Just when we thought city hall couldn’t get any more childish, Rob Ford and Karen Stintz decide to stand in the same room and trade tweenage insults through the press. The background: this week, Ford publicly scorned the TTC’s recent $50-million, sole-sourced contract for the newsstands, bakeries and cafés in the subway system; Stintz says she twice tried to call the mayor to discuss the deal, but never heard back. Yesterday, when Stintz found out the mayor was holding an impromptu press conference, she hustled to Ford’s office to observe. After a Ford staffer asked why she crashed the scrum, she replied, in pitch-perfect passive aggression, “I just want to hear what the mayor has to say. I don’t hear from him directly.” For his part, Ford vowed he left a message for Stintz as soon as he heard about the deal and offered to show reporters his cellphone history, triumphantly declaring, “cellphones don’t lie.” Maybe they don’t, but it seems like at least one of these politicians is fibbing. [Globe and Mail]
(Images: Rob Ford, Christopher Drost; Karen Stintz, Mike Beltzner)
What’s your privacy worth? According to a recent study by the German Institute for Economic Research, less than 66 cents. The Institute presented moviegoers in Berlin with a choice when they purchased film tickets online. They could buy them from a theatre that demanded their cellphone numbers, which could be used however the theatre pleased, or, for the same price, they could buy a ticket from a theatre that didn’t ask for any personal information. Eighty three per cent of patrons chose the latter. The next batch of customers was presented with the same choice, only this time the privacy-friendly theatre charged a little bit extra—half a euro, or 66 cents Canadian. Sales dropped to 31 per cent. The lesson? We may prefer privacy, but we’re not really willing to pay for it. 
Bad news for Bell Mobility and parent company BCE: they 
When Dalton McGuinty suggested in September 2010 that cellphones and tablets might have useful educational applications, he was savaged by both the press and his political opponents. The Toronto Sun called the idea a “terrible” surrender to already tech-addled kids who want to use gadgets only for Facebook. The National Post likened it to welcoming cigarettes and sharp objects into class. Even Wired magazine panned the idea of gadgets in school as “premature,” citing the potential for distraction, cyber-cheating and a digital divide between kids with the latest gear and kids without. The Ontario Tories picked up all the outrage and ran with it, slamming the notion as “absurd,” a prime example of just how out of touch McGuinty was, and asking, “Shouldn’t our kids be learning math and science instead?” They went on to suggest that if McGuinty gets his way, we will soon have “sexting” in our classrooms. 
Sure, the fact that Bell Canada and Rogers have teamed up to 
Getting gouged by cellphone providers is such a routine part of life in Canada that it barely seems worth complaining about. Yet we complain all the time. We trade tales of shocking bills and awful customer service at every opportunity. We complain to friends and we complain to strangers. I complain professionally. To be a technology journalist in Canada is to constantly feed the nation’s seething consumer outrage.
