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Who owns your phone number & Details? Directory Services?

Recently a court ruling went through in Australia which , by itself, wasn’t a massive major, but it was enough to make the news. A website called ‘Local Directories‘ was taken to court by  a company called Sensis which is a subsidiary of Telstra Clear because they copied the data from the Yellow and White pages of their directory services and then put it on their website.

The court ruled that whilst the databases on both sites was identical, it wasn’t owned by Sensis, and they did not create it (ie it was not an original works) and so they could not copyright it. The Judgement was “None of the Works were original. None of the people said to be authors of the Works exercised “independent intellectual effort” or “sufficient effort of a literary nature” in creating the Works.”

This made me curious and brought me back 10 years ago when a databases did the rounds in NZ containing a CSV rip of the NZ phone book. It was incomplete and only contained Auckland phone numbers, and more than one person (off the record) laid claim to doing the original scrape/rip.

I’m guessing most people are thinking ‘this is all very benign’ and ‘what’s the big deal’ about now, hang on, i’m getting there. What if somebody now took the data from the phone book, and let you search by street name, suburb, or even phone number (reverse phone book anyone?). According to this new ruling, not a heck of a lot!

So to try a proof of concept i hunted about and found that old Auckland rip from 10 years ago, imported it into the database, munged the data so no names/addresses/phone numbers matched up correctly and put it on the web.  You can see that here http://velofille.com/phbook/ .  I see that http://www.whitepages.com/ provides a reverse phone number lookup already (search the number, find the address), which is a little dodgy, however this is only for USA by the looks.

Now, are you beginning to see the problem with the court ruling? Whilst its great to finally track down who owns that number who calls you at 3am and hangs up or does deep breathing, or even ringing all your neighbours on the street when the music is too loud. What happens when salesmen decide to cold call an entire suburb? or the creepy guy next door rings you to tell you he can see you through the gap in the curtain? What happens when this information is used for something not so nice?

Whilst this originally was an Australian ruling, and Australian problem, much like internet filtering and a lot of other things, these things have a way of happening in NZ. Already Yellow Pages are taking Auckland company Image Marketing Group (IMG) to court saying it obtained details of over 300,000 businesses from the Yellow Pages and re-sold the information via its own products.

Now, in my mind, and in a perfect world, surely *i* own the right to my own personal data, in which case surely they have to pay *me* to use it on their website in the first place? There is no one major company any more doing only phone and yellow/white pages any more, I can have my phone provided from one place, and white/yellow pages is now an independent company.  So this led me to wonder ‘who is paying for this information?’ .

Whilst their Privacy Policy page says they promise to not sell your data to third parties without disclosure, they do say they retain the right to use it in any “Yellow Pages Group companies”. So does this mean if they decide to start up a Marketing company they will use that data? or any other company they decide to start up? Its no secret they are not making much money at the moment, and their Terms of Service page also does state “If you require a comprehensive list of New Zealand businesses for commercial or marketing purposes, we have other services which will better meet your needs.”

Also, I see that in their Terms of service page they state “You are allowed to manually access the Directory, to make a copy of the results of any searches made in the Directory, and to use those results, provided that none of such access, copying and use is for the purpose and in the course of any business, or for the creation of your own commercial database”. So going by these guidelines am I allowed to copy the entire database, and put it on my own PERSONAL website without making profit or being a business? And if somebody copies the data of my personal website for commercial use, well … that’s a whole new can of worms isn’t it?

Now factor in that Brendon Battles is the director and shareholder of IMG. This guys is really fairly famous for making millions via spamming, and was once reported to have once sent 50 million spam emails per day.

So, where do you stand in the scheme of this? Is it time they started paying *us* for information they are sharing and making money off? Let me know your opinions!

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Fiji Holiday – day 4 & 5 & Home

Day 4
We got up, there was no dish washing liquid so had to try and rinse things until we found housekeeping. At 8:30 we were picked up to go out on a caving tour which included a village visit, a hike, and a Kava ceremony.
The trip out was an hour to Sigatoka where we were dropped off for 30 minutes to look around. Whilst we looked about the van went off to pick up other people from other resorts before coming back and picking us up. Our van had 2 familys, ours and another Australian couple and kids.
Our tour guides were a couple of transvestites who were very knowledgeable. From Sigatoka township we went onto dirt roads and travelled another 50km up into Sigatoka Valley where the temperature was a good 5C higher than it was in the low lands.
It was a bouncy trip with some major pot holes in the roads, however the views were fantastic in several places. We stopped briefly to wave to some boys who must have been about 5-10years old gathering firewood, and also to look at a wind farm and resort in the middle of nowhere.
We managed to see several farmers using ox to plough the land on the way, a stray pig on the main road, and cops with guns.

