marks spencer

I am standing in a quiet London street, just off a busy market, and nobody is coming to help me. The personal attack alarm I have set off screeches away into a void of nothingness.

Eventually, a man walks past on his mobile phone, glances in my direction and looks annoyed. A pigeon looks slightly alarmed.

I could be dead by now, I think. Or maimed. Damn you fellow citizens. "Why didn't you come and see if I was OK?" I ask a stallholder on the market.

"We get a lot of kids round here," Roman Sarlowaray says. "I thought it was one of them messing around."

Time for a giggle. Time, too, for a little serious thinking about data protection.

The giggle turns up in a story today about a faulty birthday present.

A seven-year old boy opens a package from his aunt to find within – oh, ecstasy! – a superman outfit.

Then, catastrophe: the belt is missing. How can he be Superman without a superbelt to hold his superpants up?

A French court last week ordered eBay to pay €38.8m (£30.6m) in damages to the luxury products group LVMH for letting fake versions of its designer bags be sold on the online auction site.

Forget collective bargaining or a sitdown strike, it appears that Britain's largest private-sector union is engaging in... well... buying some Google ads in protest.

The Times Online tries to make this out to be an alternative to a strike or a walkout, and even implies that buying a few Adwords on Google to show their displeasure with the retailer Marks & Spencer would have a similar impact.

Britain’s biggest private sector union is using “cyber-warfare” to open a new front in a campaign against Marks & Spencer over workers’ rights.

Unite, which has nearly two million members, plans to use searches for M&S on Google from 5am today to divert users to its list of grievances.