Google DA
Notes
This is a DA that links to affs that increase privacy regulations of some sort. The
evidence on government privacy regulations spilling over and hurting private
companies’ abilities (specifically, Google) to collect data/operate efficiently is pretty
good.
The 1NC impact is the oil dependence scenario, but we have cards that talk about
innovation/economy.
Good luck! Let us know if we can update/cut/change anything ~Myles, Ameek, Clare,
Rishika 
1NC Shell
1NC — Google DA
Privacy regulations directly inhibit private sector data collection and innovation
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
The relationship between innovation and privacy policy runs deeper than this superficial similarity
suggests. This paper argues that ultimately privacy policy is interlinked with innovation policy and
consequently has potential consequences for innovation and economic growth. Drawing on empirical
analysis of privacy regulations in online advertising and health care, we summarize evidence that privacy
regulations directly affect the usage and efficacy of emerging technologies in these sectors.
Furthermore, because these impacts are heterogeneous across firms and products, regulations affect
the direction of innovation.
This linkage sets up a tension between the economic value created by the use of personal data and the
need to safeguard consumers’ privacy in the face of the use of such data. As discussed by Hui and Png
(2006), it is not straightforward to incorporate notions of privacy into economic models, because such
notions are often based on consumer emotions as well as on strict economic concerns. As such, it is
important for regulators to balance consumer uneasiness with (or repugnance toward) data collection
and usage with the consequences such regulations may have on certain types of innovation.
More broadly, the extent of privacy regulation should represent a trade-off between the benefits of
data-based innovation and the harms caused by violations of consumer privacy. Much of the policy
discussion appears to assume substantial harms, perhaps citing survey evidence that people do not like
to be tracked (FTC 2010). It is important to measure the size of these harms carefully, ideally in a realworld revealed-preference setting where the costs and benefits can be explicitly traded off. These
studies should be conducted across many industries and settings, because such harms likely affect
different sectors in different ways. The fact that there may be differential effects in terms of both harm
and incentives to innovate across different sectors means that there may be potential adverse
consequences of using a single policy tool to regulate all sectors. These adverse consequences should
be set against the benefits of simplicity and uniformity of comprehensive cross-sector privacy
regulation.
Data collection is key to enhanced Google revenues and operations
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
It is not new for companies to collect information about their customers. For decades, firms have been
able to buy data from external parties (such as magazine subscription and car ownership data) and
integrate it into their mailing lists. What is new about the collection of online data is the scope of the
data collected, the precision with which the company can associated an action with a specific customer,
and the sheer quantity of information. Before online purchasing, stores rarely observed abandoned
shopping carts, statements of customer preferences, or a complete list of all past purchases.
The quantity and precision of the data collected mean that there are benefits to firms that offer
services online from the retention and use of customer clickstream data beyond the example of
advertising described earlier. One common innovative application is the use of data to tailor products
automatically to a consumers’ needs and interests. Data can also be used for immediate feedback.
Google, for example, retains user clickstream data to continuously improve both its search algorithms
and online product services, such as youtube.com, partly on the basis of terminated user queries and
actions.
Online data have also allowed the development of recommender systems that use customers’ purchase
decisions to offer recommendations about products of interest to another customer. If, for example, a
website observes a customer buying a DVD of the television series “Lost,” it uses the purchase histories
of other customers who have also bought “Lost” to suggest other DVDs that the customer might also
enjoy. Dias et al. (2008) suggest that such systems can increase revenues by 0.3%. This increase is
economically significant given the relatively low cost of implementing such systems and the high costs
of increasing revenues through alternative marketing actions. Recommender systems can also be
designed to move sales toward higher-margin items (Fleder and Hosanagar 2009).
So far, our discussion has focused on how the sharing of information collected online has been used by
firms to improve the accuracy of their efforts to increase demand and customer satisfaction. However,
improvements in information and communication technologies allow a wide-scale collection of
consumer data that can also enhance a firm’s operational efficiency. At Walt Disney World, a new
operations center is designed to use detailed customer surveillance data to minimize wait times in lines
(Barnes 2010). Many financial services companies use data to predict credit risk and to determine
promotions and interest rate offers.
Another valuable type of data for operational efficiency is information about consumer trends that
enables firms to manage their supply chains more effectively. For example, companies use data from
wishlists, grocery lists, and registries online to project future demand for certain products. Search data
are also useful for predicting demand. Choi and Varian (2009) show that data about who is searching for
what on search engines can predict travel and retail demand reasonably accurately. Again, the collection
and analysis of information, facilitated by recent advances in information and communications
technologies, has led to innovation in the operations of firms from online retailers to theme parks to
financial services companies.
Google Self-Driving cars are key to revitalizing the economy, reducing dependence on
oil, and a more sustainable future.
Dallegro 14 — Joseph A. Dallegro is a journalist and advertising copywriter living in the New York area.
He has covered business and finance, automobiles and local interest stories for publications such as
Institutional Investor, ConsumerSearch and the Jersey City Independent. His advertising work has been
profiled in CBS News, The Huffington Post, and Adweek, 2014 ("How Google's Self-Driving Car Will
Change Everything,” Investopedia, April 2014, Available Online at
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/052014/how-googles-selfdriving-car-will-changeeverything.asp, Accessed 7-21-2015)//CM
Imagine getting in your car, typing or speaking a location into your vehicle’s interface, then letting it drive you to your destination while you
read a book, surf the web or nap. Self-driving vehicles – the stuff of science fiction since the first roads were paved – are coming, and they’re
going to radically change what it’s like to get from point A to point B. Basic Technology Already In Use “The
building blocks of
driverless cars are on the road now,” explained Russ Rader, senior v.p. of communications at the Insurance Institute for Highway
Safety. He pointed to the front-crash prevention systems that for several years have been able to warn drivers of an impending obstacle and
apply the brakes if they don’t react fast enough. These systems were quickly followed by technology allowing cars to self-park by sizing up a
free spot and automatically steering into it, with the driver only controlling the accelerator and brake pedals. Mercedes-Benz took autonomous
driving even further with last year’s unveiling of a steering system that works on the highway, in certain circumstances. The
first big leap
to fully autonomous vehicles is due in 2017, when Google Inc. (GOOG) said it would have an integrated
system ready to market. Every major automotive manufacturer is likely to follow by the early 2020s, though their systems could wind
up being more sensor-based, and rely less on networking and access to map information. Google probably wont manufacture cars. More likely,
it’ll license the software and systems. A Drastic Change As with the adoption of any new revolutionary technology, there will be problems for
businesses that don’t adjust fast enough. Futurists estimate that hundreds of billions of dollars (if not trillions) will be lost by automakers,
suppliers, dealers, insurers, parking companies, and many other car-related enterprises. And think of the lost revenue for governments via
licensing fees, taxes and tolls, and by personal injury lawyers and health insurers. Who needs a car made with heavier-gauge steel and eight
airbags (not to mention a body shop) if accidents are so rare? Who needs a parking spot close to work if your car can drive you there, park itself
miles away, only to pick you up later? Who needs to buy a flight from Boston to Cleveland when you can leave in the evening, sleep much of the
way, and arrive in the morning? Indeed, Google’s
goal is to increase car utilization from 5-10% to 75% or more by
facilitating sharing. That means fewer cars on the road. Fewer cars period, in fact. Who needs to own a car
when you can just order a shared one and it’ll drive up minutes later, ready to take you wherever you
want? “This [has the potential to] dramatically reduce the number of cars on the street, 80% of which
have people driving alone in them, and also a household's cost of transportation, which is 18% of their
income – around $9,000 a year – for an asset that they use only 5% of the time,” said Robin Chase, the founder
and CEO of Buzzcar, a peer-to-peer car sharing service, and co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar. In 2030, self-driving cars are
expected to create $87 billion worth of opportunities for automakers and technology developers, said a
report by Boston-based Lux Research. Software developers stand to win big. A Car Manufacturing Revolution If you’re an automaker, such as
Ford Motor Co. (F), General Motors Co. (GM), Chrysler Group LLC, Toyota Motor Corp. or Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (HMC), which account for
about 70% of the U.S. market, you could see an initial surge in the $600 billion in annual new and used car sales in the U.S. But as soon as the
technology takes hold, sales could fall off significantly as sharing popularizes. Cars will always need steel, glass, an interior, a drivetrain and
some form of human interface (even if that interface is little more than a wireless connection to your smartphone). But much of everything else
could change. As an example, take front-facing seats; they could become an option, not a requirement. Automakers that see change coming,
such as how the big profits are secured downstream by car servicers, insurers and more, are focusing on services as much as on what and how
they manufacture. Infrastructure Transformation With
fewer cars around, parking lots and spaces that cover roughly
a one-third of the land area of many U.S. cities can be repurposed. That could mean temporary
downward pressure on real estate values as supply increases. It could also mean greener urban areas, as
well as revitalized suburbs, as longer commutes become more palatable. And if fewer cars are on the
road, the federal and state governments may be able to reallocate a good portion of the roughly $30
billion spent annually on highways. Changing Oil Demand If you’re in the business of finding, extracting, refining and marketing
hydrocarbons, such as Exxon Mobil Corp. (EOX), Chevron Corp. (CVX) or BP plc (BP), you could see your business fluctuate as use changes.
“These vehicles should practice very efficient eco-driving practices, which is typically about 20% better
than the average driver,” said Chase “On the other hand, if these cars are owned by individuals, I see a huge rise in the number of
trips, and vehicle miles traveled. People will send out their car to run errands they would never do if they had to be in the car and waste their
own time. If
the autonomous cars are shared vehicles and people pay for each trip, I think this will reduce
demand, and thus (vehicle miles traveled).” Safety Dividend Autonomous vehicles are also expected to be
safer. “These cars won't get drunk or high, drive too fast, or take unnecessary risks – things people do all
the time,” Chase said. “Over 90% of accidents today are caused by driver error,” said Professor Robert W.
Peterson of the Center for Insurance Law and Regulation at Santa Clara University School of Law. “There is every reason to believe
that self-driving cars will reduce frequency and severity of accidents, so insurance costs should fall,
perhaps dramatically.” “Cars can still get flooded, damaged or stolen,” notes Michael Barry, the v.p. of media relations at the Insurance
Information Institute. “But this technology will have a dramatic impact on underwriting. A lot of traditional underwriting criteria will be
upended.” Barry said it’s too early to quantify exactly how self-driving vehicles will affect rates, but added that injured parties in a crash
involving a self-driving car may choose to sue the vehicle’s manufacturer, or the software company that designed the autonomous capability.
Initially, insurers such as State Farm Insurance, Allstate Corp. (ALL), Liberty Mutual Group, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s (BRK-A) GEICO, Citigroup
Inc.’s (C) Travelers Group could see a huge benefit from lower accident liabilities, but wind up losing a big portion of the $200 billion in personal
auto premiums they write every year as fewer cars take to the road. Some have even speculated that mandatory insurance for cars could be
dropped. And as long as we’re talking about financial services, what of the multitude of banks and creditors that lend buyers money in about
70% of car purchases if sales volume falls? According to a University of Texas report, if
only 10% of the cars on U.S. roads were
autonomous, more than $37 billion of savings could be realized via less wasted time and fuel, as well as
fewer injuries and deaths. At 90%, the benefit rises to almost $450 billion a year. Closer to Home Self-driving cars
could have a substantial impact on the taxi and limousine industries and could create new ones. Chase noted that they could be used to share
specific trips as a kind of pay-as-you-go small-scale public transportation – taking a disparate bunch of Manhattanites to the beach in the
Hamptons, for instance. One study found that
a fleet of 9,000 driverless taxis could serve all of Manhattan at about
40 cents per mile (compared to about $4-6 per mile now). There are licenses for over 13,000 taxis in the Big Apple now.
Self-driving cars may also challenge train lines. “A self-driving car offers much of the convenience of rail service with the added convenience
that the service is portal-to-portal rather than station-to-station,” Peterson said. “On the other hand, a fleet of self-driving cars available at the
station may make rail service more palatable. “The technology has already been adopted in closed systems, such as campuses, air-terminals
and mining,” he noted. “Rio Tinto Group (RIO), a large mining company, uses enormous self-driving trucks in its mining operations. European
countries are experimenting with the platooning of trucks. Among other things, this saves about 18% in fuel.” Risks, Hurdles and the Unknown
There are regulatory and legislative obstacles to widespread use of self-driving cars, and substantial concerns about privacy (who will have
access to any driving information these vehicles store?). There’s also the question of security, as hackers could theoretically take control of
these vehicles, and are not known for their restraint or civic-mindedness. The Bottom Line However
it plays out, these vehicles
are coming – and fast. Their full adoption will take decades, but their convenience, cost, safety and other factors will
make them ubiquitous and indispensable. Such as with any technological revolution, the companies that plan ahead, adjust the
fastest and imagine the biggest will survive and thrive. And companies invested in old technology and practices will need to evolve or risk dying.
Oil dependence diminishes US hegemony — key to combating WMD spread,
terrorism, Gulf instability
Deutch and Schlesinger 6 — John Deutch, served as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Director of
Central Intelligence, Director of Energy Research, Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology, and
Undersecretary of the Department, emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, holds a B.A. in history and economics from Amherst College, and both the B.S. in chemical
engineering and Ph.D. in physical chemistry from M.I.T, and James R. Schlesinger, served as Secretary of
Defense under Nixon and Ford, America's first Secretary of Energy, Director of Central Intelligence,
earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in economics from the Horace Mann School and Harvard University, 2006
(“National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency,” Report of an Independent Task Force,
Available Online at
http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dgvictor/publications/Faculty_Victor_Chapter_2006_National%20Security%20C
onsequences_CFR.pdf, Accessed 7/22/15)
The Task Force has identified five major reasons why dependence on energy traded in world markets is
a matter of concern for U.S. foreign policy. We have also examined a sixth, the relationship of military force
structure to oil dependence.
First, the control over
enormous oil revenues gives exporting countries the flexibility to adopt policies that
oppose U.S. interests and values. Iran proceeds with a program that appears to be headed toward acquiring a nuclear weapons
capability. Russia is able to ignore Western attitudes as it has moved to authoritarian policies in part
because huge revenues from oil and gas exports are available to finance that style of government.
Venezuela has the resources from its oil exports to invite realignment in Latin American political relationships and to fund changes such as
Argentina’s exit from its International Monetary Fund (IMF) standby agreement and Bolivia’s recent decision to nationalize its oil and gas
resources. Because
of their oil wealth, these and other producer countries are free to ignore U.S. policies
and to pursue interests inimical to our national security.
Second, oil
dependence causes political realignments that constrain the ability of the United States to form
partnerships to achieve common objectives. Perhaps the most pervasive effect arises as countries dependent on
imports subtly modify their policies to be more congenial to suppliers. For example, China is aligning its
relationships in the Middle East (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia) and Africa (e.g., Nigeria and Sudan) because of its desire to secure oil supplies.
France and Germany, and with them much of the
European Union, are more reluctant to confront difficult issues
with Russia and Iran because of their dependence on imported oil and gas as well as the desire to
pursue business opportunities in those countries.
These new realignments have further diminished U.S. leverage, particularly in the Middle East and Central
Asia. For example, Chinese interest in securing oil and gas supplies challenges U.S. influence in central Asia, notably in Kazakhstan. And
Russia’s influence is likely to grow as it exports oil and (within perhaps a decade) large amounts of natural gas to Japan and China.
All consuming countries, including the United States, are more constrained in dealing with producing
states when oil markets are tight. To cite one current example, concern about losing Iran’s 2.5 million barrels per
day of world oil exports will cause importing states to be reluctant to take action against Iran’s nuclear
program.
Third, high
prices and seemingly scarce supplies create fears— especially evident in Beijing and New Delhi, as well as in
current system of open markets is unable to ensure secure supply.
The present competition has resulted in oil and gas deals that include political arrangements in addition to
commercial terms. Highly publicized Chinese oil investments in Africa have included funding for infrastructure projects such as an
European capitals and in Washington—that the
airport, a railroad, and a telecommunications system, in addition to the agreement that the oil be shipped to China. Many more of these
investments also include equity stakes for state-controlled Chinese companies. Another example is Chinese firms taking a position in Saudi
Arabia, along with several Western firms, in developing Saudi Arabia’s gas infrastructure.
At present, these arrangements have little effect on world oil and gas markets because the volumes affected are small. However, such
arrangements are spreading. These arrangements are worrisome because they lead to special political relationships
that pose difficulties for the United States. And they allow importers to believe that they obtain security
through links to particular suppliers rather than from the proper functioning of a global market.
We note that the
United States, in the past, has also taken decisions to restrict markets partly due to similar
concerns about energy security. For example, when the trans-Alaska pipeline opened, it included a prohibition against exporting the
oil. The hostility toward proposals by the Chinese National Overseas Oil Company (CNOOC) to purchase Union Oil of California is
seen by some as denying investment opportunity in the U.S. market in a similar manner to what the
United States decries about other nations’ conduct. The Task Force believes that foreign entities should be able to purchase
U.S. assets provided that the acquisitions meet the criteria established by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).12
Opening a dialogue with rapidly growing consumers, notably China and India, can help those consumers gain confidence that will lead to a
greater willingness to allow markets to operate. (We return to this policy recommendation later.) The United States and other consuming
countries have a tremendous interest in maintaining the present open market oil commodity trading rules.
Fourth, revenues from oil and gas exports can undermine local governance. The United States has an interest in
promoting good governance both for its own sake and because it encourages investment that can increase the level and security of supply.
States that are politically unstable and poorly governed often struggle with the task of responsibly
managing the large revenues that come from their oil and gas exports. The elements of good governance include
democratic accountability, low corruption, and fiscal transparency. Production in fragile democracies, such as in Nigeria, can be undermined
when politicians or local warlords focus on ways to seize oil and gas rents rather than on the longer-term task of governance. Totalitarian
governments that have control over those revenue flows can entrench their rule.
When markets are tight, large oil consumers have tended to become especially focused on securing supply and ignore the effects of their
investments on corruption and mismanagement. In Sudan, for example, despite civil war and widespread human rights abuses, the Chinese
government and its oil enterprises are funding extensive oil supply and 12 Alan P. Larson and David M. Marchick, Foreign Investment and
National Security: Getting the Balance Right, a Council Special Report(New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2006). Findings: How
Dependence on Imported Energy Affects U.S. Foreign Policy 29 infrastructure projects. China has used its threat of a veto in the UN Security
Council to thwart collective efforts by other countries to manage the Darfur crisis in Sudan. Similarly, China, India, and several Western
European countries continue to invest in Iran despite the need to contain its nuclear aspirations.
Fifth, a
significant interruption in oil supply will have adverse political and economic consequences in
the United States and in other importing countries. When such a disruption occurs, it upends all ongoing policy
activity in a frantic effort to return to normal conditions. Inevitably, those efforts include matters of foreign
policy, such as coordination with other countries to find measures that will mitigate the consequences
of the supply disruption. Some of these responses may be preplanned, such as the coordinated release of strategic reserves, but other
responses will be hurried, ineffectual, or even counterproductive.
Sixth, some observers see a direct relationship between the dependence of the United States on oil, especially from the Persian Gulf, and the
size of the U.S. defense budget. Such a relationship invites the inference that if
it were not dependent on this oil, the United
States and its allies would have no interest in the region, and hence it would be possible to achieve
significant reductions in the U.S. military posture. In the extreme, this argument says that if the nation reduced its
dependence, then the defense budget could be reduced as well.
U.S. strategic interests in reliable oil supplies from the Persian Gulf are not proportional with the percent of oil consumption that is imported by
the United States from the region. Until very low levels of dependence are reached, the United States and all other consumers of oil will
depend on the Persian Gulf. Such low levels will certainly not be reached during the twenty-year time frame of this study.
