The default retirement age (DRA) is to be abolished by October next year under new proposals put forward by the government.

Currently employers can make staff retire at 65 regardless of their circumstances. The new plans allow for a six-month transition from the existing regulations, following the announcement in the Budget that the DRA would be phased out from April 2011.

These measures, says the government, will help and encourage people to work for longer against ‘the backdrop of demographic change’. Others include reviewing when the state pension age should increase to 66 and re-establishing the link between earnings and the basic state pension. The consultation also proposes to help employers by removing the administrative burden of statutory retirement procedures, such as employees having the ‘right to request’ working beyond retirement or for employers to give them a minimum of six months notice of retirement.

The short timescale of the changes raises serious questions for employers. John Cridland, CBI deputy director-general, states: ‘Scrapping the DRA will leave a vacuum, and raise a large number of complex legal and employment questions, which the government has not yet addressed. This will create uncertainty among employers and staff, who do not know where they stand. There will need to be more than a code of practice to address these practical issues; we will need changes in the law to deal more effectively with difficult employment situations.’

Employment relations minister Edward Davey argues that the reforms provide individuals with extra freedom and control. ‘With more and more people wanting to extend their working lives, we should not stop them just because they have reached a particular age. We want to give individuals greater choice and are moving swiftly to end discrimination of this kind.’

Steve Webb, pensions minister, suggests that many older people want to work beyond the age of 65 and have a wealth of skills and experience that are not being used.  ‘We want to get rid of the default retirement age so that if they want to work they can do so.  By spending longer in the workforce they can also have a better pension in retirement,’ he says.

The government states that it will still be possible for individual employers to operate a compulsory retirement age, provided that they can objectively justify it, like air traffic controllers and police officers. The consultation asks whether the government could provide additional support for individuals and employers in managing without the DRA or a statutory retirement procedure, and includes the possibility of future guidance or a more formal code of practice on handling retirement discussions.

For Cridland, it’s essential that all the consequences of abolishing the retirement age are given full consideration: ‘For employers, these proposals could make workforce planning and providing some employment benefits, such as critical illness cover, next to impossible.

‘A default retirement age helps staff think about when it is right to retire, and also enables employers to plan more confidently for the future. In certain jobs, especially physically demanding ones, working beyond 65 is not going to be possible for everyone.’

Click here to take part in our poll, Should the retirement age be scrapped?

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Facebook’s privacy woes continue. This week a man harvested and published the profile details of 100 million Facebook users. If that weren’t bad enough, he then made the file available for free download. You’d think that a lot of companies would be interested in acquiring such data. And you’d be right.

But this is less a case of nefarious marketing tricks than a factor of Facebook’s privacy settings. And things are only going to get worse as Facebook grows.

The man responsible for the leak, Ron Bowes, is a security consultant. He tells the BBC that it was a test for a new security tool he’s working on:

“I’m a developer for the Nmap Security Scanner and one of our recent tools is called Ncrack.

“It is designed to test password policies of organisations by using brute force attacks; in other words, guessing every username and password combination.”

Originally, he acquired people’s first and last names from Facebook to make a list of common user names. But once he had the information, he decided to release it. The list contains the URL of many searchable Facebook users’
profiles, plus their names and unique IDs.

The effort has been good PR for Bowes. But not so much for Facebook.

The social network has already been in trouble for changing the default privacy settings on its profiles. This week, Gawker decided to start giving Facebook’s CEO the paparazzi treatment. The site wrote:

“This is the executive who pushed the private information of
Facebook’s
hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public
sphere.”

Facebook now has over 500 million users, and companies have lined up to download the information Bowes made available. 

Through PeerBlock, a Gizmodo reader found the IP addresses of people who downloaded the torrent and the company or organization they downloaded the file from.

A company’s appearance on the list could simply be due to a single employee’s curiosity. But it’s interesting that so many tech companies appear. 

Gizmodo
has the complete list, which includes groups like The Church of
Scientology among the usual suspect like AT&T, Novell, Viacom and
Wells Fargo.

Those names and emails might not be a major coop for marketing departments. But a little free torrent doesn’t hurt either.

Facebook isn’t interested in upping its security features for business purposes. The more information from the social network that Google can crawl, the more integral a piece of online personal data Facebook becomes. But issues like this are going to keep popping up.

As Bowes put it:

“Having the name of one person means nothing, and having the name of a hundred people means nothing; it isn’t statistically significant.

“But when you start scaling to 170 million, statistical data emerges that we have never seen in the past.”

Posts from the Econsultancy blog

Tony Robbins New TV Show

Breakthrough with Tony Robbins premieres on NBC, Tuesday, July 27th at 8/7 PM CST

Check out the Trailer: www.BreakthroughInsider.com

Here’s what the show is about:

“The show serves as an inspiration to people in tough times. It’s not about positive thinking; it’s about six families, good people you want to root for, who have gotten a raw deal. Life has seemingly crushed them. In less than 30 days with Tony’s help, their lives are completely transformed and they get a second chance. This show demonstrates the undeniable triumph of the human spirit over any obstacle that we could ever have to face. It’s about what happens when you manage to breakthrough, when what was once impossible suddenly becomes possible.” I can’t wait to watch it!

