users' attention “risks exacerbating mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety and self harm".
I'm in Nottingham regularly, and I've been to this place couple of times, but I've not walked around it. So, I thought a map would be good, preferably with some identified walks with distance included. Sadly, no such thing on the website. Not even a map.😕
OK, maybe the page's contents are rather static - but really, over ten years?
What is it telling visitors/readers? Could it be; 'don't trust anything you read here because it might have changed'?
I just saw an ad on X which said: '
'We get your brand ranked #1 by ChatGPT and every leading AI'.
That would be a good trick seeing as there is no rank on GenAI.
Naturally, I'm not going to publicise the organization by naming it here.
A contract is something you should read in its entirety, not just the highlights.
This message - 'sign up for our newsletter' - covered the homepage of this TV guide, with no option to delete it or get round it.
Interesting take on GenZ's obsession with social media ... 'Sarah thought she'd met the perfect man'.
I landed on a web page - and got this advert taking up the whole screen ...
I could not scroll up, down or across. I could not get rid of the ad - the 'delete' X is in the top corner but not big enough to be clicked.
So I clicked on 'back' to the previous page without ever seeing the page under the ad - so all the work done to get the link on another site was completely wasted. Ho hum.
The author/presenter of this video as been around for a while and I like [most of] his stuff.
I've included it here as it includes the pros and cons of using ai for researching audience data.
In the early days of website development, an important issue was screen size. Back then the answer was make the web page a fixed - smaller - size so i fit on all screens. as screen sizes increased for PCs and got smaller for laptops, flexible pages were used [they adjusted to the screen size]. Then came touchscreens, generally they were smaller and so we got just coding for them - and as well as flexible for all size screens. Of course, this is the abbreviated history - and I've not even started on the web page layout changing on different devices. Oh, and my book this comes under usability.
The solution back then was 'test the site on multiple screens', and it should still be the case. Not always it seems.
I was searching for a hotel, so after entering my search criteria I needed to click on 'search' [obviously].
This is a screenshot from my iPhone ...
And this is the same page on my iPad mini.
Note that I checked the page on my iPhone just for this blog. I used my PC to make the booking*. And if any tech person is reading this and saying 'well you booked the room, so no problem' ... you're missing the point. Completely.
* I've changed the real date and destination 😏
Back to another old favourite for an example of tech folk doing marketing jobs.
The old favourite is a website not recognising my password, then when I follow the prompt to change it I enter the same password and it tells me it already exists. Grrrr.
But that's not the main reason for this post - take a look at the message I've high-lighted at the bottom of the image.
Back in the day, a mentor of mine told me:
If you’re writing something that matters, take your time in
getting it right.
if you’re writing something that doesn’t matter, don't waste
your time – just don’t bother writing it at all.
Now he might say:
If you’re writing something that matters, don’t write it
with ai.