Even if the Persian Gulf did not have the bulk of the world’s readily available oil reserves, there would be reasons to maintain a substantial
military capability in the region. The
activities of Iran today and Iraq, especially prior to 1991, underline the
seriousness of threats from weapons of mass destruction. Combating terrorism also requires a
presence in the Gulf. In addition to military activities, a U.S. presence in the region can help to improve political
stability.
At least for the next two decades, the Persian Gulf will be vital to U.S. interests in reliable oil supply, nonproliferation, combating 30 National
Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency terrorism, and encouraging political stability, democracy, and public welfare. Accordingly, the
United States should expect and support a strong military posture that permits suitably rapid deployment to the region, if required.
It is worthwhile to explain what should and should not be expected from this military force, and how it serves U.S. interests. Most importantly,
the conventional force of the United States deters aggression in the region. Any nation (or subnational group)
that contemplates violence on any scale must take into account the possibility of U.S. preemption,
intervention, or retaliation. Deterrence is powerful, but it does not always work (especially if the possibility of a military response is
not raised). For example, deterrence did not prevent the Iran-Iraq war of the early 1980s. Because no clear and credible signal was sent of a
possible response in 1990, Saddam Hussein was not deterred from invading Kuwait. Nevertheless, the
U.S. military posture with its
capacity to intervene, if managed wisely, can play a role in stabilizing this highly fragile region and make many
countries in the region more secure from hostile action by their neighbors.
2NC/1NR Uniqueness
They Say: “Regulations Key”
Status quo privacy regulations should solve their advantage — any more results in a
loss of data collection capabilities
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
Concerns over the use of data for targeted advertising have also led to a number of regulations designed
to offer privacy protection. The first major legislation on the issue was the European ePrivacy Directive
(EC/2002/58), which predominantly addressed the telecommunications sector. However, several
provisions of the ePrivacy Directive limited the ability of companies to track user behavior on the
Internet. These changes made it more difficult for a specific advertiser to collect and use data about
consumer browsing behavior on other websites.
The interpretation of EC/2002/58 has been somewhat controversial as it relates to behavioral targeting.
For example, it is not clear to what extent companies need to obtain opt-in consent: the provision says
only that companies who use invisible tracking devices such as web bugs require the “knowledge” of
consumers, and the definition of “knowledge” has been extensively debated. This is one reason why, in
the recent “Telecoms Reform Package,” the European Union (EU) amended the current regulation to
clarify what practices are allowed. However, in general, the limitations the current EU regulation
impose on data collection by online advertisers are widely seen as stricter than in the United States and
elsewhere. Baumer, Earp, and Poindexter (2004, 410) emphasize that the privacy laws that resulted
from the ePrivacy Directive are far stricter than in the United States and that “maintaining full
compliance with restrictive privacy laws can be costly, particularly since that adherence can result in a
loss of valuable marketing data.”
There are also proposals for legislation in the United States. In particular, FTC (2010) suggests a move to
implement a “do not track” policy that would allow consumers to enable persistent settings on their
web browsers and prevent firms from collecting clickstream data. A specific privacy office within the
Department of Commerce has also been suggested to monitor and regulate the use of data by firms
(USDOC 2010).
Consequences.—However, such regulation will impose costs. As set out by Evans (2009) and Lenard and
Rubin (2009), there is a trade-off between the use of online customer data and the effectiveness of
advertising.
Google Revenue High
Google has an extremely high revenue now – even after spending money on driverless
cars, revenues will be sustainable
Womack 7/16 — Brian Womack is a Reporter at Bloomberg News, 7-16-2015 ("Google stock soars to
record high on earnings beat," Globe and Mail, 7-16-2015, Available Online at
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/us-business/googleprofit-tops-analyst-estimates-as-company-curbs-costs/article25536408/, Accessed 7-26-2015)//CM
Google stock soars to record high on earnings beat Google
Inc.’s stock rallied in Europe trading after new Chief
Financial Officer Ruth Porat signaled plans to bring more restraint to spending at the Internet search
giant. Profit and sales topped analysts’ estimates in the second quarter, and operating expenses rose at the slowest pace since 2013. On a
conference call after the results were released Thursday, Porat -- who joined the company in May from Morgan Stanley -- said she was focused
on cost controls. Reuters Jul. 16 2015, 6:15 PM EDT Video: Google's earnings beat expectations As
the company seeks ways to
boost revenue growth in its main Web search-advertising business and beyond, Chief Executive Officer Larry
Page has been investing in new -- and sometimes expensive -- projects, from driverless cars to fast
Internet service. Porat has bolstered investor confidence that the company will balance spending on
such initiatives with the need to keep a tighter rein on expenses. “People are realizing it’s a new era,” said Colin Gillis,
an analyst at BGC Financial LP. “She’s coming in and she’s expressing what investors wanted -- that’s there’s going to
be cost rationalization, a degree of discipline.” Google shares rose about 12 percent to the equivalent of
$672.88 at 8:47 a.m. in Frankfurt. The stock gained 3.1 percent to $601.78 at the close in New York Thursday, and
has soared 11 percent since the start of July. Porat’s Priorities Profit before certain items in the recent period was $6.99 a
share, the company said in a statement. Sales, minus revenue passed on to partners, rose 13 percent to $14.4
billion. Analysts on average projected $6.73 a share in profit on $14.3 billion in sales, according to data
compiled by Bloomberg. “The priority is revenue growth,” Porat said on the call, her first at Google, after the report. “We
have a breadth of opportunity, but pursuing revenue growth is obviously not inconsistent with expense
management.” Second-quarter net income was $3.93 billion, compared with $3.35 billion a year earlier,
Mountain View, California-based Google said. Revenue would have been $1.1 billion higher had foreign-exchange rates stayed constant,
the company said. Porat said Google is still investing in new businesses, just as it always has under co-founders Page and Sergey
Brin. Pursuits have included the introduction of a new wireless-phone service and tests of delivery drones and Google Glass wearable
computer, as well as forays into products like contact lenses that can track glucose levels and kites designed to deliver clean energy. “The
founders are still in control and that dynamic still exists, so she’ll have to deal with that going forward,” said Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward
Jones & Co. “The fact that she was hired indicates that Larry and Sergey are looking for a change in the approach around expenses.” Advertising
Business Google
also has devoted money to improving its core advertising services, including new tools to enable
company has a wide lead
in the digital-advertising market over rivals such as Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Twitter Inc. In the recent
quarter, the number of clicks on ads rose 18 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase in the first
quarter, while the average cost per click fell 11 percent after dropping 7 percent in the prior period. Google’s mobile cost- per-click is
purchases directly from ads and features that aim to make the buying process simpler for marketers. The
climbing, helping to close the gap with desktop ads, Porat said on the call. Watch time on YouTube, the company’s video-sharing site, was up 60
percent, with mobile watch time more than doubling, she said.
Google’s revenue is at a record high
Hall 7/16 — Stephen Hall is a Senior Editor of 9to5Google, 7-16-2015 ("Google announces Q2 2015
earnings: $17.7 billion revenue, $3.93 billion net income," 9to5Google, 7-16-2015, Available Online at
http://9to5google.com/2015/07/16/google-announces-q2-2015-earnings-17-7-billion-revenue-3-93billion-net-income/, Accessed 7-26-2015)//CM
Google today has posted its earnings for Q2 2015. The company reports revenue of $17.7 billion, which
is up 11% or $15.9 billion year over year. Net income for Q2 2015 was $3.93 billion. Of its total revenue, advertising
consisted of right about $16 billion, with Google’s own websites accounting for $12.4 billion. Advertising
revenue is up 11% year over year, while that of Google’s own sites are up 13 percent year over year.
Aggregate paid clicks rose 18 percent in Q2, while cost-per-click rates fell 11 percent compared to Q2 of 2014. Google is holding
a webcast at 1:30PST/4:30EST further discussing its earnings for the first quarter of 2015, and you can find that stream embedded above.
Google’s revenue is on an upward spiral – sustainable growth and improving margins
prove
Cardenal 7/21 — AndréS Cardenal, CFA, is a tenacious researcher of the best investment
opportunities around the world. Andres is an economist and CFA Charterholder living in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, 7-21-2015 ("Google Stock at Record Highs: Time to Take Profits, or More Growth Ahead?,"
Motley Fool, 7-21-2015, Available Online at
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/21/google-stock-at-record-highs-time-to-takeprofits.aspx, Accessed 7-26-2015)//CM
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock was having an uninspiring year in 2015. Shares of the online search giant
were basically flat, as investors were getting disappointed with Google's financial performance over the past several quarters. However,
things took a dramatic turn when Google reported rock-solid earnings for the second quarter of 2015
last week, gaining a staggering 16% in a single day and making new historical records for Google stock.
Let's look at the main reasons Google delivered such an explosive gain in a relatively short period of time, and, more importantly, whether the
company still offers upside potential from current levels or if the best is already in the past for investors in Google stock. Google is still growing
rapidly Google is in the midst of a transformation. The online advertising industry is going through major changes because of
powerful emerging trends such as the rise of mobile computing and increasing online video consumption, factors that are changing industry
dynamics. Transformations are seldom easy, and Google's revenue growth has been hurt by declining ad prices, since channels such as mobile
and YouTube typically mean lower average prices per ad. Besides, rising costs, as the company invests huge sums of money on all kind of
growth initiatives, have taken their toll on profit margins. But Google
dissipated a lot of concerns when it announced
financial results for the second quarter of 2015. Not only did earnings come in ahead of Wall Street
expectations, but management also highlighted some remarkably encouraging trends, which bode well
for investors in Google stock over the years ahead. Total revenue during the second quarter of 2015
came in at $17.7 billion, an 11% year-over-year increase. Unfavorable currency movements were a major headwind during
the period, since total revenue in constant currency jumped by an impressive 18% versus the same quarter in the prior year. This growth
rate is nothing short of extraordinary for a company as big as Google. Margins are improving, too: Traffic
acquisition costs declined to 19% of revenue from 21% in the second quarter of 2014, and the company
managed to contain operating costs at reasonable levels, so adjusted operating margin rose from 32% of
sales to 34% of revenue in the last quarter. Promising trends The latest quarter was the first time ever that Google's new CFO,
Ruth Porat, led the company's earnings conference call, and what she had to say sounded like music to investors' ears. To begin with, Google
is being more disciplined when it comes to investments and expenditures, which should drive higher
profit margins over the coming quarters. In Porat's own words: The sequential deceleration in expense growth achieved in the
second quarter reflects in part the benefit of expense discipline discussed in prior calls. A key focus is on the levers within our control to
manage the pace of expenses while still ensuring and supporting our growth. We will do this while we continue to invest in engineering talent
to keep us preeminent in innovation globally. The company is also making big inroads in mobile, reducing the price gap between desktop and
mobile ads via an improved user experience and enhanced ad quality. This is another major positive for investors, since it indicates that Google
will be able to sustain its enormously profitable business model under the mobile computing paradigm. According to management, more
Google searches are taking place on mobile devices than on desktop in 10 countries, including the U.S. and
Japan, two of Google's biggest markets. The company calculates that 30% of mobile queries are related to a specific location, which
provides plenty of opportunities for growth and monetization in local search. Also, YouTube is firing on all
cylinders and consolidating Google's position as a top player in online video. Watch time on YouTube was up by a staggering
60% year over year during the last quarter, the fastest growth rate the platform has seen in the past
couple of years. YouTube mobile watch time more than doubled from the same period in 2014, so
YouTube is rapidly expanding on mobile devices, too. Advertising dollars are going in the same direction as consumers'
eyeballs. As more viewers are increasingly going online for their video content, advertisers are jumping in to capitalize on the opportunity. The
number of advertisers running video ads on YouTube is up more than 40% year over year, and the average spend among the 100 top
advertisers is up by 60% versus the same quarter last year. The stock is priced at a moderate premium versus the overall market: Google stock
trades at a forward P/E ratio near 21, while the average company in the S&P 500 carries a forward P/E ratio in the neighborhood of 18. Still, this
doesn't sound like an excessive price tag to pay for such a leading growth company. The way things are going, it looks
like Google is
well positioned for sustained growth over the years ahead, and current valuation levels provide
attractive upside room for investors in Google stock.
Collection High
Google largest collector of data and uses data to enhance experience
Aronsky, ’14 Eugene Aronsky is a Sr. SEO specialist at NetLZ and holds a Masters Degree
in International Relations from Seton Hall University,(“What does Google Know about Me?”,
Feb. 14 2014, Available online at http://commonseoquestions.com/2014/02/14/what-does-googleknow-about-me/, Accessed online at 07-20-15)
The Internet works great when it comes to collecting information and putting the information into our
command. The privacy that was once known in America is long gone, taken away by various different websites. Surprisingly, the
biggest collector of information is Google. With so many services offered by Google, they are able to collect a large amount of
data on users. Here is a taste of what Google knows about you and how they got the information. Data Collection Services Google collects
information through its many services. Gmail sends what information it can find to Google for safe keeping. They even index and analyze the e-
Google also
collects information about what you buy, where you buy it, how much of it you buy, and how you pay
for it. Google explains that this data is for the analytics and demographics data that can be derived from
the material. Powerful Data Collection Tools If you own an Android Smartphone, you would be surprised what data Google has about you.
They likely have your whole contact list, what phone numbers you called when, and even who you call often. On top of that, they have
information stored about your Mobile network as well as your ISP. Chrome OS is another powerful data
collection tool of Google. So, What do They Have? Google most definitely has your full name if you have signed up for any kind of
mails that you throw away. Why it collects this information is to serve as the relevant ads that Google presents you with.
service through them. They keep this information and store it for future reference. You physical street address is also likely known by Google.
Your Google Maps could have shared this information, or services like AdSense or Checkout. Having a Gmail account grants Google your phone
number. Google can tell when you are online, what your latest IP address was, and even your interests. Google gets information from Google
Reader as well as your Google Bookmarks. Your bookmarks can contain a massive amount of information. More? Google Web History and the
Google Toolbar keeps track of every website that you go to. Google Notebook contains your “To Do” list. Google Calendar contains information
about your most important appointments. Through your Gmail Contacts, Google gains information about everyone that you know. Gmail and
Google Talk know what you are saying. Google finances keeps a record of what stocks that you own. Google has access to your bank account
and your routing number. Google Analytics If you have a blog, Google Analytics is able to track a large variety of stats. Google knows when you
publish a blog, how popular it is, and even who is reading it. By having personal pictures in Picasa Web Albums, Google knows what you look
Google’s Privacy
Policy Google’s Privacy Policy states that everyone’s privacy is important to them. They now only save 18
months worth of search data. This data is also completely anonymous. A large amount of data can be learned from
behaviors online. By combining a large body of data with Google’s massive computer power, they can get an
excellent idea of how to shape products that meet user’s needs. Information Technology Google gains more and more
like. Google can plug your information into a search database and come up with every site that you have an account at.
information from users every day. Questions about how big Google is allowed to get and whether the government needs to step in and regulate
this overwhelming amount of data that gets collected should be on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Having
this amazing collection of
data is great, but if used by the wrong hands, the information could be used in a lot of different bad ways. If you want to know
what information Google has on you, it is easy to find out. The first step is to sign in to your account with Google. Once
signed in, visit https://www.google.com/dashboard. This will show you some of the information that they have collected about you already.
Google is not going anywhere and their reign at the top of the internet world is just beginning. They are
able to collect a large amount of data about the users of their products. Google knows more about you than you
think.
2NC/1NR Links/ILs
They Say: “Regulations Don’t Hurt”
Privacy protections undermine Google’s ability to function.
ElectroSpaces, 9/15/14 (“What if Google was an Intelligence Agency?”, Available Online at
http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-if-google-was-intelligence-agency.html, Accessed
online at 07-21-15
Google security practices are generally considered state of the art and the company recently announced
support for end-to-end encryption in GMail, but the body of messages will remain unencrypted on Google's servers and
accessible to the company's bots. In october 2013, Google became aware of a covert network penetration lead by the
NSA, targeting communications links connecting the company's data centers, which were not encrypted.* The
exact amount of user data which may have been collected by the NSA during the operation is still unclear. - Google privacy policy is sometimes
cloudy, and users trying to get informed about what data they release to Google, how this data will be used and how long it will be retained, have
to sift through disclaimer pages scattered on Google's websites. - As a major stakeholder in the worldwide web, Google
has to bring
more accountability and transparency abo1ut what is shared from its users. The user data that could potentially be
provided to law enforcement agencies should be clearly and precisely marked as such. It should become clear to all users that some of their data,
whether it's personal information, files, e-mails, messages, metadata from network traffic or phone calls, or even recorded communications may
become available to intelligence services. - Also,
Google should clarify if this information can be provided only to the
law enforcement agencies of the user's country of residence or also to United States government
agencies, as Google is an American company with most of its servers and activities in the US. - American web
companies and cloud operators are facing growing critics about their vulnerability to US intelligence operations. Some in Europe
advocates for sovereign "national clouds" restricting data retention and traffic between secured servers
and users, forbidding access to the American government. During an hearing before the United States Senate in November
2013, Richard Salgado, Google's director for law enforcement and information security, stated that "in the wake of press
reports about the so-called "PRISM" program", he was concerned by the trend of "data localization" that could result
in the creation of a "splinternet" and the "effective Balkanization of the Internet". Data localization would
also probably cost more to Google, and would place the company under the law of each country where the company processes user data.
In many cases Google argued that it was established in the United States and therefore was not subjected to the law of European countries, as all
data processing occurs in the USA. However in France, Google was imposed a (small) financial penalty as the administrative authority made
clear that the company had to comply with the French Data Protection Act. - Google cannot condone a systematic breach of confidentiality and
privacy of its users. A call
to reform US government surveillance laws cannot be considered enough. Google
must implement proactive measures, reinforcing its network security, offer end-to-end encryption for all
of its services, securely distribute users' files hosting in their countries of residence and better inform its
users of privacy risks. These measures could be seen as costly, but are necessary to maintain the trust of
Google's user base and main source of revenue. Google has massive technical capabilities for user data retention, metadata
collection, telecommunications monitoring, localization, mapping and imaging, all which could allow it to act as an intelligence agency. The
main difference is that Google has a different goal (commercial) than an intelligence agency, but this also makes
that Google gathers far more data than an intelligence agency is legally allowed to do.
They Say: “Data Not Key to Google”
Data is key Google’s advancement as a company — increasing privacy protections
eliminates that data hindering technological innovation.
Harris 11 — Derrick Harris, Senior Writer and Technology Journalist at Gigaom, 2011 (“Will a
Crackdown on Privacy Kill Big Data Innovation?,” Gigaom, May 16th, Available Online at
https://gigaom.com/2011/05/16/will-a-crackdown-on-privacy-kill-big-data-innovation/, Accessed on 0722-15)
As the report’s authors note, policymakers will play an important role in enabling future big data
advances, both technologically and strategically. They point out and briefly discuss six issues facing
policymakers:
1. Build human capital for big data
2. Align incentives to promote data sharing for the greater good
3. Develop policies that balance the interests of companies wanting to create value from data and
citizens wanting to protect their privacy and security
4. Establish effective intellectual property frameworks to ensure innovation
5. Address technology barriers and accelerate R&D in targeted areas
6. Ensure investments in underlying information and communication technology infrastructure
I’ve given this issue a lot of thought over the past few months, and I think No. 3 is the key issue — not
just for the future of big data, but for the future of the web in general. Unless there’s a well-reasoned
balance developed between consumer privacy and business interests, goals such as information sharing
and an increased pace of innovation could fall victim to the federal government’s heavy hand. As I
explained in January, Congress is considering its strategy for regulating online privacy, but it’s an issue
strewn with pitfalls. Here are a couple of thoughts I’ve been mulling lately:
Proposed federal regulations could hamstring technological innovation: For example, two proposed
federal regulations — the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Track policy (which has just been
endorsed by several senators in the form of the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011″) and the Department
of Commerce’s Fair Information Practice Principles — have the potential to seriously hamper big data
and analytics innovations, illustrating the importance of striking the right balance. The regulations are
fairly complex in their current states, but they strive for two separate but interrelated goals,
respectively: giving consumers the ability to proactively opt out of certain data-tracking practices and
giving consumers all the information — upfront and crystal-clear — about how sites are using their data.