[Please share this with everyone you know!]

As more companies introduce social media campaigns, there’s often
a real lack of understanding when deciding which numbers really matter,  so the default action is often to watch everything.

On the one hand,
keeping track of every tweet, post and comment is good practice. However, when it
comes to actually interpreting the piles of data, meaningful analysis is sometimes sorely absent.

Ideally you should be able to
interpret the figures so that you can both hone your KPIs and make ongoing
strategic decisions. By analysing figures in meaningful ways
you’ll receive deeper, more useful insights.

Let’s
consider a few ways you can sort figurative fact from fiction:

Do it yourself

There are a number of tools and apps available that will score your online sentiment for you. Don’t trust them.

As an example, someone might tweet: “Joy, another £50 charge on my account. Thanks for that Big Bank PLC.”

If you’re using an automated service it will see your brand name, and the words ‘joy’ and ‘thanks’ and assign a positive score.

It’s far more useful to have a real person hand check your Twitter stream for relevant comments rather than have a program simply rate everything.

Accumulate to speculate

Short term reporting is always handy, but make sure you compile long-term reports for all your social media channels.

Every stream will experience highs and lows and the temptation is there to act on them directly, especially with the speed and flexibility social media offers you.

Make sure you also have tracking in place so that you can view the long term effects and growth stemming from your campaign.

Depth of data will provide you with solid numbers to base long term decisions on. Don’t be fooled by trends. Looking at short term figures, weekly hits for example, can be misleading as they don’t take factors like public holidays or network outages into account.

Keep it together

Make sure you timetable your regular round of data collection from each stream.

We’ve all received emails saying the boss wants a reprot straight away. Good for him, but randomly pulling data from everywhere at a moment’s notice does no good at all.

You’ll receive a much clearer picture if you’ve taken data from a single source at 3pm on Thursday every week than from anything you’ve randomly grabbed. Above all else, be consistent.

There are an awful lot of facts and figures to be found on both your internal analytics and the net at large, but the key is in organising them and examining them effectively over time.

Without a clear system in place the data becomes random, meaningless and can actually be damaging to your business by being incorrectly understood.

Make sure you have a clear plan in place before you act on your figures.

Posts from the Econsultancy blog

Apple’s iPad may have struck fear in the hearts of e-book makers when it launched three months ago, but the e-book market continues to grow. This week, Amazon revealed strong sales for its Kindle device during its earnings call. And Amazon’s price performance with the Kindle and its e-books could be enough to continue that growth.

The iPad has been a huge success, selling about 3.3 million iPads in the gadget’s first three months on the
market. In that time, 100 million apps have been downloaded. Also, 250,000 e-books were downloaded.

But the Kindle isn’t doing too bad either. After second quarter earnings came out this week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the Kindle and mobile content is an area of the
company defined by “rapid growth,” and he’s excited about what he defines as a “new category” of wireless tablet computers.”

Amazon’s stock did not perform well after its earnings announcement this
week, but there’s plenty of good news coming from the e-book division.

More Kindle

titles are now sold on Amazon than hardcover books. In the past three months,
143 Kindle books were sold for every 100 hardcover books, and last month alone, 180 Kindle books sold for every 100 hardcover
books. Free Kindle books, including 1.8 million
public-domain titles available on the device, were not included
in those figures.

In hard sales numbers, Amazon customers spent over
billion via mobile device in the last year, including sales by
Kindle. During the company’s second quarter earnings release this week, CEO Jeff Bezos said that
tablets “over time” could “become a meaningful additional driver for our
business.”

The Kindle might be an exclusive reading tool, but Amazon was wisely branched out Kindle features. Most importantly, the company now allows users to access its ebooks on mulitple mobile platforms, including the iPhone and Android phones.

Kindle is also providing price performance. Titles on Amazon are slightly cheaper than those in the iTunes store. And just this summer, the Kindle price dropped from 9 to 9.

Kindle may now be in the early stages of a price war. Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader costs 9. The iPad costs 9, meaning that consumers really focused on reading might be attracted to the cheaper product that does that one thing well. 

This could all be changed by a shift in technology or the digital reading experience. For now, dedicated e-readers have a jump on devices like the iPad because they are better at creating a reading friendly environment. For example, the iPad recently was criticized as a bad product for reading in bed.

But Amazon could have even more success by making the Kindle more affordable and opening up the e-book market to a wider demographic of readers. For Amazon, selling books is a big business. If getting a Kindle in the hands of consumers means they become dedicated Amazon e-book customers, it could be worth a little subsidy in the long run.

Posts from the Econsultancy blog