Ray Sullivan Author: government

Showing posts with label government. Show all posts

Saturday, 29 December 2012

Taxing Times for All

These are hard times for many. In some parts of Europe, in the mature economies, unemployment is running at over 25%. That's a tough gig for anyone. I know some will carp about the Social State and the amount of benefits available in such-and-such a country, but I'd rather earn a wage than be on the dole.

Those of us who have kept earning through the last five years have noticed a reduction in the purchasing power of our wages, in the main. Taking a dive in spending power might seem trivial compared to not having a job, and I'd agree, but it is still unpleasant. It is also galling to many that there is still an apparent strata of society that seems largely unaffected by the economic downturn - there's a significant amount of people who appear to be able to spend money like there's no tomorrow. Senior bankers appear to be in this group.

Of course, whether you have experienced a pay cut, job loss, or just an erosion of your spending power, or even if you are one of the lucky few who are relatively unaffected by the economic situation, the impact of the current financial situation will not have passed you by. However all of us are likely to be affected by the cuts in public spending to some degree.

Now this isn't a political rail against any particular party; this blog is read across the globe in both hemispheres in countries that have widely differing political systems so that would be a pointless exercise. And I fully accept that some readers believe whole-heartedly in the cuts to public sector spending while others will think it needs to be balanced and another group will insist that any cut is a bad one.

Now I'm a bit of a pragmatist by nature. I recognise that we are always going to have a public sector of some size and consequently there are always going to be taxes needed to fund them. Plus, apart from the extreme right wing in this country (at least) I guess we all want roads, schools, hospitals and all the other embodiments of a public infrastructure. In the UK at the moment the drive is to reduce the public sector while maintaining the tax burden to reduce the deficit, mainly because that's the only obvious route to doing it other than raising taxes.

Like many other countries the UK is now taking a firmer stance against those who choose to not pay the right amount of tax, however this isn't always an easy task. It is for those of us who are normal wage earners, but for the well heeled and large corporations with the cash to pay smart people to scrutinise the tax laws there are many ways to avoid paying too much.

This has caused a bit of a furore in the UK recently as it seems many of the global tech companies such as Amazon and Google are paying little or no tax in the UK and global coffee house Starbucks has managed to avoid making any profit, in a technical sense, for a decade, consequently not paying any tax.

Actually, despite the public outrage about the Starbucks side of the picture, they did pass on a sizeable amount of tax in the form of VAT and staff Paye-As-You-Earn (PAYE) income tax. What they did do was reduce their Corporation Tax liability by legally shifting money around Europe and leasing their own logo from the US. As far as I know, and I'm not an accountant or a lawyer, they didn't break any laws, they just exploited gaps in the legislation of the country.

The same goes for Amazon and Google. They employ a lot of people in the UK, who all pay income tax. A lot of the goods we buy from them are subject to VAT, so that feeds back into the public coffers too. But they do seem to have spent a lot of effort in reducing their tax burden. But I'm guessing they quite like having roads to drive on and hospitals for their employees.

Anyway, there's been a bit of a stink about the tax avoidance tactics of these three companies. I'm sure they're not unique but it would appear that they are amongst the most effective at the avoidance thing. As a result of a newspaper campaign backed by outraged politicians, who quite recently spent a lot of their inventiveness in fabricating expense claims that bled the taxpayer pretty well dry, the three companies are getting a lot of public scrutiny as 2012 draws to a close.

Predictably Starbucks caved in first - avoiding buying a latte in Starbucks is a lot easier than avoiding using Google to search for an alternative coffee house in the area or using someone other than Amazon to do your on-line Christmas shopping. But Google have also felt the pinch as advertisers have decided that associating with them might damage their corporate image. Amazon may come out of all this unscathed and virtually untaxed - they hold that much sway in the public shopping mind that it's difficult to imagine any other business ousting them right now.

But the real issue is the tax rules. None of these companies, as far as I'm aware, did anything illegal. Sure, they may have been inventive, wilful even. Morally challenged probably doesn't even come close. But law breakers? Almost certainly not.

Simplify the tax rules, then make it clear - you trade in this country, you pay the taxes due. If any Government gets that wrong and makes it too unprofitable for the likes of Amazon, Google or Starbucks to trade here then they'll do what any rational commercial enterprise would do - they would turn their backs on the country and millions of vote bearing, coffee drinking, Google searching and Amazon buying people would ensure the Government got it right pretty quickly.