When we arrived at the village the other van behind us had another couple of people. The houses that the Kava ceremony was in better condition than the usual ‘barely staying together’ look most had, so i presumed it was a community building or church as these seemed to be consistently slightly better than the houses.
The porch area was large and the poles of it covered in some reflective metallic yellow wrapping. Apon closer look i realized it was covered in chip packets! Clearly going all out to impress the tourists.
The other guests had clearly never read up about Fiji and none had covered their knees or shoulders. Apparently this is common so they had some Sulu (Sarongs) in the vans for those people. Paul (my hubby) was the ‘chief’ in our group so went first with the Kava. He managed to forget the fijian words but was able to repeat them when they were yelled by our guide. I was next, and then several others including my youngest son Quantum. The girls were a bit scared for some reason, perhaps worried they were end up drunk 😀
We got a vague numb tongue afterwards but nothing major. It was clearly a weak mix for the tourists, however I did see they left 5 packets of extra Kava for the village. I needed to use the toilet whilst there, so decided to make use of the only flushing toilet for 50km. Lets just say it was probably more hygienic to go outside in a long drop, nobody had clearly explained that a flushing toilet needed to be cleaned!

After the ceremony we went down to the river where a couple of bamboo rafts waited for us. By ‘raft’ i mean a large bundle of bamboo tied together with rope. Several locals swam across whilst pulling the raft, at which point we got out and went up a bank. We hiked for about 30 minutes whilst the guides showed us local trees, fruit, vegetables. The knowledge the guides had was incredible, they knew almost every tree and fruit and how it was used. Children learn the farm whilst growing up so apparently this knowledge is normal for most Fijians.
Eventually we arrived at the Caves. To enter them we had to walk through a shallow river (no biggie since we had already walked through several and were all wearing sandals). The second cavern was only accessible by crouching low with only a gap of 30cm out of water to get through.
The second cavern was large and had a waterline about 2 mtrs up the wall, where in winter, the cave was inaccessible. The Third and fourth caverns were also large, and all of them had fantastic rock formations and things like ovens where they cooked those they killed. Apparently the hunters would eat the muscle, sailors used the bones for needles and parts, the chief would eat the brains and other internal organs.
We discovered why islanders have the large horn when they blew it. Cockroaches ran everywhere trying to get away from the noise (and they were HUGE and plentiful).
We left the cave, walked back to the river. By this time we were hot so half us jumped into the river and helped swim the raft over. We then played in the river and ate fruit for afternoon tea until we drove home. The van had a plentiful supply of beer to drink on the long trip home which was fantastic, plus a lot of stories. After arriving home we went to the ports and had Indian and watched a show of fire dancers

Day 5

Today we went out to the ports, and took a cruise around all the Islands. We stopped at the South Seas Island which was about 200mtr x100mtr and had free food/drink etc and use of snorkelling gear. We stayed for a couple of hours and snorkelled the reefs. The fish were amazing, the reefs were a little worse for wear after recent bad cyclones. We got back on the boat and for the next few hours just looked at all the Islands as they went past. Beachcomber Island was the only one with a Wharf, the rest had run abouts that picked people up off the Sea Cat and took them inland. Some of the beaches were amazing, as was the coral.

After getting home we crossed the road and picked up a coconut. They were plentiful and free for anyone who wanted them. We opened it up and it tasted great! Since it was Sunday and our last night, we hired a babysitter and went out to dinner. Husband and I spent a relaxing 2.5 hours eating and sitting back relaxing talking about everything.

Day 6

We pretty much cleaned up, swam, and checked out. Checkout was 11am and the plane pickup was 5pm so we had several hours where we had nothing to do. We were aloud to hang about at the resort still and use it so we left our bags there and took the Bula bus around the other resorts. We decided the one we were at was by far the best, especially if you had children, however others had some decent things going on.

At 5pm we got our ride to the airport, and left Fiji at 8pm. We arrived in NZ at 10:55pm, got all our gear through customs ok (was a bit worried about the wooden crafts i had and shoes from the hike).
Overall the holiday was a mega success , we are already planning on going back again and staying at perhaps a different place.
South Seas Island looks like a good spot to perhaps spend a day or two next time since its only $110 per week or $25 a night and that includes food and drinks (yes, including booze!). And that cost is Fijian so its even less in NZD (about $20 a night!), and we can perhaps do some diving as well as the snorkling!