Both limit to some degree what sites can track, how they can do it, and impose penalties for
violations. My concern — and one echoed by Google in its recent opposition to California’s proposed Do
Not Track legislation — is that customer data has driven the innovation of numerous key big data
technologies by major web sites, including Hadoop (within Facebook and Yahoo, especially), NoSQL
databases and many of Google’s tools and projects. McKinsey highlights many of these among the list of
technologies enabling big data. Will putting companies’ analytics efforts at the mercy of consumers,
and under the thumb of the federal government, reduce desire to innovate because they fear
penalties or because they simply don’t have the relevant data required to do so?
Social media and the personalized could be jeopardized. This is directly related to the above concern,
but is more wide-reaching. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and largerscope web sites such as Google, innovate on big data technologies because their services rely on data.
The only way to optimize and create a better user experience is to draw better insights into customers’
activities, interests and connections. And the only way (or, at least, the primary way) to make money
from such services is via targeted advertising. It’s the data that drives Google’s huge advertising
revenues, which pay for its myriad free services, and Facebook to an $80 billion valuation. I’m not
suggesting Facebook or Google are going to fold in the face of proposed regulations, just that their
services could suffer. Less data and more regulations means less innovation and fewer risks taken. This
might be a boon for privacy, but it’s a hindrance in the fast-moving web world, where major changes
come from rewriting code as opposed to physically building a new project, and where services can be
improved on the fly as issues arise.
Don’t get me wrong, consumers deserve more information and the federal government is right to
attempt to give it to them, but everyone needs to get educated on the connection between data
collection and usage and the benefits they provide. If consumers value their social media and
personalized web experiences, and if the government is serious about pushing analytics as a major skill
set for the next-generation economy, they need to consider the issue of big data in terms of its pros as
well as in terms of its obvious cons such as privacy and security implications. It might be tempting to
clamp down on data practices or to click “do not track” and shut off the personal-data firehose, but such
decisions could have far greater implications than meets the eye.
They Say: “No Spillover”
The plan builds on the virtuous cycle for privacy to create more reforms.
Ozer 12 — Nicole Ozer, the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director at the ACLU of Northern
California (ACLU-NC), where she developed the organization's Demand Your dotRights online privacy
campaign, 2012 (“Putting Online Privacy Above The Fold: Building A Social Movement And Creating
Corporate Change” New York University Review of Law & Social Change, Lexis)
As noted in Part I, n226 one of the primary challenges of establishing a privacy social movement is
sustainability. While the privacy community has had success in the past in addressing specific incidents,
these successes did not initially lead to a coherent and sustainable privacy social movement. n227 More
recently, however, advocates have successfully leveraged the environmental changes discussed in Part II
to win specific battles to protect individual privacy. The privacy community has also used those victories
to reinforce the climate for change and support the discussion necessary to sustain the nascent social
movement. This has helped to create a much-needed "virtuous cycle" n228 in which each successful
advocacy effort reinforces awareness of the ongoing issues concerning online privacy and makes it
easier both to challenge specific practices in the future and to lay the groundwork for broaderreaching change.
Privacy protections from the government spillover into the private sector and inhibit
services
Anderson 14 — Dan Anderson, staff writer for E-Net News, Elon University’s academic newspaper,
2014 (“Elon University & Pew Research Center report on the future of privacy,” December 16th, Available
Online at https://www.elon.edu/e-net/Article/105454, Accessed on 07-20-15)
Mark Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), said, “Within 10 years,
there will be much more contentious battles over the control of identity, mobility, communications and
private life. The appropriation of personal facts for commercial value—an issue that began to emerge
this year with Google and Facebook's sponsored stories—are a small glimpse of what lies ahead.” Bob
Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and infrastructure for British Telecom, observed, “Society's
memory is short—Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism, and McCarthyism happened too long ago to worry
about.” Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center at the City University of New York, wrote,
“Government, threatened by the redistribution of power brought by the Net, could succeed in claiming
sovereignty over it, throttling its freedoms. Business could overstep its trust with consumers and bring
regulation into place. Media could succeed in breeding moral panic—technopanic—over anything that
could go wrong. But, I hope that enlightened self-interest will prevail.” Andrew Bridges, a partner and
Internet law litigator and policy analyst at Fenwick & West LLP, wrote, "There will be no trusted privacyrights infrastructure that is effective against government surveillance. Unless government surveillance of
all aspects of society and of all individuals gets under control, all norms about privacy will become
hollow, and the expectation of privacy will be nil. We will have to reorder all our actions to reflect the
reality that there is no privacy except for the secrecy associated with the ‘Security Class,’ namely those
persons who get to know about others without their own actions and knowledge being known.” Alex
Halavais, a social sciences professor at Arizona State, said, “Our language around privacy may evolve.
The word, on its own, is too broad to encapsulate the broad range of concerns. Until the issue of
‘privacy’ is appropriately segmented, we will have a tough time either talking about it or addressing it.”
Vint Cerf, Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist, responded, “Corporations and service
providers will feel pressure to implement practices including two-factor authentication and end-to-end
cryptography. Users will insist on having the ability to encrypt their email at need. They will demand
much more transparency of the private sector and, especially, their governments. Privacy conventions
will evolve in online society—violations of personal privacy will become socially unacceptable. Of course,
there will be breaches of all these things, but some will be accompanied by serious social and economic
downsides and, in some cases, criminal charges.” Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, wrote, "If
capable people of good will—on both policy and tech sides—can connect, then this can happen.” Alice
Marwick, author of “Status Update, “predicted, “It will be quite difficult to create a popularly-accepted
and trusted privacy rights infrastructure. This is for a number of reasons. First, countries, regions, and
cultures differ in their approaches to privacy.” Alf Rehn of Abo Akademi University wrote, “As privacy is
becoming increasingly monetized, the incentive to truly protect it is withering away, and with so much
of policy run by lobbyists, privacy will be a very expensive commodity come 2025. Some of us will be
able to buy it, but most will not. Privacy will be a luxury, not a right—something that the well-to-do can
afford, but which most have learnt to live without.”
Privacy restrictions on governments shift the debate to corporate privacy rules
Langenderfer and Miyazaki 9 — Jeff Langenderfer, Vice President at Fifth Third Bank, previous
District Manager at Huntington National Bank, holds a Bachelors Degree in Business and Finance from
the University of Toledo, and ANTHONY D. MIYAZAKI, Anthony D. Miyazaki, Chair Head and Professor of
the Department of Marketing in the College of Business at Florida International University, holds a PhD
in Business Administration from University of South Carolina, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business
Administration from the University of Utah, 2009 (“Privacy in the Information Economy,” The Journal of
Consumer Affairs, Volume 43, Issue No. 3, pp. 380-388, Fall, Available Online via Subscribing Institutions
to JStor, Accessed 7/20/15)
Relatively early in the computer age, it became apparent to U.S. law makers that the ability to assemble
vast amounts of electronic information implicated privacy rights. The Privacy Act of 1946 controls the
use of information held in federal government records by restricting disclosure of personally identifiable
data, granting individuals the right to access information about them held in governmental records,
allowing individuals the opportunity to amend federal records upon a demonstration of inaccuracy, and
requiring federal agencies to adhere to particular standards of record keeping and maintenance.7 The
Act was later amended to establish standards when federal agencies exchange computer records
through matching programs under the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act.8
Although these statutes accomplished a great deal to ensure the fairness of governmental record
keeping within the United States, federal regulation of private information practices is uneven at best
and applies only to certain kinds of records. Educational,9 medical,10 and credit data11 are all subject to
specific legislative provisions as are video rental records,12 but for many areas of record keeping in
private hands, federal regulation is minimal or absent.
Largely free from federal control are such potentially sensitive areas as purchases histories for consumer
products, web surfing history, employment records, and many types of insurance data. Even financial
records, some of the most sensitive of any kind of privately held personal information, is only minimally
federally regulated, with financial institutions required to provide consumers with opt-out options from
information sharing among unaffiliated companies. In other words, it is possible, if a person takes the
affirmative step, to prevent a financial institution from selling a customer's bank balance, loan payment
history, and debt level to other interested companies willing to buy the data.13 But few customers take
actually opt out, most don't even read the privacy notices (Winkler 2001), and many have little
knowledge regarding the privacy regulations affecting various types of firms (Turow, Hennessy and
Bleakley 2008). The onus is on the customers to control data sharing— the institution owns the data,
not the customer—and information flow is largely unimpeded.
The consequence of this regulatory void is that as private data collection has grown—commensurate
with the development of inexpensive computing power—concern about the privacy implications of
nongovernmental data sharing has grown also. A May 20, 2009 ABI/Inform Global search for "privacy"
in the title of a scholarly journal articles published since January 1, 2003 reveals 568 papers. Of these,
virtually all of them deal with the threat to privacy posed by private data collection or the mechanics of
information safeguarding. One hundred fifty-eight articles focused on computer security, 108 on
electronic commerce, 144 dealt with governmental privacy regulation, 46 focused on medical data, 23
on privacy in the workplace, and 11 on identity theft. Only 32 dealt in any way with consumer responses
to the current commercial data explosion, and of those, all but 10 were devoted to online privacy. In a
world that relies largely on consumers to manage their own privacy, privacy concern has evolved from a
fear of intrusion to a generalized unease regarding the power that comes from easily accessible,
personally identifiable data, with each area of sensitive information the subject of separate scrutiny.
To be sure, intrusion has not disappeared completely from the radar of privacy advocates, particularly in
the wake of heightened governmental security practices put into place following the events of
September 11, 2001. But the lion's share of the attention is surely on information gathering and
exchange and the felt intrusion that comes with the knowledge that anyone can easily discover a great
deal about anyone else, from their desktop, with a modicum of skill, at little or no cost.
Against this backdrop of shifting privacy attention comes this special issue on privacy literacy. Because
federal lawmakers have adopted, in the main, a hands-off approach with respect to private data
collection and exchange, it has become increasingly incumbent upon individuals to take an active role in
the ways they safeguard their own personal information. Privacy literacy is the understanding that
consumers have of the information landscape with which they interact and their responsibilities within
that landscape. It is an area that demands understanding in a climate where the responsibility for
privacy rests largely in the hands of the consuming public, and lack of literacy may have important
implications.
A series of articles focusing on privacy literacy highlight the Fall 2009 issue of the Journal of Consumer
Affairs. Youn writes insightfully and eloquently about student privacy concerns and their coping
behavior (Youn 2009). Podar, Mosteller, and Ellen (2009) explore, through a series of depth interviews,
the ways in which consumers protect them selves online. Using a more quantitative approach, Milne,
Labrecque and Cromer (2009) also examine privacy protection practices in risky environments. And
Stanaland, Lwin and Leong (2009) detail the responses that web sites make to different regulatory
environments. To finish the special issue, an intuitive article by Norberg, Home and Home (2009) calls
for the inclusion of the self in the privacy debate, an alert that may help set the agenda for the privacy
debates to come. But to where from here? Though state legislators and, in some cases, state courts
have periodically stepped into the regulatory void, the state of information control remains an uneven
regulatory patchwork (Langenderfer and Cook 2001).
The debate has changed from government invasion to private information sharing, with intrusion and
loss of privacy experienced not from police entering the sanctity of the home, but from corporate
entities compiling long and accurate dossiers regarding virtually every aspect of our existence. Indeed, it
seems that, given the ubiquity of private data sharing and the importance of the accuracy of many data
centers, we are increasingly defined by the information that databases store about us. For celebrities,
being defined by others may seem normal. For most citizens who have yet to experience their 15
minutes of fame, self-definition would seem to be an inalienable right.
Distrust toward government surveillance leads to distrust toward the private sector.
Diaz 13 — Claudia Diaz, Assistant professor at the KU Leuven Department of Electrical Engineering,
COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) in Belgium, 2013 (“SYMPOSIUM: The Second
Wave of Global Privacy Protection: Hero or Villain: The Data Controller in Privacy Law and
Technologies,” 74 Ohio St. L.J. 923, Available Online at Subscribing Institutions via LexisNexis, Accessed
on 07-20-15)
Constitutional privacy protections treat centralized power with distrust and require effective checks,
balances, and safeguards against government surveillance. Over the past two decades, as individuals'
daily lives have become increasingly mediated by technologies, government institutions have enhanced
their surveillance powers through tightening collaboration with private sector entities, to create a
"surveillant assemblage." Findings about the extent of government and private sector surveillance have
recently reached the zenith with the constant drumbeat of revelations about the NSA and GCHQ.
Information privacy law, a legal framework arising in the 1970s to protect individuals' data privacy,
provides little protection against such surveillance risks. This relatively new legal framework bridges two
distinct trust paradigms: one assuming that data controllers are trusted entities, the other assuming
that, in a similar vein to the constitutional framework, data controllers should be treated with suspicion
and distrust. Over the past few years, the legal framework has shifted from focusing on data
minimization, a cornerstone of the untrusted controller model, to imposing information stewardship
obligations on data controllers who are increasingly viewed as custodians of individuals' rights. These
obligations, typically grouped under the title "accountability," are based on a notion of the data
controller as a trusted party. In stark contrast, the technological community researching PETs proceeds
from a diametrically opposed perception of a data controller, that of an adversary. Under this approach,
information disclosed to a data controller is compromised and can no longer be viewed as private, given
that a data controller itself may subject individuals to persistent surveillance.
Inter users will soon demand privacy from the private sector, not just the government.
Rainie and Anderson 14 — Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science, and Technology at the Pew
Research Center, Janna Anderson, Director of the Imaging the Internet Center at Elon University, 2014
(“The Future of Privacy,” Pew Research Center, Available Online at
http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/12/PI_FutureofPrivacy_1218141.pdf, Accessed on 7-21-15)
A variety of views in regard to this issue are reflected in these big thinkers’ imaginings of what may
happen by 2025.
‘Social punishment may have to be accompanied by legislation’
Vint Cerf, Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist, responded, “The public will become more
sophisticated about security and safety. Corporations and service providers will feel pressure to
implement practices including two-factor authentication and end-to-end cryptography. Users will insist
on having the ability to encrypt their email at need. They will demand much more transparency of the
private sector and, especially, their governments. Privacy conventions will evolve in online society—
violations of personal privacy will become socially unacceptable. Of course, there will be breaches of all
these things, but some will be accompanied by serious social and economic downsides and, in some
cases, criminal charges. By 2025, people will be much more aware of their own negligent behavior,
eroding privacy for others, and not just themselves. The uploading and tagging of photos and videos
without permission may become socially unacceptable. As in many other matters, the social punishment
may have to be accompanied by legislation—think about seat belts and smoking by way of example. We
may be peculiarly more tolerant of lack of privacy, but that is just my guess.”
Since intelligence agencies rely on private companies for the data, the private sector’s
relationship with consumers are also at risk.
EFF 14 — Electronic Frontier Foundation, leading non-profit organization defending privacy and civil
liberties, 2014 (“Big Data in Private Sector and Public Sector Surveillance,” EFF, April 8th, Available Online
at https://www.eff.org/files/2014/04/08/eff-big-data-comments.pdf, Accessed on 7-21-15, NYL)
How should the policy frameworks or regulations for handling big data differ between the government
and the private sector? Please be specific as to the type of entity and type of use (eg, law enforcement,
government services, commercial, academic research, etc.).
First, government use of big data is inherently subject to constitutional constraints, while private sector
use of big data is typically subject only to statutory constraints, with two significant caveats. In
California, for example, private actors are subject to the state constitutional privacy right. And even
under the federal constitution, private actors can in some circumstances violate individual rights under
the state action doctrine. Of particular importance are the predication and particularity values of the
Fourth Amendment, the due process values of the Fifth Amendment, the reasoned elaboration values of
Article III courts and the democratic accountability of the Constitution itself.
Second, the policy framework for law enforcement and intelligence uses of big data is distinguishable
from most other contexts by its lack of transparency. Obviously, law enforcement and intelligence
agencies typically collect data in secret and without the consent of the people being surveilled. Secrecy
also interferes with public knowledge about these surveillance practices and technologies. Particularly in
the intelligence realm, the system of classified information and the state secrets privilege distorts
normal processes of democratic accountability essential to legitimate constitutional government. And
because these law enforcement and intelligence agencies often rely on data collected by the private
sector, these distortions also directly affect individuals’ trust relationships with business.
They Say: “Privacy Violations are Intrusive”
Google’s data collection for the purpose of online advertising is not invasive and
increases innovation.
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
Online advertising is perhaps the most familiar example of how firms use the rich data provided by users
of information and communication technology. Online advertising is also distinctive among advertising
media in its application of detailed data collection. Key to this data collection effort are two important
differences between online advertising and offline advertising —“targetability” and “measurability.”
Targetability reflects the collection and use of data to determine which kind of customers are most likely
to be influenced by a particular ad. Measurability reflects the collection and use of data to evaluate
whether the advertising has actually succeeded (Goldfarb and Tucker 2011a). Targetability and
measurability have helped make advertising-supported Internet companies, such as Google and
Facebook, among the fastest growing and most innovative in the U.S. economy.
Targeting occurs when an advertiser chooses to show an ad to a particular subset of potential viewers
and displays the ad online to that subset rather than to everyone using the media platform. An example
would be choosing to advertise cars to people who have recently browsed web pages devoted to car
reviews and ratings. No newspaper or television station can offer this level of targeting. The targetability
of online advertising can be thought of as reducing the search costs to advertisers of identifying
consumers. Targeting advertising has always been known to be desirable, but Internet advertising has
two primary advantages over offline advertising. First, the online setting makes it virtually costless for
advertisers to collect large amounts of customer data. Second, Internet technology makes it relatively
easy to serve different customers different ads because packets are sent to individual computers. In
contrast, with current technology, targeting individual customers with newspaper or TV ads is
prohibitively expensive.
These innovative targeting methods require media platforms to collect comprehensive data about the
web pages that customers have browsed. Typically, advertisers and website owners track and identify
users using a combination of cookies, flash cookies, and web bugs. Many advertising networks have
relationships with multiple websites that allow them to use these technologies to track users across
websites and over time. By examining past surfing and click behavior, firms can learn about current
needs as well as general preferences. Reflecting the value of this behavioral targeting to firms, Beales
(2010) documents that in 2009 the price of behaviorally targeted advertising was 2.68 times the price of
untargeted advertising. Lambrecht and Tucker (2011) further show that the performance of behavioral
targeting can be improved when combined with clickstream data that help to identify the consumer’s
degree of product search.
Increasing Privacy Protections will result in decreased operation efficiency. Google’s
surveillance is not a massive violation of privacy.