Sorting the tax rules out should be a priority, although I don't see any move from my armchair, just lots of outraged politicians attempting to bully Amazon (good luck there guys). However, getting the tax laws is likely to be a big job, will take time to get right. So I guess a bit of moral pressure on these three and any others that are legally avoiding tax will have to continue.

In the meantime, why not avoid paying any tax - or indeed any money - at all by 'buying' my second novel, The Journeymen for free using the special code in this posting. Offer good until January 1st 2013, don't ask exactly when, it's in Pacific time zone. Best you get your copy from Smashwords earlier than later.

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Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Head in the Cloud

Hands up if you've got a bookcase crammed with books? How about a CD shelf? A frightening number of DVDs bursting out of your TV cabinet? Box of photos in the attic? And by box, I mean a big box. I'll bet half of you still have video tapes and, if I probe enough of you, at least one will still have some Betamax tapes, next to the eight tracks on the shelf.

Yup, in what seems a blink of my eye, but is probably more than a lifetime for some of you, technologies have come and gone and will probably disappear without a trace in the next ten years.

Books? Well you should know my view by now, sure there will be a resistance to eBooks but that will change - pricing, ecological arguments, the sheer convenience of carrying around countless books will reach a tipping point soon.

Music? In my lifetime I've seen vinyl go, come back, go again, resurface and despite holding respect for a minority of collectors will go once and for all soon. The unit cost of manufacturing, the ecology point (again) and the viable alternatives will render vinyl as relevant as the eight tracks some of you still love to play - both of you. CDs are going the same way, and I'll admit to being a bit of a dinosaur here as I still buy the odd one myself. But the future isn't plastic based, it isn't even physical in the sense of hard drives, USB flash drives and MP3 players.

The same goes for your photos, the fading ones in the box upstairs and the thousands on various media associated with your digital camera. Let's face it, they're becoming unmanageable and difficult to keep track of anyway. Some will be duplicated on several hard drives, DVDs and flash drives, others, probably the ones that you really want to keep, are in one place only. If you can remember where they are, it would be great.

And what about those films on DVD and Blu-ray? Think of it as a temporary solution that is almost played out. Already we're hooking into Lovefilm and Netflix for our old films and TV programmes. The established TV companies are struggling to pay their way using the traditional advertising model. It doesn't work anymore because increasingly we're recording our TV on hard drive recorders and fast forwarding through the ads. Think of 2015 (or thereabouts) as the year the networks went subscription. Once that step is made then programming as we know it will disappear also - programmes will be released at a point in time and will then be available for viewing when required. With subscription YouTube will almost become redundant as we'll all have our own personal YouTube.

Sure, there will still be advertising TV, but it will be for those who won't or can't pay for subscription TV. But who wants to pay to advertise to the poor or the tight fisted?

All of these activities will take place on Clouds, the huge server networks being constructed and linked around the planet. Apple have one and millions of us are using it. Amazon are developing theirs - it's up and running in the US but I think they are struggling to broaden it across Europe, which is probably as good a reason as to why the Kindle Fire still hasn't launched here. Your mobile phone probably uses a cloud and if you prefer webmail to a client based service such as Outlook then your emails are sat on a cloud.

Cloud based storage has moved from a concept to a reality in a few short years. It is being used by you and me, often unknowingly, and is used by small, medium and large corporations. Governments and their agencies are tapping into Clouds big time. Bolt on your remaining legacy photos, music, books; add subscription TV, film and music and you'll find that we're up in the Clouds and there's no going back. Or, indeed, down.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, WH Smith, Kobo and many other good ebookstores.

Digital Life Form is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $8 (or for £5 plus P&P in the UK for UK readers - contact me on raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com for details)

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my book

To View My books In....

Saturday, 24 March 2012

Wired For Sound (and Vision)

In the Eighties the phenomenon of the day was the Sony Walkman, a genre breaking device that looked futuristic and sleek that allowed everyone to take their music with them. Cliff Richard had one of his biggest hits based on the Walkman with a song called 'Wired For Sound'.

Thirty years on and anyone digging a Walkman out of their attic will wonder what the furore was all about - it has the stying of a washing machine and the profile of a brick. And the media! Cassette tape, prone to stretching, intolerant of mishandling and, for goodness sake, limited to forty-five minutes of music on each side - OK there were 2 hour cassettes but the agreed wisdom was that the longer tapes failed quicker.

