Report from Maurice George

The 'new' West Lancs Computing Club was re-launched last week with the aim of widening its approach to all types of computers and IT issues.

We began the evening by examining an article on the powerful global corporations which dominate the IT world; Google started as a search program but has expanded in many directions - the data from all these activities is gathered by Google and used for tracking the activities of users.

Amazon controls a large part of Internet sales, and Facebook is the dominant global social network. Users post lots of private details of their lives and FB puts all this data together to create a profile this gives them tons of information that they can sell to corporations.

We didn't come to any conclusions on how this power can be controlled.

Most of the evening went on solving a member's laptop problems, with other groups discussing a wide range of computer topics.

The atmosphere was friendly and open to questions and opinions. We meet on the second Monday of every month at the Greyhound on Aughton Street, Ormskirk and anyone is welcome; there are no subscriptions and membership is free.