Facebook: buyer beware
I agree with your editorial comment (30 March) that online services must be subject to some kind of regulation. However I am mystified by Tim Adams’s piece in the same edition that makes repeated references to private data on Facebook. As far as I can establish, there is nothing private online. Unless it is encrypted – and even then it’s doubtful if the code can withstand the hackers – the chances of anyone sharing a private moment online are as likely as it snowing in the Sahara desert.
Advertising-supported media rightly see Facebook as a rival. This has resulted in some highly emotional accounts about people’s rights. Facebook has given people a platform to express themselves, but as far as I know it has not given them any rights. There is no code of ethics, just terms and conditions, which nobody reads.
Adams’s piece does cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Cambridge Analytica campaigns, which leads one to think: what is the fuss all about? In this digital age there is a tendency to marvel at what can be done with the right devices. This in no way lessens the importance of that old warning: buyer beware. Children, especially, need to be instructed how to use these devices to protect themselves and their friends. Adults also need to apply some common sense in what is becoming an increasingly confused and complicated world.
Val Wake
Lodeve, France
Healing power of nature
In Nature Watch – Chew Valley (23 March) Dawn Lawrence expresses her gratitude that some ancient pastures have been saved from modern farming. She reminds me how lucky I am to live here in Victoria, where I can drive half an hour and be immersed in pockets of wilderness.
Last week I was in a grove of firs and cedars two metres in diameter and 60 metres tall that somehow escaped the rapacious saws. As I walk along sketchy back-trails I am always conscious of when I am in second growth from industrial logging (post-second world war, small trees close together), second growth from selective logging (pre-second world war, larger trees with more space between) or original growth (huge ancient trees in valley bottoms). I can feel how healing it is to spend time with the old trees.
When I return to the city I am greeted by a forest of tower cranes. While the local population explodes, I am amazed that just a short time from here I can be surrounded by timeless natural beauty and never meet a soul.
Edward Butterworth
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
‘Schoolchildren’ disdainful
In your comment piece Trump won’t fall without a push (23 March) the young people who are organising the public protests against gun violence are referred to as “schoolchildren”. This is misleading and carries a hint of disdain. The word implies humans up to the age of about 10. The young people organising the protests are high school students. In the US high school covers the last four years before college: the 15- to 18-year age range.
As a Brit who has lived in various parts of this continent for 60 years, I observe that most high school students are more mature, confident and aware of social issues than those in the UK in the years around 1940. That might be different today.
Joyce Phillips
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, US
Who is hogging all the art?
The Opinion in brief of 16 March featured the piece Why should we let the rich hog all the art?, decrying 13 Picasso works having been bought by a London art adviser, along with nine more having been sold at Christies, the implication being that these works would be lost to the super-rich and would no longer be available for viewing in public museums. “Thank God for export bars”!
But those paintings would not have been in Britain in the first place if Spain and France had had export prohibitions. And isn’t the art wealth of the country largely the result of extremely wealthy Brits buying up treasures abroad? These now fill the land’s galleries to an extent that would seem disproportionate to the UK’s share of the population.
So who did you say is hogging all the art?
Anthony Walter
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Briefly
• Used to selling hardware to vast numbers of Australian handy-persons, Bunnings evidently over-estimated the great British public’s enthusiasm for do-it-yourself (6 April). Perhaps the company was misled by all the talk of self-reliance that hung about the Brexit vote. It may have thought the term translates into a willingness to hammer, cut, drill and screw in the process of fixing things around the house. As it turned out, it was actually about screwing up something that worked pretty well on an international scale.
Lawrie Bradly
Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
• Thank you, Michael Sheen (23 March), for focusing on action for ordinary individuals, in this case over debt. I have just finished David Hepworth’s excellent Uncommon People, the truth about who rock stars really are. Just plain people. The rest is hype. Replace rock stars with politicians, clergymen, so-called successful businesspersons, and a whole new world opens.
E Slack
L’Isle Jourdain, France
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