Compare that to today - solid state memory rules for portable music devices, although I suspect the days of dedicated MP3 players is near to an end as screens suitable for watching movies seem to appear on virtually every domestic device these days. Creative did have a strong pitch to rival Apple in the early days of the iPod with it's Zen range of hard-drive MP3 players, but I think it lost that battle pretty quickly thanks to the solid state technology and Apple's dominance of the legitimate MP3 market.

But as I pointed out above, it's getting harder to find devices that just play music - images are becoming a must as well as Internet surfing capability. A recent US study identified that a significant number of sports games were watched on mobile phones and tablet devices - not enough to threaten the TV based viewing figures just yet but double the number compared to other computer based devices such as PCs.

This is another example of the convergence in technology we're seeing and I think the only element slowing down this process is the availability of open wireless networks. In the UK, outside of your own home, the availability of free wireless networks is patchy, confined to coffee shops and MacDonald's. Some hotels and guest houses offer it but increasingly the bigger hotel chains expect customers to pay anything from £5 a day to £5 an hour.

While I think it's a great marketing opportunity for commercial traders to draw customers into their business premises, there's an obvious gap here, only filled to a minimal amount by 3G. Yet most cities and larger towns are increasingly desperate to draw in tourists, and those that are unlikely to appeal to holiday makers are trying to make themselves attractive to commerce. Yet I'm unaware that any such location in the UK is looking at providing a free WiFi service for it's inhabitants and visitors. They seem to think that leaving it to the commercial sector to provide Internet access is adequate.

I don't. I think the first towns and cities in this country to build in free WiFi within its tourist and commercial sectors will find both sectors growing, probably exponentially. It won't be the same for every town and city to join the club, though - fortune will tend to favour those who do it first. The ones that come later will do so because they have seen other towns and cities do well because of their initiative, but by then the public expectation will be that WiFi is available for free everywhere.

So the moral is this: Someone will bite the bullet and fill their town or city with free WiFi and will reap the commercial and tourist benefits, hopefully soon. Everyone after them will be playing catch up to some degree until we reach a point where free WiFi is as expected as street lighting. Which is interesting, as street lighting has a number of useful features that would be needed for such a network - height and electrical power supplies, for example. At least street lights would be earning their keep 24 hours a day instead of just at night time if they had WiFi network routers strapped to them. Telephone poles might seem to be a more natural anchor, but they are disappearing fast underground - that shouldn't happen to street lights.

Come that day, or night, then we'll all be wired for sound and vision.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my book

To View My books In....

Saturday, 17 March 2012

RFID - A Really Fine IDea

There's a technology that's been bouncing around in commerce for some time now that should change the way we work and play in the near future, assuming an even better technology doesn't leapfrog it.

RFID, Radio Frequency Identification, has been used to track pallet loads of goods from the warehouse to the supermarket for some years with some of the bigger corporations (manufacturers and supermarket chains). To the likes of Wal-Mart or their UK subsidiary, Asda, it's convenient to measure stock by the pallet load, so that's been a useful way for them to evaluate and shake down the technology.

However the logical next step is to embed the RFID tags, which are increasingly compact and cheap to produce, into every can of beans, bottle of ketchup and plasma TV set in the store. The advantages of this next step are obvious: implemented correctly we should be able to to have our shopping basket scanned and priced in seconds without having to remove it from the trolley - OK, with current technology levels that might involve microwaving a few chickens in the process, but the challenge is far from insurmountable. Apart from the time saved it also means that us shoppers can pack our trolleys in the way we want, ready for loading into the car, as we shop.

But there are other, less obvious advantages. Stock levels, currently monitored very closely at the point of sale, can be monitored even closer - the point of sale method is notoriously poor at accounting for shrinkage, the industry euphemism for theft. This should mean better stock control, less disappointed shoppers when their favourite product sells out and could lead to a Just in Time (JIT) approach to retail.

I want to see if the process can be extended further, though. One of the most fascinating advances in modern manufacturing is the ability to track a product from raw material through to leaving the factory. In advanced processes it is possible to tell which tree, which animal, which mineral mine was used to make up the raw materials, to determine when the component parts were put together and every step taken in the process. So when you return a faulty product, some manufacturers can work out literally when it was made, packaged, shipped as well when the raw materials were produced.