Lenard and Rubin ’09 , Thomas M. Lenard, Professor and Senior Fellow at Tech Policy
Institute and Paul Rubin, Professor of Economics at Emory University and Ph. D for
Purdue University (“IN DEFENSE OF DATA:INFORMATION AND THE COSTS OF PRIVACY”,Tech Policy
Institute, May 2009,Available online at
https://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/files/in%20defense%20of%20data.pdf, Accessed 07-16-2015)
At the highest level of data collection, users
can opt in for Google's "Web History" service for users with Google
accounts (those who use Gmail, Google Documents, Google Reader, or most other Google services), which tracks, indexes, and archives
search history. Data are available both to the user for future reference and to Google itself for analysis. Yahoo!
offers and uses data collected by these applications for behavioral targeting in advertising. Users concerned about ensuring
personal privacy when using search engines have a variety of technological tools at their disposal to
choose a level of activity-monitoring with which they are comfortable. Search engines provide some of
these themselves; for example, users can opt out of Google‘s Web History (which is opt-in to begin with), pause monitoring, or delete
their collected search and browsing history altogether. Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN also allow users to opt out of similar behavioral targeting
systems. Other
privacy protections rely on client‐side techniques. Users of Internet Explorer and Firefox can easily delete
Google's tracking cookie, which is essential for tying together separate personal data streams. In addition, several free browser
extensions and utilities can clear the cookie or require Google to provide a new one at the start of each
browsing session. Web proxies and anonymizing applications like Tor easily conceal user IP addresses, although because
of their architecture they often reduce bandwidth speeds. At the most basic level, a dedicated user could potentially even ―spoof‖ TCP source
addresses to prevent Google from monitoring immediately previous search results. The
costs in time and difficulty of these
solutions tend to increase as the desired level of privacy increases, but minor actions can have huge marginal effects
on privacy protection—for example, opting out of Web History takes only a few clicks but prevents collection of a significant amount of
personal data, whereas browsing entirely anonymously requires more effort to set up. Finally, all major search engines offer privacy policies in
compliance with the requirements of both United States and European data security laws. These policies disclose the 22 companies‘ use of
personal information and require user notification and consent before transferring personal information to others. Users of
search
engines essentially face a tradeoff between protecting their personal privacy and the speed and
relevance of their search results. As personalized search algorithms and behavioral targeting techniques
grow in popularity and precision, this tradeoff will likely become more and more evident to the everyday
user of search technology. Considering the current availability and ease of use of tools for protecting personal information, the
greatest threat to individual privacy is not search engines themselves, but the governments that may
seek their records. Companies vary in the degree to which they have protected data from government requests. In 2006, Google resisted
a Justice Department subpoena for millions of user search records, while Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN complied and handed over detailed server logs.
It is unclear whether search engines have aided government agencies in other surveillance efforts. Google declared publicly in March 2008 that
it ―was not part of the NSA‘s Terrorist Surveillance program,‖ but this
statement does not rule out the possibility of
collaboration in other monitoring schemes. Could search engines exist and organize information without collecting any
personal information? They could—consider Google‘s early years, when search rankings were based primarily on analysis of incoming links.
However, Google
attributes much of its success in developing better search algorithms to careful analysis
of consumer behavior that is stored in its logs. Going forward, it is likely that user information will continue to be
useful in providing searchers with relevant results and sustaining the business model that makes free
search engines viable.
They Say: “Private Sector Bad”
Private sector data collection allows for innovation and more – restricting that would
detrimental for society
New 2/5, (Joshua, a policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation. He has a background in
government affairs, policy, and communication. Prior to joining the Center for Data Innovation, Joshua
graduated from American University with degrees in C.L.E.G. (Communication, Legal Institutions,
Economics, and Government) and Public Communication, “A Lot of Private-Sector Data is Also Used for
Public Good”, Center for Data Innovation, 2/5/2015, http://www.datainnovation.org/2015/02/a-lot-ofprivate-sector-data-is-also-used-for-public-good/) BBer
The unprecedented collection of data by the private sector has been a boon for the average citizen, but
government restrictions could have a chilling effect. As the private sector continues to invest in datadriven innovation, the capacity for society to benefit from this data collection grows as well. Much has
been said about how the private sector is using the data it collects to improve corporate bottom lines,
but positive stories about how that data contributes to the greater public good are largely unknown. This
is unfortunate, because data collected by the private sector is being used in a variety of important ways,
including to advance medical research, to help students make better academic decisions and to
provide government agencies and nonprofits with actionable insights. However, overzealous actions by
government to restrict the collection and use of data by the private sector are likely to have a chilling
effect on such data-driven innovation. Companies are working to advance medical research with data
sharing. Personal genetics company 23andMe, which offers its customers inexpensive DNA test kits, has obtained consent from threefourths of its 800,000 customers to donate their genetic information for research purposes. 23andMe has partnered with pharmaceutical
companies, such as Genentech and Pfizer, to
advance genomics research by providing scientists with the data
needed to develop new treatments for diseases like Crohn’s and Parkinson’s. The company has also
worked with researchers to leverage its network of customers to recruit patients for clinical trials more
effectively than through previous protocols. Private-sector data is also helping students make more
informed decisions about education. With the cost of attending college rising, data that helps make this investment
worthwhile is incredibly valuable. The social networking company LinkedIn has built tools that provide prospective college students
with valuable information about their potential career path, field of study and choice of school. By analyzing the education tracks and careers of
its users, LinkedIn can offer students critical data-driven insights into how to make the best out of the enormous and costly decision to go to
college. Through LinkedIn’s higher-education tools, students now have an unprecedented resource to develop data-supported education and
career plans. Government
agencies and nonprofits, which often lack the capacity to do their own largescale collection and analysis, are using data from the private sector to advance their own missions . The
nonprofit organization GiveDirectly discovered that the materials used for housing, such as metal roofs versus cheaper, homemade thatched
roofs, are a good indicator of economic status in rural Africa. The
group now analyzes satellite imagery from Google
Maps to identify the poorest households in Uganda to prioritize aid delivery. Elsewhere in Uganda, a United
Nations project has begun mining Facebook data to better understand perceptions surrounding contraception and teenage pregnancy in an
effort to improve public health outcomes. By analyzing
the content of Facebook posts, UN workers have begun to
better understand attitudes towards condom use, abstinence, teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS —
incredibly valuable information in a country where one in four girls between the age of 15 and 19 are
pregnant and 7.2% of adults have HIV — and increase the efficacy of the policies and programs to
address these public health concerns. Finally, in the United States a researcher at the Food and Drug
Administration mined 1.4 million electronic health records from health insurer Kaiser Permanente to
determine that the popular arthritis and pain drug Vioxx posed serious health risks and should be
withdrawn from the market. These beneficial uses of private-sector data are not just one-off, isolated
occurrences — just this past month two major tech companies have offered to put valuable and even
potentially life-saving data to good use for the public. Facebook will now start matching users’ location
data to Amber Alerts to rapidly spread awareness about missing children, and Uber will be donating its anonymized
transportation data to city governments to help reduce congestion and enable better city planning. However, it is important to keep
in mind that many of these success stories could have been blocked by rules limiting data collection or
unnecessarily restricting data reuse. If researchers had not been allowed to analyze data from the
electronic health records of Kaiser’s patients, it might have taken more time to prove the harmful
effects of Vioxx. The takeaway for policymakers should be that data, even or perhaps especially in the hands of the
private sector, has enormous potential to improve societal welfare, and so government should be
cautious about implementing well-intended restrictions that limit data-driven innovation.
They Say: “No Adoption”
Google’s cars will get adopted – efficiency and current adoption is increasing
Fancher 14, Lou Fancher is a Reporter for the SF Weekly, 2014 ( “Hard Drive: SelfDriving Cars Are Closer Than They Appear “, February 2014,Available at
http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-02-19/news/google-self-driving-cars-center-forautomotive-research-darpa/, Accessed 07-26-15)
Before 2009, it was a secret. In 2010, it became an announcement. And from 2011 on, Google's selfdriving car program has been an intriguing spectacle. Now, five years on, Google cars regularly traverse
Bay Area byways, sensing their surroundings and operating off internalized maps. At a late-January
lecture at Livermore's Bankhead Theater, Google senior staff engineer Mike Montemerlo played a video
compilation. A windshield-mounted camera showed faultless journeys: through dark mountain roads
filled with big rigs and leaping deer; a residential, stroller-infested Mountain View neighborhood; a
FasTrak toll booth; and highway construction sites. And what Bay Area driving test would be complete
without a meander down pedestrian-rich Lombard Street? Throughout 10 challenging routes and 1,000
miles, the self-driving phenomenon performed like a robotic Galileo. Originally composed of a tiny fleet
of toaster-topped Priuses and one Audi TT, the program now boasts a dozen Lexus SUVs sporting Silicon
Valley tech company Velodyne's Light Detection and Ranging system (LIDAR). Spinning at up to 900
rpm, the 64-laser rooftop whirligig creates a 360-degree point cloud — an enhanced "driver's" view. Other
than the vehicles' high-tech hats, Google's autonomous cars hide their hardware: algorithm-loaded
computers in the trunk, radar under the front hood, Vestigial Actuators where they always are (VAs are
code for brake, accelerator, steering wheel). In the car's interior, the only aberrant features are a
passenger with a data-collecting laptop and a Big Red Button (known as the BRB) — a clown-sized,
electronics interruption knob to punch in a crisis. (Self-driving car language is rife with acronyms, applied
to everything from roadkill to potholes to the car's sensitive circuitry.) Beyond the geeky fascination,
Google's program wields enough clout to earn commentary from transportation experts all over the Bay
Area. At a sustainable transportation conference sponsored by Chevron in Concord in late January,
Oakland-based Cambridge Systematics partner and ITS-Midwest Vice President Christopher Hedden said
the interesting part isn't the technology, it's how we will live in the smart-car future. "Google's goal is to
reduce the number of cars on the road. This will impact where you choose to live," he said. "Imagine an
autonomous Winnebago. Get in after work at 7 p.m. and say, 'Take me to L.A.'" Turning to more serious
matters, Hedden said connected vehicles and self-driving cars will greatly reduce drunken driver-related
accidents. Self-driving cars trace their origin to a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency invention, the
DARPA Grand Challenge. Frustrated in its efforts to develop self-operating vehicles, the Department of
Defense in 2004 dangled a $1 million prize (subsequently $2 million) for inventing a car capable of traveling
132 miles in the desert without a driver or remote control. The first year's winner managed to cover only 7.5
miles. But bright minds at places like Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford were turned on. In 2005, the
second year, Montemerlo's Stanford team completed the course and won with "Stanley," a VW Touareg stuffed
with computers. After 2007, DARPA's focus turned to robotics; the corporate world had taken the self-driving
car challenge and run with it. Safety, Montemerlo says, is the No. 1 reason "you need this car in your
driveway." With 32,778 auto-related fatalities in 2010 — 1.5 million worldwide, on average, per year — he
said, "anything we can do to make driving safer can potentially save thousands of lives." Smart cars save
lives, he argues, by reducing human error. An autonomous vehicle doesn't get mad, drink and drive, fall
asleep, text illegally, become legally blind or too old to drive responsibly — but remain too independent to
stop — or practice playing trombone. Montemerlo showed actual photographic evidence of a driver
practicing his instrument, earning a big laugh, but statistics from the American Automobile Association
prove the sobering truth: Ninety-three percent of the 6 million annual crashes are attributable to human
error. Improved safety and economics also come from autonomous driving's efficiency. Total lane
capacity on a freeway is estimated by experts to be 2,000 vehicles per hour. At peak capacity, only 15
percent of the space is used, according to Montemerlo. But that would change if sensors were allowed to
command a car and decrease the "cushion" needed to drive safely. " If we could use more of the space, we
could double the capacity of the road," Montemerlo said. Instead of adding lanes to handle congestion
(costly construction), smart cars could operate more cars on existing roads, leaving more funds for road
maintenance. Plus, greater efficiency would reduce the amount of time (and fuel) people burn up on the
road: 30 billion hours per year, studies show.
Revenue Internal Link
Advertising revenue is a driving factor for internet companies profits, especially
Google.
Investopedia 15 — Investopedia is a popular financial website that includes a wide variety of financial
voices, 2015 ("How important is advertising revenue in the Internet sector?," Early 2015, Available
Online at http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041015/how-important-advertising-revenueinternet-sector.asp, Accessed 7-21-2015)//CM
Advertising revenue is extremely important to the Internet sector, though reliance on advertising revenue varies
among industry participants. Certain Internet firms such as Amazon, eBay and Priceline operate online marketplaces and
derive revenue from premium postings and commissions from sales on their respective platforms, reducing
the importance of advertisements. Companies such as Salesforce generate revenue by charging users for services. This model is becoming
increasingly popular as software-as-a-service providers proliferate, especially for enterprise solutions. Media companies such as Netflix or the
Wall Street Journal can charge users for subscription memberships because they offer unique, high-quality content. E-commerce retailers
generate income through retail sales in the same manner as traditional brick and mortar retailers. Advertising
generates the vast
majority of revenue in the search and social media portions of the Internet industry. Google, Yahoo and
Baidu all rely heavily on income from advertising. According to Search Engine Watch, 47% to 64% of total website
traffic comes through search engines. This allows search providers to charge vendors for display ad
placement or sponsored search results. Popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have become common mediums
for communication and entertainment, resulting in heavy traffic and access to substantial user data. User volume and targeted advertising are
attractive to businesses that are trying attract customers, and social networks have exploited this advantage substantially. To illustrate these
points, consider
the 2014 annual filings for the largest Internet firms. According to Pricewaterhouse Cooper, the ten
largest U.S. companies in terms of digital ad revenues control 71% of the market, and the next 15 companies hold
an additional 11% market share. The largest companies provide an excellent gauge of overall industry conditions.
For the online marketplace operators Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and Priceline, advertising revenues contributed 7%, 16%, 1.6% and 5%
respectively. These advertising contributions also include revenue from marketing solutions and other services, meaning that the actual ad
revenues are even lower than the available figures. Salesforce derives substantial income from subscription fees and support services, and
advertising income is not even mentioned in its 2014 10-K. Netflix similarly generates substantial revenues from membership fees, and it does
not publish figures related to ad sales. Advertising
contributed 90% of Google's total revenue, 79% of Yahoo's total
revenue and 99% of Baidu's total revenue. Digital advertising accounted for 92% and 90% of Facebook's
and Twitter's total revenues, respectively. The importance of advertising revenue will continue to grow
as technology advances. According to a 2014 report by Pricewaterhouse Cooper, U.S. online advertising revenues grew
15.1% year over year to $23.1 billion in the first half of 2014. During this same period, mobile ad
spending grew 76%. As mobile devices become ubiquitous, local, real-time and precisely targeted
advertising will become increasingly valuable for businesses.
Advertising makes up the majority of google’s revenue
Bott 14, (Ed, an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for
mainstream media outlets and online publications. He has served as editor of the U.S. edition of PC
Computing and managing editor of PC World; both publications had monthly paid circulation in excess of
1 million during his tenure, “Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from?”, Zdnet,
2/6/2014, http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-google-microsoft-where-does-the-money-come-from/)
GOOGLE Two years ago, Google was a one-trick pony, with its revenues
coming almost entirely from advertising.
According to its 2011 annual report, "Advertising revenues made up 97 percent of our revenues in
2009 and 96 percent of our revenues in 2010 and 2011." That picture changed slightly with Google's attempt to move
into hardware manufacturing via its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, as you can see in this chart. But the
pending sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo will shift things back to nearly the way they were. The
"Other" category, which includes digital content and non-Motorola hardware products, is still a tiny fraction of the
company's revenues. After the Lenovo transaction closes, Google's advertising revenues will go back to being
more than 90 percent of its total.
PRISM Link
Google’s intelligence will reduce if PRISM is curtailed
,Available online at http://thedailyjournalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/rja-privacy-v-spying.pdf,
Accessed online at 07-14-15
However they do help explain many effects beyond mere information security. A
further set of examples comes from studying
dependability in network industries, from the power industry to the ISPs and other firms that provide
the Internet itself [4]. Here again there are other externalities; for example, a utility that suffers an outage faces the cost of lost customer
minutes, while the social costs are very much greater. But in many utilities, network effects play a role in industry dynamics, along with
technical lock-in and marginal costs. Curiously, scholars of government appear to have paid little attention to these factors. Experts in public
choice study how people act within institutions, while the international relations community observes the interaction between them. The latter
school is divided between realists (Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kissinger …) who see relations between states as a cynical zero-sum game,
and liberals who believe in international institutions, global norms and interdependence (Kant, Wilson, Keohane, Clinton …) – but even the
liberals pay little or no attention to network effects. There is some specialist literature on whether governments should interfere in markets
with network effects, or with behaviours that have a social-network component such as smoking and obesity, but this tends to focus on the
likely effectiveness of intervention; its takeaway message is the pessimistic one that regulating networked industries is hard, and behaviours
with entrenched social-network support can be hard to change. The Snowden papers reveal an international
surveillance network
whose scale surprised even industry insiders and security experts. In order to understand how this might be brought
under appropriate political, judicial and social control, we need to understand its dynamics. Of course these depend hugely on
the economics of the communications service industries; its was the existence of large service firms like
Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft which control the personal information of many millions of
people that enabled the intelligence agencies to gain cheap and convenient access via PRISM, while the
relatively small number of international cable operators facilitates TEMPORA. But that is not all.
2NC/1NR Impacts
Innovation Module
Google has significant influence on the world – a loss of revenue would preclude
future innovations that can change the shape of our future
McFarland 14— Matt McFarland is is the editor of Innovations at the Washington Post, 1-14-2014 ("7
reasons why Google is the most fascinating company in the world," Washington Post, 1-14-2014,
Available Online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/01/14/7-reasonswhy-google-is-the-most-fascinating-company-in-the-world/, Accessed 7-21-2015)//CM
Just Google it. The word is synonymous with searching the Web. But given the sweeping goals of the
company, the word Google might come to mean something else in pop culture. Google made a big move Monday,
announcing plans to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion. With Nest on board Google continues to position itself to change the world on a grand
scale. Here are seven reasons why Google’s
future will be incredibly interesting: Tony Fadell has a proven track record. What
will he do next? (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP) 1. They now have a key player behind the iPod and iPhone on their side.
Before he was CEO of Nest, Tony Fadell led the Apple team that developed the iPod. He’s sometimes called “the Podfather”
and had a hand in the iPhone as well. This is huge for Google, a company that has lacked a hip, aesthetic touch.
Google Glass looks like something for cyborgs. Apple has long had talent for making beautiful objects that can win mainstream
acceptance. Take one look at the Nest Thermostat or Nest Protect and you’ll be struck by its looks. With at least 100 former Apple employees
now joining Google, a lack of elite design instincts is addressed. Meet the Nest Thermostat. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) 2. The Internet of
Things is exploding, and Google has its hottest products. Not long ago, a phone was something you simply placed calls on. Now, a
smartphone can be used as flashlight, alarm clock, pocketwatch, calculator, GPS, camera and more. The gadgets smartphones don’t kill off will
be reinvented too with computer chips and online access. We’re
realizing the potential of the Internet of Things, in
which everyday objects harness the power of digital chips and Internet access. Nest’s two products — a
thermostat and smoke detector — have received near universal praise. Fadell’s team has a secret sauce and an
advantage over everyone else in this space. Whatever unloved household device they seek to reinvent next will
likely be a hit. Driving may be fun, but it isn’t healthy. (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg) 3. The self-driving car may be the most
important innovation of the 21st century. Motorized vehicles kill 1.24 million people per year worldwide.
That number is on pace to triple to 3.6 million by 2030. Self-driving cars offer a solution. Who happens to be a key
player in this space? Google. 4. They’re hoarding robots for who knows what. Google bought eight robotics
companies in 2013 to pursue what it admits is a “moonshot.” One of those companies won the DARPA robotics
challenge in December, which suggests that Google has a leg up on competitors. It’s been reported that its early robotics
efforts will focus on electronics assembly and manufacturing. Instead of limiting itself to its core business of Web search,
Google has expanded its tentacles into whatever it finds interesting or potentially world changing. It
even bought a company that makes airborne wind turbines. A Google Fiber technician gets supplies out of his truck to
install Google Fiber in a residential home in Provo, Utah. (George Frey/Reuters) 5. Google is quietly building a telecom
network. Google controls more than 100,000 miles of fiber-optic cables around the world, according to the
Wall Street Journal. For comparison’s sake, that’s more than twice the size of Sprint’s network. They’re
experimenting with Google Fiber, which brings uncommonly fast Internet to a nation that is lagging
behind the world in Internet speeds. While Google Fiber’s current reach is limited, its existence is a reminder to consumers and
rival Internet providers that better service can and should exist. If the country that invented the Internet is going to lead the world in Internet
speeds, Google Fiber will nudge us forward. 6. They’d like
to cheat death. You’ve heard the expression — nothing is certain but death
and taxes. But it may not even be a certainty if Google has its way. Its funding Calico, which will tackle aging and related
diseases. 7. Google doesn’t care for convention or precedent. Companies, individuals and armies falter when they expect the future to
resemble the past. Because the past is all we know, imagining the future is a challenge. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We
march backwards into the future,” media theorist Marshall McLuhan once wrote. Google doesn’t have this problem. “Don’t
be surprised
if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet
businesses,” Google CEO Larry Page wrote in September. He’s open to radical and different thinking. His
idea as a Stanford grad student of downloading the entire Web onto a computer may have seemed crazy, but it was the foundation of Google.
As Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer once put it, “Larry’s
superpower is asking ‘Why not? Why does it have to be this way?’
” Page’s outlook is the perfect fit for leading a company in an era of revolutionary technology. Google says its mission is to
organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. With these new ventures
a more accurate — and appropriately shorter — slogan might be “reorganizing the world.” Eventually
our planet will see a company with a market cap of $1 trillion. If Google can put all the pieces together
and keep innovating, they have a good chance. Whether they succeed or not, the road ahead will be
exciting.
Innovations in business are key to competition in the future.
Macfarland 13 — Scott Macfarland is a Digital marketer and brand strategist, 2013 ("Why Is
Innovation Management So Important to Compete?," Huffington Post, 10-30-2013, Available Online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-macfarland/why-innovation-management-isimportant_b_4174482.html, Accessed 7-21-2015)//CM
In reality, innovation management is
really just a form of looking into the future, being creative and
imaginative so that you can carve out a new niche before your competitors. Business must look ahead,
not behind. It's not just the big companies that need to do this. Every business must innovate to compete. They must create new products
and services for new markets. They must be creative, and come up with new ideas that never would have been
thought of before. This is the new management paradigm. Get used to it, it's not going away anytime soon. Here's what
will happen. Everything will speed up. Processes, functions, data, inventory turns and speed to market, will force employees to learn a whole
new language called innovation. Business as usual doesn't cut it any more. Enter innovation management. The
proven management tools, techniques and clichés once embraced, are being challenged and shelved for a new set of rules and a new way of
doing business. The
management style of the future is no longer command and control. That ship has sailed.
Today, in order for businesses to succeed, management must trust in the technologies and open
leadership styles that are sweeping boardrooms, the C-suite, office suites and cubicles everywhere. In
fact, today's companies are implementing new job titles that are rapidly appearing on business cards and office doors. So, which one will you
hire next? Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Ideation Officer or Chief Digital Officer? Ten years ago, you would have been laughed out of the
building if these were printed on your business card. Not today. According to Idris Mootee who wrote the book Design Thinking for Strategic
Innovation, Innovation Management
is about more than just planning new products, services, brand
extensions, or technology inventions. It's about imagining, mobilizing, and competing in new ways. I
couldn't agree more. This may sound like it's just another day in the office, however, it's clear that imagining new ideas and competing in new
ways is extremely challenging, even for the biggest and best of companies. So, how do companies forge ahead so they can be change agents for
the next generation? I believe one way is to immerse themselves in the benefits of what the internet offers. The world as we know it has
actually become smaller as a result of the convenient connectedness of the internet. Some businesses have fully embraced the global online
economy and real time, digital, interactive communication we now have at our fingertips, all of which didn't exist that long ago.
Consequently, a massive paradigm shift in how business is conducted has paved the way for an
environment that desires more and demands more. In the online environment, everyone communicates more, and in more
ways, shares more information, creates more content, trashes more, stores more, and buys more of just about everything a human or business
could possibly want. People and businesses also have more friends in their contact list. Based on the trends, we are addicted to more, and it's
embedded in the business environment. Expectations
are now rising at alarming rates, and the speed of business is
no longer fast enough to keep up with the speed of innovation. Guess what? There is no end in sight.
Businesses around the world are more connected than ever before. Just ask any company how many smartphones
they have, how many tablets and laptops they have, how many virtual meetings are held with clients, and how many emails and text messages
are sent. Oh, and we haven't even talked about the use of social technologies. Being
connected is probably the most powerful
influencer of innovation. There are many reasons for this. The immediacy and accuracy of real-time data transfer
has become the norm. We now have the ability to share and connect with people, groups, and companies around the world. The
quality and ease of use of digital media is not just for professionals any longer. Online learning and the global reach of it have changed the face
of learning. Mobile technologies, cloud based storage, computing, medicine and space have continued to amaze us year after year. The list
could go on. Some
form of innovation touches every aspect of our life. In my opinion, innovation is also required
to be competitive today and tomorrow. Managing that expectation and deliverable is critical for
sustainable growth to occur. In thinking about sustainable growth, I spoke with Kevin Wells, Executive Vice President, Global Market
Development for Reach Analytics. Kevin's comments were quite telling when discussing how to predict innovation for growth purposes. How
do you predict innovation, and also leverage predictive analytics so that your business can use that
information to create growth? Predicting innovation has always been part science, part black magic and part luck. The world of data
gives us the ability to maybe leverage the science and luck parts of that equation a little more. We are a predictive analytics firm so we have to
eat our own dog food so to speak. We look at the trends the data uncovers and then we look at the variables that are more difficult to quantify.
And then we make what we think are good business decisions. But they are based on facts more than gut. Big data uncovers things humans
would overlook -- if you know how to look for them. The future is not like the past It's no longer the speed of business that creates challenges.
It's the speed of disruption that is permeating our business models in seemingly every possible way that is causing businesses to rethink how
they operate. The speed of disruption is also the trigger that is causing entire industries to think about how to re-purpose what they have, and
redefine a new sense of the brand. They
are realizing their current model may not be sustainable. Welcome to the
new business paradigm. Welcome to innovation management.
Competitiveness among businesses is key to stimulate the economy — 4 warrants
Kolasky 2 — William J. Kolasky, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division for the U.S.
Department of Justice, 2002 (“The Role Of Competition In Promoting Dynamic Markets And Economic
Growth,” Address Before the TokyoAmerica Center, November 12, Available Online at
http://www.justice.gov/atr/speech/role-competition-promoting-dynamic-markets-and-economicgrowth, Accessed 7/16/15)
The most obvious benefit of competition is that it results in goods and services being provided to
consumers at competitive prices. But what people often forget is that producers are also consumers.
They must buy raw materials and energy to produce their products, telecommunications services to
communicate with their suppliers and customers, computer equipment to keep track of their
inventories, construction services to build their plants and warehouses, and so forth. To the extent that
prices for these goods and services are higher than those of their foreign competitors because of a lack
of competition in those markets, firms will be less competitive and will suffer in the marketplace.
A second benefit of competition is its effect on efficiency and productivity. Companies that are faced
with vigorous competition are continually pressed to become more efficient and more productive.
They know that their competitors are constantly seeking ways to reduce costs, in order to increase
profits or gain a competitive advantage. With that constant pressure, firms know that if they do not
keep pace in making efficiency and productivity improvements, they may well see their market position
shrink, if not evaporate completely. It is exactly this process of fierce competition between rivals that
leads firms to strive to offer higher quality goods, better services and lower prices.
A third benefit of competition is its positive effects on innovation. In today's technology-driven world,
innovation is crucial to success. Innovation leads to new products and new production technologies. It
allows new firms to enter into markets dominated by incumbents, and is critical for incumbent firms
who want to continue their previous market successes and stimulate consumer demand for new
products. Competition drives innovation. Without competition, there would be little pressure to
introduce new products or new production methods. Without this pressure, an economy will lag behind
others as a center of innovation and will lose international competitiveness
A fourth benefit of competition is that it fosters restructuring in sectors that have lost competitiveness.
It is difficult for governments to determine which sectors of the economy need to be restructured,
which firms in those sectors should remain or should cease to exist, and when it is best to engage in
such restructuring. Governments are subject to political constraints and pressures, which more often
than not lead to sub-optimal decisions. The competitive process, on the other hand, is unbiased. It
forces decisions to be based on market factors, such as demand, product uses, costs, technologies,
rather than the incomplete information in the possession of government bureaucrats. The competition
for capital and other resources by firms throughout the economy leads to money and resources flowing
away from weak, uncompetitive sectors and firms and towards the strongest, most competitive sectors,
and to the strongest and most competitive firms within those sectors. In these ways, the very operation
of the competitive process makes decisions on restructuring clear, and leads to the strongest and most
competitive economy possible.
US economy is still the lynchpin of the global economy — most recent evidence
Brett 15 — Shane Brett, author of "The Future of Hedge Funds", founder of "Global Perspectives", cofounder of "Gecko", received his Bachelor of Business Studies (Hons), Accounting & Finance from
Dundalk Institute of Technology, received his MBA in Management Consulting from the University of
Wales, has 19 years experience in hedge fund /asset management operations, consultancy &
technology, including programme & product management at top fund managers & administrators
worldwide, 2015 (“The Global Economy In 2015 - 5 Key Trends,” Seeking Alpha, January 11, Available
Online at http://seekingalpha.com/article/2811155-the-global-economy-in-2015-5-key-trends, Accessed
7/16/15)
The US economy created 7,000 jobs per day in 2014 and this remarkable rate of employment growth is
set to escalate in 2015.
The perceived decline of American power has been greatly exaggerated.
Commentators confuse the current US unwillingness to wield hard power, for a lack of underlying real
power. They also confuse deadlock in Washington with the underlying dynamism of many US regions
and States.
The US still controls the global economy, all the world's oceans, its trade routes and its reserve
currency. It spends nearly as much on defence as the rest of the world put together. This will not
change anytime soon.
In 2015, the US will continue to be the global engine for growth, enterprise and innovation, as it has
been for most of the last century.
This should not be surprising. The English-speakers (i.e. the USA/UK) have run the world for 3 centuries
now. They have consistently defeated all challengers to world hegemony that have appeared over this
time (Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Stalin etc.).
Despite the chorus of BRIC hysteria over the last few years, the economic growth in these countries has
taken place because they adopted US policies of trade liberalization, economic freedom and a free
market. In 2015, they will endure a major emerging market crisis. Their power will not surpass the US
for decades (if ever).
Oil Dependence Module
Google Self-Driving cars are key to revitalizing the economy, reducing dependence on
oil, and a more sustainable future.
Dallegro 14 — Joseph A. Dallegro is a journalist and advertising copywriter living in the New York area.
He has covered business and finance, automobiles and local interest stories for publications such as
Institutional Investor, ConsumerSearch and the Jersey City Independent. His advertising work has been
profiled in CBS News, The Huffington Post, and Adweek, 2014 ("How Google's Self-Driving Car Will
Change Everything,” Investopedia, April 2014, Available Online at
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/052014/how-googles-selfdriving-car-will-changeeverything.asp, Accessed 7-21-2015)//CM
Imagine getting in your car, typing or speaking a location into your vehicle’s interface, then letting it drive you to your destination while you
read a book, surf the web or nap. Self-driving vehicles – the stuff of science fiction since the first roads were paved – are coming, and they’re
going to radically change what it’s like to get from point A to point B. Basic Technology Already In Use “The
building blocks of
driverless cars are on the road now,” explained Russ Rader, senior v.p. of communications at the Insurance Institute for Highway
Safety. He pointed to the front-crash prevention systems that for several years have been able to warn drivers of an impending obstacle and
apply the brakes if they don’t react fast enough. These systems were quickly followed by technology allowing cars to self-park by sizing up a
free spot and automatically steering into it, with the driver only controlling the accelerator and brake pedals. Mercedes-Benz took autonomous
driving even further with last year’s unveiling of a steering system that works on the highway, in certain circumstances. The
first big leap
to fully autonomous vehicles is due in 2017, when Google Inc. (GOOG) said it would have an integrated
system ready to market. Every major automotive manufacturer is likely to follow by the early 2020s, though their systems could wind
up being more sensor-based, and rely less on networking and access to map information. Google probably wont manufacture cars. More likely,
it’ll license the software and systems. A Drastic Change As with the adoption of any new revolutionary technology, there will be problems for
businesses that don’t adjust fast enough. Futurists estimate that hundreds of billions of dollars (if not trillions) will be lost by automakers,
suppliers, dealers, insurers, parking companies, and many other car-related enterprises. And think of the lost revenue for governments via
licensing fees, taxes and tolls, and by personal injury lawyers and health insurers. Who needs a car made with heavier-gauge steel and eight
airbags (not to mention a body shop) if accidents are so rare? Who needs a parking spot close to work if your car can drive you there, park itself
miles away, only to pick you up later? Who needs to buy a flight from Boston to Cleveland when you can leave in the evening, sleep much of the
way, and arrive in the morning? Indeed, Google’s
goal is to increase car utilization from 5-10% to 75% or more by
facilitating sharing. That means fewer cars on the road. Fewer cars period, in fact. Who needs to own a car
when you can just order a shared one and it’ll drive up minutes later, ready to take you wherever you
want? “This [has the potential to] dramatically reduce the number of cars on the street, 80% of which
have people driving alone in them, and also a household's cost of transportation, which is 18% of their
income – around $9,000 a year – for an asset that they use only 5% of the time,” said Robin Chase, the founder
and CEO of Buzzcar, a peer-to-peer car sharing service, and co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar. In 2030, self-driving cars are
expected to create $87 billion worth of opportunities for automakers and technology developers, said a
report by Boston-based Lux Research. Software developers stand to win big. A Car Manufacturing Revolution If you’re an automaker, such as
Ford Motor Co. (F), General Motors Co. (GM), Chrysler Group LLC, Toyota Motor Corp. or Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (HMC), which account for
about 70% of the U.S. market, you could see an initial surge in the $600 billion in annual new and used car sales in the U.S. But as soon as the
technology takes hold, sales could fall off significantly as sharing popularizes. Cars will always need steel, glass, an interior, a drivetrain and
some form of human interface (even if that interface is little more than a wireless connection to your smartphone). But much of everything else
could change. As an example, take front-facing seats; they could become an option, not a requirement. Automakers that see change coming,
such as how the big profits are secured downstream by car servicers, insurers and more, are focusing on services as much as on what and how
they manufacture. Infrastructure Transformation With
fewer cars around, parking lots and spaces that cover roughly
a one-third of the land area of many U.S. cities can be repurposed. That could mean temporary
downward pressure on real estate values as supply increases. It could also mean greener urban areas, as
well as revitalized suburbs, as longer commutes become more palatable. And if fewer cars are on the
road, the federal and state governments may be able to reallocate a good portion of the roughly $30
billion spent annually on highways. Changing Oil Demand If you’re in the business of finding, extracting, refining and marketing
hydrocarbons, such as Exxon Mobil Corp. (EOX), Chevron Corp. (CVX) or BP plc (BP), you could see your business fluctuate as use changes.
“These vehicles should practice very efficient eco-driving practices, which is typically about 20% better
than the average driver,” said Chase “On the other hand, if these cars are owned by individuals, I see a huge rise in the number of
trips, and vehicle miles traveled. People will send out their car to run errands they would never do if they had to be in the car and waste their
own time. If
the autonomous cars are shared vehicles and people pay for each trip, I think this will reduce
demand, and thus (vehicle miles traveled).” Safety Dividend Autonomous vehicles are also expected to be
safer. “These cars won't get drunk or high, drive too fast, or take unnecessary risks – things people do all
the time,” Chase said. “Over 90% of accidents today are caused by driver error,” said Professor Robert W.
Peterson of the Center for Insurance Law and Regulation at Santa Clara University School of Law. “There is every reason to believe
that self-driving cars will reduce frequency and severity of accidents, so insurance costs should fall,
perhaps dramatically.” “Cars can still get flooded, damaged or stolen,” notes Michael Barry, the v.p. of media relations at the Insurance
Information Institute. “But this technology will have a dramatic impact on underwriting. A lot of traditional underwriting criteria will be
upended.” Barry said it’s too early to quantify exactly how self-driving vehicles will affect rates, but added that injured parties in a crash
involving a self-driving car may choose to sue the vehicle’s manufacturer, or the software company that designed the autonomous capability.
Initially, insurers such as State Farm Insurance, Allstate Corp. (ALL), Liberty Mutual Group, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s (BRK-A) GEICO, Citigroup
Inc.’s (C) Travelers Group could see a huge benefit from lower accident liabilities, but wind up losing a big portion of the $200 billion in personal
auto premiums they write every year as fewer cars take to the road. Some have even speculated that mandatory insurance for cars could be
dropped. And as long as we’re talking about financial services, what of the multitude of banks and creditors that lend buyers money in about
70% of car purchases if sales volume falls? According to a University of Texas report, if
only 10% of the cars on U.S. roads were
autonomous, more than $37 billion of savings could be realized via less wasted time and fuel, as well as
fewer injuries and deaths. At 90%, the benefit rises to almost $450 billion a year. Closer to Home Self-driving cars
could have a substantial impact on the taxi and limousine industries and could create new ones. Chase noted that they could be used to share
specific trips as a kind of pay-as-you-go small-scale public transportation – taking a disparate bunch of Manhattanites to the beach in the
Hamptons, for instance. One study found that
a fleet of 9,000 driverless taxis could serve all of Manhattan at about
40 cents per mile (compared to about $4-6 per mile now). There are licenses for over 13,000 taxis in the Big Apple now.
Self-driving cars may also challenge train lines. “A self-driving car offers much of the convenience of rail service with the added convenience
that the service is portal-to-portal rather than station-to-station,” Peterson said. “On the other hand, a fleet of self-driving cars available at the
station may make rail service more palatable. “The technology has already been adopted in closed systems, such as campuses, air-terminals
and mining,” he noted. “Rio Tinto Group (RIO), a large mining company, uses enormous self-driving trucks in its mining operations. European
countries are experimenting with the platooning of trucks. Among other things, this saves about 18% in fuel.” Risks, Hurdles and the Unknown
There are regulatory and legislative obstacles to widespread use of self-driving cars, and substantial concerns about privacy (who will have
access to any driving information these vehicles store?). There’s also the question of security, as hackers could theoretically take control of
these vehicles, and are not known for their restraint or civic-mindedness. The Bottom Line However
it plays out, these vehicles
are coming – and fast. Their full adoption will take decades, but their convenience, cost, safety and other factors will
make them ubiquitous and indispensable. Such as with any technological revolution, the companies that plan ahead, adjust the
fastest and imagine the biggest will survive and thrive. And companies invested in old technology and practices will need to evolve or risk dying.
Driverless cars have the potential to substantially cut oil dependence and make
traveling more efficient.
Plumer 13 — Brad Plumer is a reporter focusing on energy and environmental issues at The
Washington Post. He was previously an associate editor at The New Republic, 2013 ("Will driverless cars
solve our energy problems — or just create new ones?," Washington Post, 3-30-2013, Available Online
at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/30/will-self-driving-cars-solve-allour-energy-problems-or-create-new-ones/, Accessed 7-22-2015)//CM
Self-driving cars are all the rage these days. Companies like Google are building vehicles that can drive themselves with sensors and algorithms. Futurists are raving
about how this will revolutionize transportation: fewer accidents, easier parking... It's reached the point where even Newt Gingrich is offering a "short course" on
driverless cars. Wait a minute, who's driving this thing? (Getty Images) And that got us wondering .
