William Heath’s blog

See below our letter to Orange explaining why them offering me £250 is pretty useless. Interesting to see how much work is really involved doing this. Of course what the lawyers have done is a fraction of what I’ve had to do….

Hurrah! BT has dropped the intrusive Webwise targetted advertising system developed by Phorm. I had the dubious honour of being named in the attack web site StopPhoulPlay with which Phorm tried to win friends and influence people.
The only worry is that even more unscrupulous and shadowy players will now try to use deep packet inspection [...]

U. writes out of the blue to say
Hi william
Just been reading about your problems with orange. I’ve run into similar problems in that 5 years ago my phone got stolen in spain. I rang orange to bar the phone at the time which they said they’d do. 2 days later I rang about getting a [...]

Here’s a reply from Orange which came in yesterday:
Dear Sirs
Your Client: Wiliam Heath
Account Number: xxx
I write further to your fax dated 3rd June 2009, the contents of which are noted. As set out in my previous correspondence, points 1-3 of my offer of settlement were offered purely as a gesture of goodwill, on a [...]

You may recall where we got to with Orange, my long-term mobile phone services supplier which started threatening me and invoking debt collectors and damaged credit reputation after someone else took out a mobile phone contract in my name.
After months of trying to get them to listen Orange’s offer of settlement made no apology, [...]

I’ve posted to the Ctrl-Shift blog the text of my GCLive talk today. It was potentially awkward having to chair the session as well as make a strong contributution, but Toby from EPG, Sureyya from Intellect and John from the Home Office were unfazed and supportive.
What I said further develops the VRM and “volunteered [...]

Over at the blog of my new company Ctrl-Shift I’ve tried to explain how much better public services could be if we looked after our own information ourselves to a far greater extent. It’s an attempt to cross-fertilise contempory thinking about user-centred identity management and personal data management with years of concern about the direction [...]

After a weekend of no broadband (I use Zen as ISP, with BT as wholesaler) I have to confess it’s not all bad. BT had extensive faults over the weekend, but did fix them. And Zen’s phone support is excellent (I had some router glitch that prevented me getting back on top of things immedaitely). [...]

Background: Orange has since December wanted to bill me for a contract fraudulently taken out in my name using a stolen drivers’ licence and cancelled debit card. They put put debt collectors on the case and threatened to damage my credit rating. After a lawyers’ letter they last week finally acknowledged my concern, though not [...]

Here’s a useful tool called Zamzar which converts wps documents to other formats online for free. Jolly handy if someone has written an affidavit (for example saying I was at the Hambledon nursery on 5 Dec and NOT in the Oxford Street Orange shop taking out a contract) but has sent it in wps format.