So if you capture that information in the RFID tag at packaging stage then you will realise more benefits. Essentially the RFID tag would be a two part tag - one part identifying the product in the same way a bar code does now, the second uniquely identifying the individual item. One advantage of this is that supermarkets would be able to rotate stock intelligently, identifying items approaching the 'best before' date effortlessly. It would also make anti-theft methods more effective as they could detect cans of beans and the odd plasma TV being taken out of the store without a sale entry in the store electronic ledger. A bad day for shoplifters but a good one for the majority of us who have to subsidise these losses whether we want to or not.

But let's not stop at the store. Put the technology in your fridge, your cupboards, your garage storage - you know, the place where cars used to be kept. Link it all to your home network, set minimum and maximum stock levels, create a few rules and bingo, your weekly shopping list created on the fly, ready for you to ping it to your favourite store. Or ready for a savvy Internet application to search out the most cost effective way to shop for what you need by comparing the prices in all the major stores automatically, perhaps even booking home delivery slots around your home timetable.

And when you've filled up with beans, ready meals and the odd alcoholic beverage, the RFIDs could help with the sorting for recycling. Increasingly local councils are under pressure to ensure greater and greater amounts of material is appropriately collected for recyling, now here is a way to measure, regulate and manage it. And in the meantime it allows those of us who have struggled with a food container to decide which recycling bag it goes in. It could also be used to incentivise the whole process, providing a way to give credits to consumers who recycle the most effectively.

But the biggest advantage, now we've fitted RFID scanners in our fridge, cupboards, garage, dustbins etc is that each and every time we can't find our keys, we just have to access the software on the netbook and voila - there they are! If only I could find the netbook....

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my book

To View My books In....

Thursday, 15 March 2012

Tablets To Cure Inflation

In the US the Amazon Fire has given the Apple iPad a good run for its money; not enough to hurt the technology giant, but sufficient to give it a bruise. In the UK, Apple pretty much dominates the market. The Fire should have been on sale over here since January, according the the rumours that circulated in December, but clearly that didn't happen. As I've mooted before, perhaps Amazon had bigger fish to fry, such as an unexpected success story in the US that they decided to capitalise on.

The Kobo Vox is probably the only low to mid price tablet attemting to fill the shoes of the Kindle Fire over here and as I pointed out in an update to my main blog entry on the Vox the other day, it's getting a bit of a boost. Up until this week the choices for a Vox over here were, in order of price, Asda (Wal-Mart's UK subsiduary) at £147.00, WH Smith at £149.99 and Play, a subsiduary of Rakuten, Kobo's owner, for £170.49. My best guess was that Play, a traditionally competitive company, was being forced by its parent to keep the price high to give WH Smith a chance to trade against Asda. I'd certainly be surprised if they sold many Vox units at that price and extremely disappointed if any of my readers paid that much, given the information I've provided.

Well, the picture has changed once again, not dramatically but sufficiently to indicate that the kid gloves may be in the process of being peeled off. Although the Asda and WH Smith prices have held steady so far, Play has just dropped its price down to £147.99. OK, Asda still has a £0.99 price advantage, but Play are throwing in a 4Gb micro SD card in with the sale. So technically Play are undercutting Asda for the first time, and believe me, the SD card is a must have for this device. They are also giving seven Vox units away on a comptition being run this week, so they are trying to raise the profile.

So, was it just time for Play to man up and challenge Asda? Could be, and it will be interesting to see if Asda react. They are one of those retailers that don't like being undercut. But it's also likely that Rakuten have decided they need to cement their market position in the UK before the Fire arrives. I haven't seen any convincing posts indicating that the Fire is imminent, but I suspect any company that can afford to shell out $315M on an eBook company can also afford better market research than I can offer.

And in a strange quirk of fate, this might just feed into the UK economy in an unexpected way. Inflation in the UK is measured by comparing the relative cost of a 'representative' shopping basket of items each month and comparing their costs to other months. Sure, staple goods such as milk and meat feature in there, but so do many other items commonly bought. It's just been through its annual overhaul and some items have been dropped. Incredibly this is the first year that camera film hasn't been included; and it's the first year that tablet computers have. Although I'm predominantly a digital photography kind of guy I do dabble in the old fashioned technology and can report that film is flipping expensive these days, so it has probably been skewing the RPI upwards, probably for several years. Including tablets, which I don't see as a general replacement in most households, could push the RPI up further still on current tablet data as the highly expensive iPad is the dominant tablet over here, but come the invasion of lower priced and viable tablets we could see some deflationary presssures from the tablet device catergory.