If self-driving cars ever do become the
future of transportation, what would that mean for energy, oil use and climate change in the decades
ahead? Some backdrop: Last week, the National Academy of Sciences released a big report on how the United
States could cut gasoline use and transport emissions 80 percent by 2050 — a key step toward
addressing global warming and U.S. oil dependency. It would be difficult, the report said, but a big push on electric
vehicles, advanced biofuels and efficiency could get us there. In a follow-up post, David Roberts criticized the NAS for thinking
too prosaically. The report assumed our transportation system would look basically the same in 2050, only with somewhat cleaner vehicles. And that might well be
wrong. What
if self-driving cars become ubiquitous and utterly transform the way we get around? The task
of getting off oil and curbing emissions could be much easier — or much harder — than anyone thinks. Now, a future filled with
driverless cars might be far-fetched, but it's interesting to ponder. So here are a few very speculative thoughts on how self-driving cars could conceivably affect
energy use in the decades ahead — assuming they ever catch on: How driverless cars could curb energy use and be great for the environment: Driverless
cars will be far more fuel-efficient. That's the idea, anyway, laid out in this report from KPMG. Once we no longer need clumsy
human drivers, then self-driving cars and trucks will be able to bunch close together at steadier speeds.
Traffic jams and accidents will become a thing of the past. The robots will be driving as efficiently as possible. The hope is that this
could save thousands of lives. It could also have massive effects on energy use. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that the reduction in wind drag alone from
vehicles traveling closely together could reduce fuel use 20 percent to 30 percent: 012513-DriverlessCars2-image2-courtesyPATH Driverless
vehicles
could also, in theory be much, much lighter — since collisions will no longer be a big concern. Cars that currently weigh
4,000 pounds could one day weigh just 750 pounds. That development alone there would nearly double
energy efficiency. Driverless cars will waste less fuel on things like looking for parking. One MIT study
found that in congested urban areas, about 40 percent of total gasoline use in cars is spent as drivers
look for parking. Presumably, intelligent self-driving cars wouldn't have this problem. Driverless cars will make car-sharing more
popular, which will mean fewer vehicles on the road. Lots of self-driving-car enthusiasts have argued that car-sharing will be a popular
model — after all, most privately owned cars are currently parked and idle 90 percent of the time. Wouldn't it make more sense for the self-driving car to make
itself useful during that period? Car-sharing could mean fewer cars overall. Driverless
cars will make the transition to electric
vehicles easier. Lighter, more efficient cars will be able to go much farther on a single battery charge,
which means that "range anxiety" will be less of an issue for plug-ins. Driverless cars will increase the
appeal of walking and biking. Since self-driving cars will (in theory) be much, much safer than human drivers, it'll be less dangerous to
bike on the road. At the margins, that could be a boon to pedestrians. Cities will become more appealing. If traffic gets less
crazy, if walking and biking become more attractive, and if parking is no longer a huge hassle, denser
urban living might become more attractive. Since cities tend to be more energy-efficient than the
suburbs, that could reduce energy use. (Although see below for a counterpoint.) The flip side: How driverless cars could lead to a huge surge
in energy demand. More and more people will drive. Think about all the people who are not allowed to drive right now. Everyone under 16. The elderly. The
disabled. People who are intoxicated or on medication. People who are sleeping. That's a huge portion of the population. And all of those people will be able to ride
in driverless cars. And that means we could see many more car trips. That's a huge plus for mobility. But it also has big energy implications. At the moment, vehicle
miles-traveled in the United States appears to have peaked back in 2005 — in part because fewer and fewer young people are getting their licenses and driving.
Could self-driving cars reverse that trend? Doug-Short-chart-VMT Public transportation could lose its appeal. If driverless cars or driverless taxis catch on, then trains
and buses could find themselves displaced. You can read or zone out in a driverless car just as easily as you can on the subway. Depending on how this all shakes
out, it could mean more driving and higher energy demands. Urban sprawl could greatly expand. Arielle Duhaime-Ross has a good post on this. Right now, there's a
serious limit to how sprawled-out a city can get — people tend to prefer to keep their commutes under an hour. But if driverless cars can offer quick, efficient
transportation, then we could see more people spread out to the suburbs. It's possible this could mean bigger environmental effects. (That said, it would be a big
gain for public health if commuting became less stressful and arduous.) Cars might need to be replaced more frequently. If car-sharing became widespread, then
driverless cars would be on the road and in motion far more often. This might mean cars would have a lifespan similar to that of police vehicles, about three to five
years, rather than their current 11 years. It's hard to say what this would mean for energy use — cars could be upgraded more quickly as new technology became
available — but it's another angle here. No doubt there are a million other possibilities I haven't thought of or missed, so feel free to add more in comments.
Self-driving cars have serious implications for the future of the environment
Elkind 12 — Ethan Elkind is the Associate Director of the Climate Change and Business Program at UC
Berkeley, 4-10-2012 ("Could Self-Driving Cars Help The Environment?," No Publication, 4-10-2012,
Available Online at http://legal-planet.org/2012/04/10/could-self-driving-cars-help-the-environment/,
Accessed 7-22-2015)//CM
As companies like Google pioneer technologies to allow cars to drive themselves, futurists
have been imagining a world where
autonomous vehicles rule the roadway. Using computer programs, map data, complex sensors, and
soon the ability to “see” all vehicles within miles, these cars hold the promise of averting the vast
majority of car accidents caused by human error, while passengers in the driver’s seat can nap, work,
and do anything but concentrate on driving. The future is here to some extent: self-parking technologies are already in use
with more coming soon, and Google’s autonomous car program has made internet waves (video here), sparking enabling legislation in Nevada
and a bill in California. In another few decades, we may have a driving revolution on our hands (and the idea of dying in a car accident may
seem as foreign to our grandchildren as dying of small pox). But what
could this technology mean for the environment?
We know that cars are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions and toxic air pollution. Selfdriving vehicles hold the potential to reduce these emissions by driving more efficiently, including the
possibility of not having to stop at intersections or even red lights as cars seamlessly avoid each other.
Vehicles may also be able to tailgate like train cars, adding more capacity and enabling efficient speeds for existing roads and highways. Cars
may also become extremely lightweight and fuel efficient, as consumers no longer need heavy cars to survive collisions. But as the video below
suggests, overall vehicle miles traveled may increase as driving becomes possible for those currently unable to drive, such as the elderly, the
physically disabled or impaired, and of course the inebriated. Self-driving vehicles may also outcompete public transit for those who can afford
to drive, as their cars would provide the same benefits as transit (such as the ability to work while commuting) without the hassles. In addition,
self-driving vehicles may clog the road as households share vehicles that drive themselves around to pick up multiple people, such as spouses
driving the same car to work at different times. At this point, proponents of self-driving cars are more interested in issues like insurance liability
than environmental law. And the technology still requires more research and development. But as
the cars become more
common, policy makers and clean air advocates could benefit from studying the impacts of these cars to
see how they might mitigate our pressing air pollution problems.
Oil independence is key to a sustainable economy
Anderson 14 — Richard Anderson is a business Reporter for BBC News, 2014 ("How American energy
independence could change the world," BBC News, 4-1-2014, Available Online at
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-23151813, Accessed 7-22-2015)//CM
No-one is suggesting America will stop importing power overnight, but being
largely self-sufficient in energy could have
widespread implications not just for the US, but for the rest of the world. US economy Last year, the United
States spent about $300bn (£180bn) on importing oil. This represented almost two-thirds of the country's
entire annual trade deficit. Oil imports are, therefore, sucking hundreds of billions of dollars a year out
of the US economy. As the IEA says, a persistent trade deficit can act as a drag on economic growth,
manufacturing and employment. If the US achieved energy independence, not only would the country
spend far less on cheaper, domestically generated power, but the money would be going primarily to
US-owned energy producers. The US's oil import bill also constitutes about 2% of the country's annual
economic growth. As the US economy averages about 2% growth a year, the country would, in effect, be
getting a year's growth for free. Paul Dales, at Capital Economics, argues that as this would be spread out over the next 10-20 years,
the annual benefits would be much smaller - in this instance, 0.2%-0.1%. True, but comparing now with energy independence, the boost to
the US economy of ending oil imports would be significant.
Oil dependence diminishes US hegemony — key to combating WMD spread,
terrorism, Gulf instability
Deutch and Schlesinger 6 — John Deutch, served as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Director of
Central Intelligence, Director of Energy Research, Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology, and
Undersecretary of the Department, emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, holds a B.A. in history and economics from Amherst College, and both the B.S. in chemical
engineering and Ph.D. in physical chemistry from M.I.T, and James R. Schlesinger, served as Secretary of
Defense under Nixon and Ford, America's first Secretary of Energy, Director of Central Intelligence,
earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in economics from the Horace Mann School and Harvard University, 2006
(“National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency,” Report of an Independent Task Force,
Available Online at
http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dgvictor/publications/Faculty_Victor_Chapter_2006_National%20Security%20C
onsequences_CFR.pdf, Accessed 7/22/15)
The Task Force has identified five major reasons why dependence on energy traded in world markets is
a matter of concern for U.S. foreign policy. We have also examined a sixth, the relationship of military force
structure to oil dependence.
First, the control over
enormous oil revenues gives exporting countries the flexibility to adopt policies that
oppose U.S. interests and values. Iran proceeds with a program that appears to be headed toward acquiring a nuclear weapons
capability. Russia is able to ignore Western attitudes as it has moved to authoritarian policies in part
because huge revenues from oil and gas exports are available to finance that style of government.
Venezuela has the resources from its oil exports to invite realignment in Latin American political relationships and to fund changes such as
Argentina’s exit from its International Monetary Fund (IMF) standby agreement and Bolivia’s recent decision to nationalize its oil and gas
resources. Because
of their oil wealth, these and other producer countries are free to ignore U.S. policies
and to pursue interests inimical to our national security.
Second, oil
dependence causes political realignments that constrain the ability of the United States to form
partnerships to achieve common objectives. Perhaps the most pervasive effect arises as countries dependent on
imports subtly modify their policies to be more congenial to suppliers. For example, China is aligning its
relationships in the Middle East (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia) and Africa (e.g., Nigeria and Sudan) because of its desire to secure oil supplies.
France and Germany, and with them much of the
European Union, are more reluctant to confront difficult issues
with Russia and Iran because of their dependence on imported oil and gas as well as the desire to
pursue business opportunities in those countries.
These new realignments have further diminished U.S. leverage, particularly in the Middle East and Central
Asia. For example, Chinese interest in securing oil and gas supplies challenges U.S. influence in central Asia, notably in Kazakhstan. And
Russia’s influence is likely to grow as it exports oil and (within perhaps a decade) large amounts of natural gas to Japan and China.
All consuming countries, including the United States, are more constrained in dealing with producing
states when oil markets are tight. To cite one current example, concern about losing Iran’s 2.5 million barrels per
day of world oil exports will cause importing states to be reluctant to take action against Iran’s nuclear
program.
Third, high
prices and seemingly scarce supplies create fears— especially evident in Beijing and New Delhi, as well as in
current system of open markets is unable to ensure secure supply.
The present competition has resulted in oil and gas deals that include political arrangements in addition to
commercial terms. Highly publicized Chinese oil investments in Africa have included funding for infrastructure projects such as an
European capitals and in Washington—that the
airport, a railroad, and a telecommunications system, in addition to the agreement that the oil be shipped to China. Many more of these
investments also include equity stakes for state-controlled Chinese companies. Another example is Chinese firms taking a position in Saudi
Arabia, along with several Western firms, in developing Saudi Arabia’s gas infrastructure.
At present, these arrangements have little effect on world oil and gas markets because the volumes affected are small. However, such
arrangements are spreading. These arrangements are worrisome because they lead to special political relationships
that pose difficulties for the United States. And they allow importers to believe that they obtain security
through links to particular suppliers rather than from the proper functioning of a global market.
We note that the
United States, in the past, has also taken decisions to restrict markets partly due to similar
concerns about energy security. For example, when the trans-Alaska pipeline opened, it included a prohibition against exporting the
oil. The hostility toward proposals by the Chinese National Overseas Oil Company (CNOOC) to purchase Union Oil of California is
seen by some as denying investment opportunity in the U.S. market in a similar manner to what the
United States decries about other nations’ conduct. The Task Force believes that foreign entities should be able to purchase
U.S. assets provided that the acquisitions meet the criteria established by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).12
Opening a dialogue with rapidly growing consumers, notably China and India, can help those consumers gain confidence that will lead to a
greater willingness to allow markets to operate. (We return to this policy recommendation later.) The United States and other consuming
countries have a tremendous interest in maintaining the present open market oil commodity trading rules.
Fourth, revenues from oil and gas exports can undermine local governance. The United States has an interest in
promoting good governance both for its own sake and because it encourages investment that can increase the level and security of supply.
States that are politically unstable and poorly governed often struggle with the task of responsibly
managing the large revenues that come from their oil and gas exports. The elements of good governance include
democratic accountability, low corruption, and fiscal transparency. Production in fragile democracies, such as in Nigeria, can be undermined
when politicians or local warlords focus on ways to seize oil and gas rents rather than on the longer-term task of governance. Totalitarian
governments that have control over those revenue flows can entrench their rule.
When markets are tight, large oil consumers have tended to become especially focused on securing supply and ignore the effects of their
investments on corruption and mismanagement. In Sudan, for example, despite civil war and widespread human rights abuses, the Chinese
government and its oil enterprises are funding extensive oil supply and 12 Alan P. Larson and David M. Marchick, Foreign Investment and
National Security: Getting the Balance Right, a Council Special Report(New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2006). Findings: How
Dependence on Imported Energy Affects U.S. Foreign Policy 29 infrastructure projects. China has used its threat of a veto in the UN Security
Council to thwart collective efforts by other countries to manage the Darfur crisis in Sudan. Similarly, China, India, and several Western
European countries continue to invest in Iran despite the need to contain its nuclear aspirations.
Fifth, a
significant interruption in oil supply will have adverse political and economic consequences in
the United States and in other importing countries. When such a disruption occurs, it upends all ongoing policy
activity in a frantic effort to return to normal conditions. Inevitably, those efforts include matters of foreign
policy, such as coordination with other countries to find measures that will mitigate the consequences
of the supply disruption. Some of these responses may be preplanned, such as the coordinated release of strategic reserves, but other
responses will be hurried, ineffectual, or even counterproductive.
Sixth, some observers see a direct relationship between the dependence of the United States on oil, especially from the Persian Gulf, and the
size of the U.S. defense budget. Such a relationship invites the inference that if
it were not dependent on this oil, the United
States and its allies would have no interest in the region, and hence it would be possible to achieve
significant reductions in the U.S. military posture. In the extreme, this argument says that if the nation reduced its
dependence, then the defense budget could be reduced as well.
U.S. strategic interests in reliable oil supplies from the Persian Gulf are not proportional with the percent of oil consumption that is imported by
the United States from the region. Until very low levels of dependence are reached, the United States and all other consumers of oil will
depend on the Persian Gulf. Such low levels will certainly not be reached during the twenty-year time frame of this study.
Even if the Persian Gulf did not have the bulk of the world’s readily available oil reserves, there would be reasons to maintain a substantial
military capability in the region. The
activities of Iran today and Iraq, especially prior to 1991, underline the
seriousness of threats from weapons of mass destruction. Combating terrorism also requires a
presence in the Gulf. In addition to military activities, a U.S. presence in the region can help to improve political
stability.
At least for the next two decades, the Persian Gulf will be vital to U.S. interests in reliable oil supply, nonproliferation, combating 30 National
Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency terrorism, and encouraging political stability, democracy, and public welfare. Accordingly, the
United States should expect and support a strong military posture that permits suitably rapid deployment to the region, if required.
It is worthwhile to explain what should and should not be expected from this military force, and how it serves U.S. interests. Most importantly,
the conventional force of the United States deters aggression in the region. Any nation (or subnational group)
that contemplates violence on any scale must take into account the possibility of U.S. preemption,
intervention, or retaliation. Deterrence is powerful, but it does not always work (especially if the possibility of a military response is
not raised). For example, deterrence did not prevent the Iran-Iraq war of the early 1980s. Because no clear and credible signal was sent of a
possible response in 1990, Saddam Hussein was not deterred from invading Kuwait. Nevertheless, the
U.S. military posture with its
capacity to intervene, if managed wisely, can play a role in stabilizing this highly fragile region and make many
countries in the region more secure from hostile action by their neighbors.
Oil dependence entrenches existing conflicts and has a laundry list of potential
escalation scenarios
Colgan 13 —Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor in the Department of Political
Science and Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. His research focuses on two
main areas: (1) the causes of war and (2) global energy politics, 2013 ("Oil, Conflict, and U.S. National
Interests," Policy Brief, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, 1021-2013, Available Online at
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23517/oil_conflict_and_us_national_interests.html,
Accessed 7-22-2015)//CM
Although the threat of "resource wars" over possession of oil reserves is often exaggerated, the
sum total of the political effects
generated by the oil industry makes oil a leading cause of war. Between one-quarter and one-half of
interstate wars since 1973 have been connected to one or more oil-related causal mechanisms. No other
commodity has had such an impact on international security. The influence of oil on conflict is often poorly understood.
In U.S. public debates about the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars, both sides focused excessively on the
question of whether the United States was fighting for possession of oil reserves; neither sought a
broader understanding of how oil shaped the preconditions for war. Oil fuels international conflict
through eight distinct mechanisms: (1) resource wars, in which states try to acquire oil reserves by force;
(2) petro-aggression, whereby oil insulates aggressive leaders such as Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
from domestic opposition, and therefore makes them more willing to engage in risky foreign policy
adventurism; (3) the externalization of civil wars in oil-producing states ("petrostates"); (4) financing for
insurgencies—for instance, Iran funneling oil money to Hezbollah; (5) conflicts triggered by the prospect
of oil-market domination, such as the United States' war with Iraq over Kuwait in 1991; (6) clashes over control of oil
transit routes, such as shipping lanes and pipelines; (7) oil-related grievances, whereby the presence of foreign workers in
petrostates helps extremist groups such as al-Qaida recruit locals; and (8) oil-related obstacles to multilateral cooperation,
such as when an importer's attempt to curry favor with a petrostate prevents multilateral cooperation
on security issues. These mechanisms can contribute to conflict individually or in combination. The
linkages between oil and international conflict are growing increasingly important in light of three
transitions under way in global energy markets. The first is the shift in patterns of global oil production away from traditional
suppliers in the Middle East and toward (1) suppliers of unconventional oil reserves in North America and (2) new suppliers of conventional oil,
especially in Africa. As many as sixteen developing countries will become oil exporters in the near future, creating a swath of new international
security concerns. Second, the low oil prices of the 1990s have given way to higher and more volatile prices, increasing the magnitude of the
consequences one can expect from oil-conflict linkages. Third, the
relative decline of U.S. hegemony may reduce the
provision of public goods such as security of shipping lanes and pipelines. Although these transitions alter some of
the ways in which the oil industry contributes to international conflict, none eliminates linkages between the two or allows the United States to
disengage from global markets. THE ROLE OF FRACKING Understanding
the eight mechanisms linking oil to international
security can help policymakers think beyond the much-discussed goal of energy security, defined as
reliable access to affordable fuel supplies. Achieving such an understanding is important in light of
recent changes in the United States. As hydraulic fracturing—"fracking"—of shale oil and gas accelerates, energy imports are
projected to decline, and North America could even achieve energy independence, in the sense of low or zero net overall energy imports, in the
next decade. Yet the
United States will continue to import large volumes of oil, and the world price of oil will
continue to affect it. Moreover, so long as the rest of the world remains dependent on global oil markets, the fracking revolution will do
little to reduce many oil-related threats to international security. The emergence of aggressive, revolutionary leaders in
petrostates would likely continue to pose threats to regional security. Petrostates will continue to be
weakly institutionalized and thus subject to civil wars, creating the kind of security problems that
demand responses by the international community, as occurred in Libya in 2011. Petro-financed insurgent groups such as
Hezbollah will persist, as will threats to the shipping lanes and oil transit routes that supply important U.S. allies, such as Japan. In sum, energy
autarky is not the answer. Self-sufficiency will bring economic benefits to the United States, but few gains for national security. So long as the
oil market remains globally integrated, national oil imports matter far less than total consumption. Rather than viewing energy self-sufficiency
as a panacea, the
United States should contribute to international security by making long-term investments
in research and development to reduce oil consumption and provide alternative fuel sources in the
transportation sector. In addition to the economic and environmental benefits of reducing oil
consumption, substantial evidence exists that military and security benefits will accrue from such
investments. UNEXPECTED SOURCES OF CONFLICT Policymakers must also think systematically about oil-security
linkages when monitoring emerging security threats as the global oil industry transforms itself. With sixteen
additional countries potentially exporting oil in the near future, new international dynamics will materialize, especially in Africa. Furthermore,
if oil prices remain high, incentives for resource grabs will grow. Resource wars are most likely to occur in unpopulated
territories or naval zones, as oil can be extracted from these areas without the need to manage a populated, potentially hostile territory. Thus,
policymakers should be most concerned about disputed territories in the East China and South China Seas and naval borders in the Caspian Sea.
