The problem with Facebook
I was deeply troubled by your report about the use and abuse of Facebook in Sri Lanka and India (11 May). While we in the west fret about the use and abuse of our “private data”, people are being killed as a result of fake news and other digital manifestations. Ironically the solution to this problem is not more protection of our privacy, but the reverse.
All Facebook accounts should be registered in a way that is subject to regular inspections by an authority – the police if necessary. This registration should supply detailed information about the address and occupation of the account holder.
Those in the west who find such registration intrusive have a simple solution: close their account.
I find it paradoxical that the mainstream media, whose dedicated task is to expose malpractice and its perpetrators, is calling for greater protection of Facebook privacy. There is nothing private on Facebook. It is a marketing tool. Mark Zuckerberg is being duplicitous when he says Facebook has failed its account holders by not protecting their privacy.
Val Wake
Lodeve, France
Business school scrutiny
A ruthless self-seeking gaming ethos, the MBA hallmark, is exposed by Martin Parker (11 May), although we could question his “bulldoze the business school” advocacy for being a bit over-the-top. The problem he identifies is that business schools advocate outrageously, if tacitly, risk-taking, resource-plundering and insider opportunism.
Academic programmes in medicine, law, engineering and planning are guided by professional practice codes. These disciplines uphold specialised expertise under the watchful scrutiny of practitioner guilds.
Business school graduates should be required to pledge and adhere to an ethical code: to uphold societal wellbeing and environmental virtue, and to never lie, cheat or steal in their service to client and society.
Robert Riddell
Helensville, New Zealand
Alarming past and present
What is disconcerting about the abuse of Auschwitz museum staff is a merging of the genocidal past with the potentially atrocious present in Poland (11 May). And what is equally alarming is that this is being driven by what are essentially the same dark forces for both periods.
This contrasts with the situation in France, where thought is being given in the Vichy Tourist Office to illuminating what happened in that locality in the early 1940s so as to present this darker aspect of French history in a proper perspective.
The time has come to confront this uncomfortable aspect of French history. We must ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia
Value of analogue clocks
Reading an analogue watch face may be a complex cognitive task, but I can’t remember not being able to do it (Leader comment, 4 May). Once mastered, it greatly simplifies many tasks. Say you have to be somewhere in 15 minutes. Check your analogue watch, shift your view forward a quarter-turn of the minute hand, and you have a visualisation of the time and distance you need to get there. A digital watch requires a computation to do the same thing, and all you end up with is a disembodied number. The value of an analogue timeface is more than just a link to our heritage – it is useful.
I hope, when the renovations are done, Big Ben doesn’t have a huge digital readout.
Keith Stotyn
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• Regarding the future of analogue clocks: UK schools are replacing them with digital ones. As far as wristwatches are concerned, the analogue variety will survive; try taking someone’s pulse rate while observing digital seconds tick by and you will understand why.
Anthony Walter
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Briefly
• I share Oliver Burkeman’s confusion (4 May) about the meaning of the expression “move the meeting forward”. Do we meet sooner or later? I understand that in India, it is accepted to use the word “preponed”, as the opposite of the more familiar word “postponed”. It is a useful and unambiguous coinage and should be generally adopted.
David Josephy
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
• In your article about Cape Town’s water crisis (11 May), you compare the city’s per capita water use with California. It would have been more appropriate to compare water use with another city, say San Francisco, rather than California as a whole, where most water is used to irrigate the desert that makes up the Central Valley.
Kenneth B Alexander
Auckland, New Zealand
• In Death by sex and television (11 May), Marina Hyde writes “despite maintaining ‘one position’ during sex with Stormy [Daniels], Trump has now adopted several conflicting ones on the payment”.
This is where Donald Trump got it the wrong way around. During sex, he should have had many positions and afterwards, when talking about it, he should have adopted one position: the position of telling the truth. But telling the truth has never been Donald Trump’s strong side.
Thomas Klikauer
Sydney, Australia
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