So a tablet price war, led by Kobo, augmented by Amazon and targetted at Apple could help the Govenment achieve its objective of getting inflation under 2%. Now that's a prediction I wouldn't have felt comfortable in making a few weeks ago.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my book

To View My books In....

Monday, 12 March 2012

eBook Pricing - DoJ Apparently Agrees With Me

If you've been following this blog for a while, you will realise that I have a particular bee in my bonnet over eBook pricing. As my recent journey into self publishing paperbacks revealed (still languishing in Germany, by the way), paper based books have an inherently expensive element that is quite independent of the costs associated with producing the core product (food, beer, single malt whisky - not necessarily in that order - with a few grains thrown to the editors, cover designers etc).

My issue is that eBooks shouldn't attract the same price as print books because of the production costs that don't exist, however if you look on Amazon, for example, you will often find that the eBook is the same price or even more expensive than many print versions. If I believed the author or any of the other talented people involved in the generation of the book took a proportionately larger payment for the eBook then I might not object so much, but I suspect that they don't.

My abiding belief is that the people who lend the least to the book take the majority of the additional cash. In my warped mindset, these are the publishing equivalent of the oil price speculators that are pushing up the cost of motoring (just to polarise all blog readers against mainstream publishers except those who also speculate on oil prices, who are probably scratching their expensively coiffured heads wondering what the problem is).

I've ranted on about this many times, adding that I believe the prices of eBooks are simply too high. I don't have an issue about premium authors commanding higher prices for their books - I accept that it is reasonable that someone would pay more for a popular and established author than they would for someone like myself, an aspiring author hoping to bridge the gap to become popular and established. But paying the same or more for the eBook version?

Well it seems I'm in good company, depending on you view of the Department of Justice, for they also believe that eBook prices are too high. The Department has challenged some of the main book publishers and distributers, including the eponymous Amazon, on their pricing strategy. Amazon are probably feeling a little peeved to be included in the list of potential offenders because seemingly - I have to resort to third hand reports here because my involvement in eBooks doesn't go back far enough for this - when Amazon first started offering eBook versions of mainstream books some years ago they did try to keep the eBook prices low. However it seems the publishers of these books objected and Amazon let the prices rise. What the DoJ seems to be concerned about is price fixing, which would be anti-competitive.

At the moment, the DoJ's approach appears to be a little informal; a kind of warning shot across the bows to give the industry a chance to disprove any wrongdoing or to put its house in order if it is fixing the prices. The next step becomes a lot more formal, and DoJ have faced down mega industries such a microsoft in the past, so they're good for a scrap. Whatever happens, the hope is that more realistic eBook prices will result.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my book

To View My books In....

Thursday, 1 March 2012

Did Apple Buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

It used to be a staple Hollywood comedic plot line, the one where the hapless hero of the film is conned into buying the rights to the Brooklyn Bridge, usually using up his last reserves. Essentially the cinematic equivalent of Caveat Emptor.

A couple of years ago Apple believed it had bought the rights to the iPad name from a Chinese company, Proview, for what must now look like a bargain price. The rights to the name, which has since become an iconic brand name with sales of iPads exceeding 32 million units since launch, were sold for £35,000 (around $55,000 US at the time). Were Proview naive or desperate?

Well it seems that possibly both descriptions were partially right, however there is a third possibility that the persons selling Apple the rights had no more authority than if they'd been throwing the Brooklyn Bridge in as well.

The iPad name had been in use by Proview for nearly ten years and referred to a desktop computer optimised for Internet access - the name is an acronym for Internet Personal Access Device - and they shifted about 20,000 of the devices over the ten years. Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind with this company, though, is that although it's struggling today, it was a big player in its time - it was ranked tenth in the world for display manufacture at one point.

Then came the sub prime problems and the resulting worldwide recession. Along with a number of other large and potentially survivable companies, Proview suffered crippling losses and technically they aren't trading as far as I can tell right now. I haven't seen their company accounts to judge just how badly they are doing, but I'm in good company there - the Chinese Stock Exchange hasn't seen their books either and have given Proview until the end of June this year to publish their results and prove they've enough capital to operate for at least twelve months. I don't think they're holding their breath on this one.