There are already competing sovereignty claims to territory in those regions, and considerable uncertainty about the magnitude of the energy
resources located there, creating conditions ripe for miscalculation and mutual suspicion. Policymakers
should be especially
concerned about security threats that arise from unexpected sources, such as allies' energy needs or
seemingly benign actions that prompt hostile responses from rivals.
Aff Answers
Google Not Key
The driverless car is coming now. Companies don’t need Google — in fact, their
software is better.
Forbes 13 — 2013 (“Why Google Will Lose in Driverless Cars (and Who Will Win), February 4th,
Available Online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2013/02/04/why-google-will-losein-driverless-cars-and-who-will-win/, Accessed on 07-26-15)
Last week’s debate on the Google driverless car raged across Forbes, auto sites and Google +, yet I found
little in the discussion to convince me that this is Google‘s opportunity. Last week I said the idea of a
Google driverless is nonsense and I repeat it – Google will not be a force in autos. In fact I’d go further
and say I doubt this is a disruptive innovation. It is happening incrementally, now. But what Google has
done, through intense lobbying and publicity, is pave the way beautifully for BMW, Mercedes and Volvo
to launch autonomous cars in 2014. Yes, 2014 (go here for information on 4 almost autonomous cars
you can drive today). Within two years these major European manufacturers, particularly BMW and
Mercedes who sell upmarket cars and have the margin to innovate, will have all the components of an
automated car on the road, in production vehicles. For example, to quote the World Future’s Society:
“BMW plans to extend that idea in its upcoming i3 series of electric cars, whose traffic-jam feature will
let the car accelerate, decelerate, and steer by itself at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour—as long as the
driver leaves a hand on the wheel.” And: “Mercedes is equipping its 2013 model S-Class cars with a
system that can drive autonomously through city traffic at speeds up to 25 m.p.h.” Here’s some more
detail: The S-Class will sport a stereo camera on the windshield to peer ahead in 3D, short- and longrange radar in front and rear, and short-range radar on the sides. Twelve ultrasonic sensors will detect
objects very close to the car—during self-parking, for example. And added to external sensors, the SClass will have internal sensors to monitor drivers. And the other types of things that will happen, down
the range, are more automated braking, more collision avoidance, more safety, more incremental
change that began as long ago as the early 2000s and whose R&D history spans back to the 1980s. So
why won’t these car makers go to Google? To understand that better I talked last week to Richard
Bishop who appeared on Twitter commenting on my post and Chunka’s. A good thing too. He is a former
head of the US intelligent highways program and oversaw public trials of driverless cars in the 1990s.
Since then he has been consulting in this area to car companies and Governments. 1. They don’t need
Google The German car makers are using different technology. Here’s a brief description of the
technology.” The (Google) system combines information gathered from Google Street View with
artificial intelligence software that combines input from video cameras inside the car, a LIDAR sensor on
top of the vehicle, radar sensors on the front of the vehicle and a position sensor attached to one of the
rear wheels that helps locate the car’s position on the map.” But Richard points out that most car
manufacturers are not dependent on complex databases and retrieval. They use sensor technology to
recognize what is around them. That provokes me to ask, might Google be setting itself up for the wrong
project. Its system relies on rich data maps, which can also be created by its laser technology, so it looks
like a great “organize the world’s information” project. But maybe not that necessary for cars. However,
there is no doubting it could have a role in freight distribution for when you get used to the idea of
lorries on the highways with no driver! 2. They already do great, safe software. Automated safety
technology is in the DNA of Tier 1 suppliers like Bosch who brought the world the first advanced braking
systems. They have years of experience in creating safe software for cars, according to Richard Bishop,
and they test the hell out of it. Before automated cars go down the car range to mid-market luxury car
makers will have more years of experience and data. Bosch is offering its automated driver technology
for 2014, also. 3. Google has a poor record outside search and ads Google’s great moment was its first –
monetizing content through search related ads. But its record of pulling off further disruptive change
since then has been poor. Android is an exception but is Google the real beneficiary there? Samsung
benefits. So does Amazon. As do HTC and ZTE. Google’s extra-curricular projects appear more designed
to boost its information businesses and in cars it might just want the opportunity to organize the world’s
spatial information at a deeper level of granularity than it can right now. Can that goal produce a
competitive enough product? What I read into last week’s debate is that people are thirsty for some
disruption and opportunity. Sorry, but this isn’t it.
Google not key — the government and auto companies are preparing to manufacture
more driverless cars.
Business Insider 15 — 2015 (“Driverless car technology just got a huge boost,” May 17th, Available
Online at http://www.businessinsider.com/driverless-car-technology-just-got-a-huge-boost-2015-5,
Accessed on 07-26-15)
In a limited sense, cars have been "driverless" for a long time — ever used cruise control? — but they
are about to become far more capable, and soon, revolutionizing the way people get around.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx promised last week that the federal government will smooth the
rollout of driverless vehicle technologies, removing unnecessary regulatory roadblocks and delays. But
realizing the benefits of driverless technology will require more than smart regulation; companies and
the government will have to convince the public that driverless cars are safe. The possibilities are
tantalizing. "Connected, automated vehicles that can sense the environment around them and
communicate with other vehicles and with infrastructure have the potential to revolutionize road safety
and save thousands of lives," Mr. Foxx declared last week. Cars are already rolling off assembly lines
with smarter cruise control, automatic braking and lane-centering technologies. In coming years they
will be able to do much more, such as directly pinging one another, which will combine with radar and
laser sensors to make onboard computers hyper-aware of their surroundings. Driver error causes nearly
all fatal crashes. Computers that never doze off or look down to text could save 30,000 lives a year.
Fewer crashes would improve traffic flow. So would putting an end to bottlenecks caused by
rubbernecking. People could reclaim untold hours now spent in start-and-stop frustration. Even when in
their cars, they could devote time to productive or entertaining activities rather than dealing with the
monotony of most commutes. And they would burn less gasoline per mile traveled. Those who have
disabilities or who are too old to drive could get around far more easily. Car-sharing would be much
easier, as well. Parking could be better organized.
No Transition/Adoption
No transition – takes too long because the technology is still in development. Even
then, society has to fully adapt.
Davies 6/10 — Alan Davies, Transport and Urban development consultant, Blogger for the urbanist,
2015 (“How long before driverless vehicles take over cities?,” Crickey, Available Online at
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/06/10/how-long-before-driverless-vehicles-take-overcities/, June 10th, Accessed on 07-26-15)
Driverless vehicles offer huge potential benefits but it’s unlikely they’ll materialise soon. Besides the
regulatory and commercial obstacles, it’s still early days for the technology. NYT columnist Joe Nocera
is enthusiastic about the potential of driverless cars to eliminate the 1.2 million deaths on roads
worldwide each year. In an article republished by Fairfax on the weekend (Google’s driverless cars will
make roads safer), Mr Nocera says “the sooner they are a reality, the safer we’ll all be”. Driverless cars
have enormous potential to change the way we travel, at least in theory. They could indeed virtually
eliminate road casualties, as well as multiply road capacity by as much as eight times according to some
estimates. They could also “create” productive in-vehicle time (including sleep), reduce the size of the
national vehicle fleet, and significantly lower the cost of private travel (see Are driverless cars coming?).
But while I think governments should already be thinking about how to deal with them in the future, I
don’t think driverless vehicles are going to take over the roads of our cities for a long time yet. I certainly
don’t see them having much impact within the 5 year and 10 year time horizons I commonly see cited
by the industry. Most observers seem to think getting the technology right will be the easiest obstacle to
overcome; the major problems will be how social institutions adapt to the new technology. One line of
thought argues that the complicated legal and social adaptations required by driverless vehicles,
especially during the transition period when there’s a mix of driverless and (much more dangerous)
human driven vehicles on the road, will be extraordinarily difficult.
Full transition takes too long — up to 20 years away.
Newsweek 15 — 2015, (“Quora Question: How Will the Transition to Self-Driving Cars Work?,” April
11th, Available Online at http://www.newsweek.com/quora-question-how-will-transition-self-drivingcars-work-320442, Accessed on 07-26-15)
Stage 1 is where we are today. Vehicles have various safety systems built with the basic technologies
behind autonomous cars, like 3-D camera systems and millimeter wave radar. Examples of "Stage 1"
technologies: Lane keeping/lane warning systems, which help you stay in your line by controlling
steering or warn you as soon as you leave (data that's determined by a camera system). Cruise control
radar systems that let you set your cruise control to follow the vehicle ahead, slowing or braking
automatically to avoid a collision. Cross traffic/blind spot detection systems, which use radar and/or
cameras and/or ultrasonic sensors to "see" around corners, etc. The so-called autopilot system from
Tesla (which is basically just a combination of lane keeping and cruise control radar), Distronic Plus from
Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai's Auto Braking, etc. are all systems that combine sensors and programming to
offer excellent safety and convenience features. Stage 1 technologies are affordable and powerful, and I
look forward to the day when all new vehicles come with these features as standard equipment (they're
likely to become federally mandated safety features this decade). Stage 2 is beginning, but we're 5-10
years away from meaningful market penetration. Essentially, Stage 2 is V2X communications, which
stands for "vehicle to x." "X" can be other vehicles as well as infrastructure. V2X will allow vehicles to
share their position and course information with all the surrounding vehicles, as well as data from their
onboard sensing systems. This, in turn, will allow vehicle software to build "models" of the world around
them, filling in gaps with information shared by other vehicles as well as the roadway. V2X offers
tremendous opportunities for improving vehicle safety, and it may be sufficient (when combined with
Stage 1 technologies) to offer nearly autonomous driving. In terms of market penetration, something
like 50% of vehicles will need to have both sensing systems and V2X communication for the driving
public to see a major shift. But even at low market penetration percentages, V2X and advanced sensing
will save lives. Sidebar: V2X communications will need to be federally mandated to make any sort of
inroads into the marketplace, and that's years away. Likewise, infrastructure needs to be upgraded to
support V2X, and that's probably decades away. Stage 3 is a combination of V2X, advanced sensors and
(potentially) high-resolution map data. Google, Audi, M-B, Toyota, Honda, Ford, etc., etc.—all are
experimenting with Stage 3 right now. All automakers (or almost all of them) are deploying high-priced
LIDAR (laser radar) pods on their test vehicles, and then combining these high-powered LIDAR systems
with radar, 3-D cameras and (in most cases) high-resolution map data. The vehicles are designed to be
100% autonomous without any sort of communication (e.g., no V2X), which would make them able to
drive themselves down a rural road without any driver input or any shared data. These vehicles are also
able to handle all weather conditions, something that 3-D camera systems can't manage (snow and
heavy rain cripple the effectiveness of 3-D camera systems). Check out this older lidar pod on this
Google Prius, which sort of looks like a single emergency light but is actually a $20k housing for a bunch
of lasers. The technology for stage three vehicles exists today. The challenge isn't technological—it's
cost. High-resolution LIDAR pods are tens of thousands of dollars (some cost upward of $80k). Lowerresolution pods are "only" $8,000 a piece, but they're not really sufficiently precise enough for complete
autonomy. ...Which brings us to map data. If you combine highly precise map data with good (but not
great) LIDAR pods, radar and 3-D cameras, you get a highly autonomous car that's almost affordable
enough for mass production. That's the technology that Google is pursuing—they're going to put
"cheap" LIDAR pods on slow-moving cars, give these cars hyper-accurate maps and then let people use
them like taxis. The new Google car, with a "cheap" LIDAR pod, a lot of map data and a 30 mph topspeed. Google thinks they've got the future of the auto industry in their hands here, but I think the
windows need to be tinted much darker. No one is going to want to be seen in this vehicle as-is. Audi,
M-B, Tesla, etc., are all kicking around systems like I've described, which may or may not rely upon
hyper-accurate mapping data. Of course, as V2X systems become more commonplace, the need for
hyper-accurate map data decreases...vehicles can build and share their own real-time maps with V2X.
There would be no need to store or download map data. Thus, it's possible that Stage 2 and Stage 3 will
arrive at the same time...that we'll figure out affordable, full autonomous vehicles right about the time
V2X becomes commonplace. "But what about all those cars without self-driving systems? Are they going
to ruin it for the rest of us because they're too technologically primitive?" Probably not. Autonomous
cars will be able to measure what's going on in the world around them, so if the driver of the oldfashioned car decides to do something crazy and cut you off, your autonomous car will detect it and
adjust. With V2X, your vehicle could identify vehicles that are on autopilot and vehicles that aren't, and
then devote extra resources to checking the activity of the human-piloted vehicle just in case. "What
about bugs/mistakes in these systems that cause accidents (or worse)?" This is the question that makes
me think autonomous cars might actually be 20 years away. Currently, if an automaker makes a safety
mistake, they're severely penalized by the NHTSA and they're subjected to class-action lawsuits. If
something isn't done to protect automakers from liability, I worry that anyone driving an "old fashioned"
car can expect a massive settlement should they get into even a minor fender-bender with an
autonomous car. A few billion-dollar class action lawsuit settlements could put a big damper on
autonomous car sales. "Will government embrace fully autonomous cars?" Not right away. We can
expect the NHTSA to demand drivers sit at the steering wheel, hands at the ready to "take over"
whenever they release their first set of standards. We can also expect NHTSA to demand that drivers are
in the driver's seats of fully autonomous vehicles, especially commercial vehicles that do nothing more
than haul goods on the highway (e.g., commercial trucks).
Alt Causes
Alt causes to development of driverless cars – competition and time for adoption
Fancher 14, Lou Fancher is a Reporter for the SF Weekly, 2014 ( “Hard Drive: SelfDriving Cars Are Closer Than They Appear “, February 2014,Available at
http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-02-19/news/google-self-driving-cars-center-forautomotive-research-darpa/, Accessed 07-26-15)
Obstacles on the horizon do exist for Google's self-driving cars. They range from large issues, like insurance (if a
smart car has an accident, who's at fault?) to legalities (which features are mandated for new cars? Is a solo-non-driver using a twoperson HOV lane a violation?) to more straightforward concerns, like weather (rain is okay, but fog and snow are tough) and unusual
circumstances ("Odd intersections, art bikes, Oscar Meyer Weinermobiles and other drivers doing weird things," Montemerlo
explained). Google's
cars rely on algorithm-driven maps that track the world like a video game, but
creating models for flattened squirrels, abandoned mattresses, and kids on bikes is a challenge. And
then there are the competitors. Richard Wallace, director of Transportation Systems Analysis at Ann Arbor, Michigan's
Center for Automotive Research (CAR), says Google may not be any further ahead or fully invested than automakers. The difference,
he writes in an e-mail, is that "automakers do not do R&D in the public (and their competitors') eye." Wallace said Audi, Mercedes,
General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and other manufacturers "are not far off," maybe as close as 2018. Despite heavy competition,
Wallace
says the role of Silicon Valley in the fast-moving field is enormous. "Google has been extremely
important in bringing automated vehicle technology into the spotlight and motivating the auto industry
to accelerate its development," he says. The company's recent addition of radar, a step beyond its primary, 3-D imaging
technology, will increase its self-driving car's viability, he adds. Michigan, given its automotive history, is one of the "automated
technology hotbeds" Wallace identified, especially in the development of connected, vehicle-to-vehicle technology. Silicon
with its no-snow weather, venture capital momentum, and dedicated-lanes infrastructure, suggests a likely
Valley,
location for
introducing mainstream drivers to the technology that will make them non-drivers. Montemerlo and Wallace
predicted that lesser forms of automation (adaptive cruise control, lane-centering, blind-spot detection, parking- and traffic-jam
assist) will continue to be incrementally released. "The average vehicle on the road today is 11.4 years old," Wallace says. "Anything
more advanced that comes out in maybe 2020 will be operating in mixed traffic for a long time to come. One day, you'll find you
almost never control your new vehicle. I think that is about 2025." But why stop at a car that can merely drive itself? Montemerlo
says "self-aware" cars that can cruise "driverless" are likely 10 to 15 years out. Cars that can "reason about the
world" are even further on the horizon, maybe even impossible. Until
a car can recognize that the driver next to us is
too preoccupied with his Slurpee, humans will remain behind the wheel.
Alt cause – China will pursue driverless cars
Mui 13, Chunka Mui is a Managing Director at Devil’s Advocate Group, authored three
books related to business development, and holds a BS in Computer Science from MIT,
2013 (“Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car -- Part 3: Sooner Than You Think”, January 30, 2013,
Available Online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2013/01/30/googles-trillion-dollardriverless-car-part-3-sooner-than-you-think/3/, Accessed online 07-26-15)
Although there are too many imponderables and cross-industry conflicts to imagine that the U.S. federal
government would get involved any time soon, one can imagine scenarios where more interventionist
governments, like China’s, might intervene. China has greater incentives to adopt driverless cars because its rates of
accidents and fatalities per 100,000 vehicles is more than twice that of the U.S., and its vehicle counts and total fatalities are growing
rapidly. In addition, the
Chinese government could be motivated to accelerate the adoption of driverless
cars because of the trillions of dollars that it would save by building fewer and narrower roads, by
eliminating traffic lights and street lights and by reducing fuel consumption. And then there is the competitive
dimension. A driverless car initiative would fit into several of the seven strategic industries that the
government is supporting. Chinese researchers have already made significant progress in the arena.
And, of course, if China perfects a driverless-car system, it could export that system to the rest of the
world.
Driverless cars won’t be modeled – five reasons
Mui 13, Chunka Mui is a Managing Director at Devil’s Advocate Group, authored three
books related to business development, and holds a BS in Computer Science from MIT,
2013 (“Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car -- Part 3: Sooner Than You Think”, January 30, 2013,
Available Online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2013/01/30/googles-trillion-dollardriverless-car-part-3-sooner-than-you-think/3/, Accessed online 07-26-15)
The car will cost too much. Estimates are that each Google research car costs more than $300,000. This
means, as BusinessInsider noted, that it costs more than a Ferrari. Prices anywhere near these levels will keep the
car out of reach for mass adoption. Customers won’t buy it. There is a widespread sense that most customers would
never give up their spot in the driver’s seat, or trust a driverless car. Reader @jackarmstrong brilliantly captured this zeitgeist in his comment to
Part 1 of this series: For most American drivers, the car is our “iconic dream machine,” and our personal freedom and status statement.