So, my guess is that when Apple popped up a few years ago and asked to buy the trademark of a product that had sold on average 2,000 units a year and was ten years old anyway, at a time when the company probably couldn't afford a round of lattes from Starbucks (but then again, who can?), they probably thought of a number to get them through the week and doubled it for good luck. Fast forward on a couple of years, 32 million iPads and 20 billion dollars of sales and they're still hanging on - just.

Apple have been to the Chinese lower courts to wrestle the rights to the name from Proview on the basis that as far as they are concerned, they bought those rights a couple of years ago. Proview are stating the people that Apple dealt with weren't authorised to sell the name. Apparently the courts are struggling to identify who is who anyway (apparently, all Apple employees look the same to them).

Will Apple lose? Possibly - they lost the first round and let's not forget that they're playing away. Ultimately they won't lose the name, or the exclusive rights to it, they may just have to pay a bit more than the original rights to achieve that. Let's face it, the guys at Proview have nothing to lose and an awful lot to gain. Given that the company accounts are shrouded in mystery, which is usually a euphemism for undisclosed debt, then perhaps the solution for Apple is to buy the company, clear the debts and pay some redundancy?

It's probably easier and cheaper than battling it out in Chinese courts.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or look me up on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, WH Smith, Kobo and many other good ebookstores.

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my book

To View My books In....

Saturday, 18 February 2012

Don't Forget, Facebook

I mentioned in a recent blog about why I thought the Facebook IPO was overpriced - a personal view from a guy working full time for a modest salary and flogging a few eBooks in his spare time. Although the blog was reasonably popular by my standards, it didn't result in an invite to sit at the top table at the next G8 to advise on fiscal policy. Fair enough.

But the key point of that blog was that it's literally not what you know, but who you know that counts. In a nutshell, I have a limited amount of value as an individual; we all do, and we all know how sought after that limited currency is. But add to that information the people we associate with, who we interact with, then there is a chance that what we like, some of them will like. And vice versa. Find a way of stitching this information together and you've got an intelligence web that John Le Carre couldn't have dreamed of during his stint as the Cold War novellist of choice.

That's what Google has built and Facebook is building. The inflated valuation on Facebook is not related to its clever coding, fancy interface or cool keywords - it's based on the second and third generation inferences that can be drawn from what you like and do multiplied by your friend list. Look up a Facebook contact, look at their list of friends - there will almost certainly be people there not on your list. Follow any of these new names and look up their list - even more names, people you've never heard of, will never speak to who in some tangential way are linked to yourself. On its own, that link is meaningless, but constructed in a web of millions of people and patterns will appear; lists of people worth targetting for specific products.

I suggested keeping your data lean, revealing as little as you could bear while reaping the benefits of the social media, and to be fair I was just looking at the obvious data people post that can compromise you, that could be used to access your online accounts. You may recall I suggested removing any data you didn't feel was necessary, with the aim of reducing your exposure to criminal acts against your online identity.

However removing that data isn't the whole story. If you've lodged that information with Google or Facebook and then deleted it, then the chances are, they still know it. Sure, they'll respect your wishes and suppress the information from outside of their organisation, but it's far from certain that they'll delete it. This has resulted in a number of people getting very worried about the retention of this data, which is why the European Union is considering a right to be forgotten - possibly the ultimate human right in a digital age. It's also being mooted across the Atlantic as well. If the legislators get their way then the value of Google and Facebook will be affected in a serious way - a large part of their value is based on the ability to cast this net wide and deep.

As humans we should be pleased to know that this is taking place, as we will be a little more in charge of our data than we are now, should we choose it. It's not universally popular though, and I'm not talking about Wall Street investors - if the right to be forgotten is made law it could hinder law enforcement and anti-terror efforts as well. No matter what your views are on their accessing such data, it's well understood that the people they target have provided many of the leads they need through social networks, often on the way up. That could be a serious curtailment.

I don't know if the lawmakers will succeed and I'm certain that those with vested interests will make the journey as difficult as possible. It'll be interesting to see who makes the journey the hardest - the moneymen or the spooks. One to watch, I guess. But in the meantime I'm keeping as much data private - except for the list of books I've written, every blog entry that reveals my inner rambling thoughts, my Twitter account details and, if anyone fancies buying a paperback copy of 'Digital Life Form', possibly my PayPal details. That's it, nothing else.

Or perhaps my sister's website promoting my ancestors - if you know anyone who may be related to Sullivans originating in Wales then take a look at this.

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I can be followed on Twitter - @RayASullivan or email me on raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony and many other good ebookstores).

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my books

To View My books In....