Americans dream about cars, and “no” able bodied person “dreams” to be
“driven,” by “robot cars,” no matter how persuasive the stats
appear on paper. There’s too much liability. In our litigious society, car makers would never offer products that took the human out of the loop
and thus shifted the liability for accidents to themselves. Legal liability for car makers could be huge if a malfunctioning car injured or killed
the driverless car has enormous ripple effects across
a number of industries—some of which are quite dire. It could be in car makers’, car dealers’, insurers’,
taxicab associations, etc., best interests to delay driverless technology as long as possible. Reader @Jacob
Haynes articulated this issue well: It is not Google that will sell this technology to consumers, it is auto manufacturers. Sadly, no auto
manufacturer will sell a technology that will decrease the number of times cars are wrecked and that
will make it easier to share cars. Also, in the short term, it might be more prudent for car makers to
market driverless technology as expensive options to existing designs, rather than to take Google’s
disruptive approach. The transition would take decades. The fleet of cars on the road turns over roughly
every 10 to 15 years, so even if driverless cars were in production today it would be many years before
they dominated our highways and started delivering the promised benefits. If the driverless car takes that long to
people. The car violates current business models. As I laid out in Part 2,
matter, it might never happen, or at least not happen in our lifetimes. After all, we’re still waiting for our Jetsons-like flying cars. My sense is
that even under incremental-change scenarios, some of these hurdles would dissolve rather quickly. Cost is the easiest to address. The
components on which the driverless car depends are improving at the speed of Moore’s Law. Following Moore’s Law, a gigabyte of memory
cost $300,000 in 1981 but less than $10,000 a decade later, less than $10 a decade after that and less than 10 cents today. From $300,000 to a
dime in three decades: That’s the trajectory that the electronics in the driverless car are on. Cost will also decrease as developers optimize their
designs for production, as opposed to building prototypes. Personal habits would surely slow adoption, but people could come
to trust the cars as evidence of effectiveness piled up. New drivers, immersed in computing technology since birth, might be more trusting than
older drivers. After all, lots of people used to be scared witless about flying, but that issue has largely faded. There’s already evidence that
young people are much less interested in driving than those of us of a certain age were. It seems that being able to connect via Tumblr and
Facebook reduces the need to actually drive somewhere and meet a friend face-to-face. And it might be that aging baby boomers, raised with a
love of cars and independence but faced with diminishing driving abilities, would embrace driverless cars as the best of the options available to
them. The liability
issue is trickier—computers are completely capable of flying planes, including takeoffs and landings, yet, for liability
reasons, every commercial flight has two humans in pilot’s seats. A study by Rand Corp. concluded that existing liability case law “does not
seem to present unusual liability concerns for owners or drivers of vehicles equipped with autonomous vehicle technologies.” Instead, the
study predicted the decrease in the number of accidents and the associated lower insurance cost would encourage drivers and auto insurers to
adopt the technology—unlike with airplanes, where deaths are rare, there are tens of thousands of preventable deaths in cars each year. The
same study did predict that manufacturers’ product liability would likely increase and that this might slow the introduction of the technology.
The Rand study suggested, though, that government might intervene
and mandate self-driving cars if they prove to
be half as safe as Google claims. After all, almost 370,000 people died on American roads between 2001 and 2009 and millions
This week Audi and BMW were the latest to unveil advances in their
driverless car technology at the Consumer Electronics Show .
more were injured.
Barriers to driverless car adoption – regulation and full adoption will occur in 2050
Falk ’14, Tyler Falk is a reporter for ZD net, 2014
(“When will every car be driverless?”, January 10, 2014, Available at
http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-will-all-the-cars-be-driverless/, Accessed 07-26-15)
But while just about every major car company has a self-driving car they're showing off (here's BMW's latest video) and intentions to add semiautonomous features to new cars in the near future, the question remains: when will we self-driving cars actually be on the roads in significant
numbers? The latest to try to answer that question is the research company IHS. In a new study, the company predicts
that globally there will be 54 million self-driving cars on the road by 2035, with annual sales rising from 230,000 in 2025 to 11.8 million in 2035.
By 2050, the company says, "nearly all of the vehicles in use are likely to be self-driving cars or selfdriving commercial vehicles." What will the driverless technology features add to the price of the car? IHS says that driverless
technology will add between $7,000 and $10,000 to a car’s sticker price in 2025. That premium is expected to drop
to $5,000 in 2030 and $3,000 in 2035. Of course, there are still plenty of hurdles before reaching any of these
milestones, decades away. But the biggest one likely won't be technology. "hTe only thing that is stopping us is the
legal stuff," Patrick Heinemann, an engineer of advanced driver assistance systems for Audi AG, told the Associated Press. In the United
States, there are numerous states -- from Florida to California -- that are trying to make sure they are
ahead of the curve with driverless car laws already on the books. But a new study from RAND Corporation looking at
the benefits and challenges of self-driving cars says that these laws could lead to a "patchwork of conflicting regulatory
requirements that vary from state to state, which could undermine potential benefits." For policymakers,
RAND has four suggestions: Avoid passing regulations prematurely while the technology is still evolving. Update distracted-driving laws.
Clarify who will own the data generated by this technology and how it will be used, and address privacy concerns Regulations and liability rules
should be designed by comparing the performance of autonomous vehicles to that of average human drivers and the long-term benefits of the
technology should be incorporated into determinations of liability. But once those are sorted out, RAND believes the benefits of self-driving cars
-- from increased safety to increased fuel economy -- will outweigh the challenges.
Oil Impact Defense
Energy independence does nothing for the economy – doesn’t change consumer
prices, production, and too many alt causes
Kaufmann 14— John Kaufmann is an energy policy analyst for 30 years with the Oregon Department
of Energy, 2014 ("The Energy Independence Illusion," Resilience, 3-28-2014, Available Online at
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-04-29/the-energy-independence-illusion, Accessed 7-262015)//CM
ECONOMY Let’s look at the economy first. We
currently import about 8 million barrels of oil per day, more than 40%
of the oil we use. We pay about $1 billion a day for that oil, or $350-$400 billion per year. That
represents more than half of our current accounts deficit. Increased domestic production reduces our
current accounts deficit and should help strengthen the dollar. This is a real and substantial benefit,
though not enough to turn around our economy by itself. The RAND Corporation estimates that about 15% of our
military budget—$83 billion of a total $518 billion—goes to protect access to oil in the Middle East. Would energy
independence free us of that responsibility? Because of the quantity of oil in question and the
dependence of our major allies, it’s likely that would maintain a strong presence there even if we were
“energy independent.” There likely will be savings here, but probably not as much as one would hope. Some sources believe that
energy independence will mean lower prices for consumers. However, any increased domestic production will come from
unconventional sources, such as shale oil or tar sands, which are more expensive than conventional oil.
It only became economic to produce because of high world oil prices over the last several years. In
addition, oil prices are tied to the world price of oil. Energy independence will not reduce consumer
prices. Most importantly, conventional world crude oil production has peaked, affecting the ability to grow
the economy. This paradigm shift contributed to the fiscal crisis of 2008 and has dampened attempts to pull out of it.
Unconventional oil is too expensive and its flow rates are too low to replace conventional oil or
rejuvenate economic growth. No monetary or fiscal policies will reverse or overcome this fundamental
choke on the global economy. The age of rapid growth is over. We are entering an era of slow or no growth. Increased domestic oil
production may help to stabilize the economy, or perhaps even to continue to grow it, albeit at a slower rate than in the past. But drilling or
fracking our way to energy independence, while it may provide a temporary shot-in-the-arm, is not
sustainable for long. Oil is a limited resource, and costs will only increase – either of which will prevent it
from being our economic salvation. While energy certainly affects the economy (energy costs above about 6 percent of GDP
have been associated with economic recessions), it is not the only factor. Thomas Friedman’s book That Used To Be Us lists five pillars
of prosperity going forward: education, infrastructure, immigration policy, government-funded R&D (which
includes renewable energy), and financial regulation. Others have suggested additional or different factors. We have
more to gain by investing in these issues rather than throwing more money into growing domestic oil
production from finite and increasingly expensive unconventional sources. The latter is just throwing
money down a rat hole.
No risk of foreign oil threats or escalation – no one cares if we are independent or not
Kaufmann 14— John Kaufmann is an energy policy analyst for 30 years with the Oregon Department
of Energy, 2014 ("The Energy Independence Illusion," Resilience, 3-28-2014, Available Online at
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-04-29/the-energy-independence-illusion, Accessed 7-262015)//CM
Next, let’s look at foreign policy and national security. The
argument is that energy independence will ensure that our
national security is not jeopardized by oil price or supply problems emanating from abroad. It will also allow
us more flexibility in foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. OPEC hasn’t used oil as a political weapon in 35 years.
They apparently recognize that embargoes and price spikes hurt them as well as importing nations. That’s
not to say something couldn’t happen. The Gulf monarchies are aging and autocratic, and face upheaval sooner or
later. If they are replaced by anti-Western radicals, world oil security will be destabilized and/or
threatened. However, this is a danger to the world, not just to the US. We prop up the Gulf monarchies. That may be
distasteful, and one may wish it weren’t so. But if we withdrew, the alternative could easily be worse – not only for
western energy security, but for terrorism, peace and stability around the region and beyond, and
perhaps even for the prosperity of the region and hopes for democracy. It’s a case of damned if we do, damned if we
don’t. Second, the U.S. is relatively energy independent already. We are self-sufficient in coal and mostly
self-sufficient in natural gas (we import about 15 percent of our natural gas from Canada). We do import about half of our
oil – but our major suppliers are Canada and Mexico. Only a small portion is from the Middle East. Europe
and Japan are much more dependent on imports from Russia and the Middle East than the US is. Their security and prosperity likely would
affect US interests more than any energy-related actions directed against us. But increased US oil production will not be enough to make
ourselves energy independent, much less our allies. If
we achieve energy independence and our partners and allies
don’t, we are still vulnerable – both economically and in terms of national security and foreign policy.
Third, would energy independence give the U.S. more latitude on foreign policy? Let’s look at some
specific cases. · What about Syria? A major drought in 2006-2011 created food shortages and drove a million Syrians into
neighboring areas. Sectarian tensions and the hope of the Arab Spring then lit this tinder. Syria has been mentioned as a possible route for a
pipeline to move natural gas from Qatar to Europe as an alternative to Russian natural gas. That may have attracted some western interest, and
it is possible that European dependence on oil and natural gas from Russia may have muted the West’s response. However, one
of the US’
main interests presumably is to break Syria’s political alignment with Russia and Iran in hopes of
alleviating its border dispute with Israel and the transport of weapons through Syria to Hezbollah. US
energy independence wouldn’t make a fundamental difference, though European energy independence may have given
them a chance to exert more influence. · Egypt? One of the causes of the Egyptian uprising in 2011 was the loss of
revenue as declining Egyptian oil production drove them to become a net oil importer. This caused food and
gasoline subsidies to be cut, leading to steep price rises that people couldn’t afford. Egyptian energy independence would help,
but not American energy independence. · Would it help resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff? We have
been independent of Iranian oil for 35 years. It was the economic, trade, scientific, and military sanctions that were successful
in getting Iran to the negotiating table. US energy independence is irrelevant. · What about 9/11? Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to
America” listed US support for Israel, western interference in Muslim countries, and Western values as the main reasons behind the attack.
Energy independence would have made little difference. It’s
doubtful that US energy independence would have
affected our response in Afghanistan, since that nation possesses little oil. · Energy independence
wouldn’t do anything to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since neither side has any oil to use
as leverage. · What about Crimea or Ukraine? Russia provides a third of Europe’s oil and gas, so European energy independence
might have made Russia think twice – but that’s not in the cards. In addition, Crimea and Ukraine are vital to Russian interests – Crimea is
Russia’s only access to a warm sea port, and Ukraine is Russia’s major source of wheat and is a buffer against western encirclement of Russia.
What could the West do differently if it were energy independent? Would it really risk military confrontation? Doubtful. Probably sanctions, just
like now. European
energy independence might make them more willing to endorse stronger sanctions; US
energy independence is irrelevant as Russia only exports a small amount of oil to the US (under 4% of US
imports and falling). · Sen. Rand Paul’s response to the Crimean crisis would be to drill, drill, drill. Gen. James Jones, former National Security
Advisor, says the Keystone XL Pipeline should be approved to signal to Putin that energy security cannot be used as a weapon. Those kinds of
responses are pipedreams. The Eurozone imports 9 mbd. No amount of drilling or fracking will make the US energy independent, much less
Europe. Meanwhile, the XL pipeline will move only 800,000 barrels of oil per day. These strategies aren’t exactly threats to Russia’s oil and gas
exports, or leverage to curtail their ambitions. · The
only case where US energy independence might have made a
difference was the two Iraq Wars, which were unquestionably about preserving access to the world’s
second largest reserves. However, even there, the sheer quantity of oil at stake may have been too
tempting to have prevented US intervention. In summary, energy independence would do little to prevent
or resolve foreign policy entanglement in the Middle East and elsewhere. In addition, our fate is intertwined with
that of Europe, Japan, China and others – as they go, so go we. We have more to gain by modeling behavior and
encouraging and assisting others to reduce their use of oil, than by trying to achieve energy
independence for ourselves.
Impact Turn
Oil independence leads to a collapse in U.S./Middle East relations
Anderson 14 — Richard Anderson is a business Reporter for BBC News, 2014 ("How American energy
independence could change the world," BBC News, 4-1-2014, Available Online at
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-23151813, Accessed 7-22-2015)//CM
Oil exporters A
number of countries export huge amounts of oil to the US; exports that would all but
disappear if the US achieves energy independence. The impact on these economies, particularly in South
America, Africa and the Middle East, would be significant. For example, in 2011, Ecuador's oil exports to the US
were worth about $6.5bn, or 8% of the country's GDP. In Colombia the figure was 7%. Even Canada, one of the world's
economic powerhouses and a member of the G8, would be hit hard. Again, of course, the loss would not be felt overnight. But it's not just
direct exports to the US that would be hit. America is currently the world's biggest importer of oil, so if it
was no longer buying, the oil price would inevitably drop. This would hurt all oil producers, and
compound the problem for big exporters to the US. This "double whammy would result in a transfer of
wealth from producer to consumer countries", Mr Dales explains. Geopolitics and the Middle East With
energy independence secured, America's interest in oil in the Middle East would inevitably wane. Much
depends on your own view of how important oil is to US foreign policy, but some commentators have compared American
policy in Syria, a relatively minor oil producer, with that in Iraq, one of the biggest producers in the
world. You only have to look at Europe's reaction to Russia's move into Crimea to see how intertwined
energy security and foreign policy are - with Russia supplying about a third of Europe's energy, EU leaders' hands are, to a large
extent, tied. Whether oil is the most important driver of US foreign policy in the Middle East is a moot point. "Oil is a very important aspect of
US interests, but you can't ignore the others," says Alexia Ash at IHS. She says the US is very concerned both about stability in the region,
particularly as it borders both Russia and China, and its image as a global superpower. The US also has strong historical ties with Saudi Arabia,
including lucrative defence contracts. Others argue the US is already starting to withdraw from some of its overseas interests. As Ms Ash asks:
"If the ideological battles are lost, does the US start to retreat into its own shores?" Energy
independence allows it to do just that.
Privacy Turn
Google’s collection of your data is much worse than NSA’s collection
Newman 13, Nathan Newman is a lawyer and Ph. D, who received his JD from the Yale Law School, co Director
of Berkeley’s Center for Community of Economic Research, and is Ph. D is sociology from UC Berkeley, 2013(“Why
Google's Spying on User Data Is Worse than the NSA's”, July 1, 2013,Available online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-newman/why-googles-spying-on-use_b_3530296.html,
Accessed online at 07-22-15)
There is an odd cadence to the debate on the National Security Agency spying on user data supplied by
social media companies like Google and Facebook, as if the comprehensive, integrated profiles of user data controlled by large
multinational corporations was only a problem when the government got hold of them. Don't get me wrong. I opposed the Patriot Act
and follow-up amendments and think the national security state is a danger that needs to be severely
reined in. Which is why I was quite happy that Edward Snowden's disclosures have highlighted the problem of national security state access
to user data created in the wake of 9-11. But the potential abuses due to corporate access to that data are as bad as
the NSA control -- and the documented harm to the public has been worse. Illegal Corporate Data Collection Let's
start with data collection itself. While the legal basis for the NSA collection has been challenged, both the courts
and Congressional Committees overseeing the collection have generally approved the program.
Compare that to companies like Google, which have violated the law repeatedly to collect user data.
Google's illegal "wi-spy" program of collecting user data over home wi-fi hubs using its Street View cars has led to investigations and fines for
violations of the law in countries around the world. Investigators were
outraged when they reviewed the downloaded
data and found Google had collected massive amounts of personal emails and data revealing everything
from people's medical histories to their sexual preference to marital infidelity. (Google's defense that that it was all
okay because they never looked at the illegally collected data is eerily similar to the NSA's). When challenged on its illegal data collection, the
company lied and stonewalled investigators around the world, with the Federal Communications Commission finding the company guilty of
"willfully" ignoring subpoenas to delay investigations into the scandal, fining the company in a 25-page condemnation in April 2012 that
concluded "Google's failure to cooperate with the Bureau was in many or all cases deliberate." Both
Google and Facebook were
charged with violating privacy laws in launching their social media networks and both had to agree to
20-year consent decrees to monitor their privacy policies. But a year after entering its consent decree, the Federal Trade
Commission found Google had secretly placed "cookies" to track the online activities of people using the
Safari web browser, despite having publicly "told these users they would automatically be opted out of such tracking." Google had
deliberately found a vulnerability in Safari's "default cookie-blocking setting" in order to collect the information for its advertising data collection
purposes, while publicly misrepresenting to users that it was not doing so. The company paid a $22.5 million fine for this illegal data collection
operation. The Harm to Users from Corporate Misuse of Personal Data The
illegal data collection is just the start of the
problem with corporate use of personal data. At least one reason I think the NSA spying hasn't led to a public opinion backlash
calling for its end is that there's been no documentation of the program being used to harm individual Americans. But we know for a fact that
companies like Google are giving corporate advertisers access to users based on the personal data they
control -- and many of those advertisers are targeting individuals with the express intent to rip them off,
sell them deadly products, and financially impoverish them. Some advertisers are just trying to help customers find a
product they might like, but the dark version of online marketing is that it can facilitate what economists call "price discrimination," selling the
same exact good at a variety of prices in ways unknown to the buyers. Researchers Rosa-Branc Esteves and Joana Resende highlight how with
the low costs of online advertising, such online price discrimination systematically shifts wealth from consumers to corporate profits. One
implication of their models is that "average prices with mass advertising [i.e. without the discrimination allowed by targeting individual users
online] are below those with targeted advertising," which follows the idea that firms will target certain consumers with promotions while
enjoying higher prices paid by consumers kept ignorant of lower prices offered to others. Early Internet visionary Jaron Lanier, who pioneered
ideas like "virtual reality" two decades ago, has noted that such access to behavioral targeting has even more appeal to the "tawdry" kinds of firms
than the "dignified side of capitalism", since "ambulance chasers and snake oil salesmen" among the capitalist class thrive on such targeted access
to their victims. And the specter of racist use of that data is all too real; As ColorLines magazine has argued, a "user's browsing history, their
location and IP information...combined with information available in Google's public data explorer (including US census, education, population,
STD stats, and state financial data) presumably could also be folded into the personalized search algorithm to surmise a lot more than your race."
While not conclusive, there is evidence of companies using names or other evidence such as physical location to offer differential advertising
through Google based on race and ethnicity. Targeting Consumers for Financial Ruin What is unquestionable is that Google advertising lay at the
heart of the largest example of price discrimination and consumer harm of the last few decades, namely the subprime mortgage destruction of
family wealth and the financial crisis that followed. Google isn't usually identified as a big player in the subprime mortgage debacle and its
aftermath, but a significant portion of Google's profits in the mid-2000s were coming straight from subprime mortgage lenders advertising on its
site. As Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy said back in 2007, "Many online companies depend for a disproportionate amount of
their income on financial services advertising, with subprime in some cases accounting for a large part of it." Companies enticed customers with
unrealistic "teaser rates" -- heavily advertised online -- that burdened borrowers with toxic terms and unmanageable obligations that exploded in
later years. And as the racial and exploitive aspect of the mortgage meltdown was endemic with what some scholars described as reverse
redlining, "the practice of targeting borrowers of color for loans on unfavorable terms." This
offering of differential rates based
on the characteristics of the borrower constitutes the most damaging price discrimination inflicting
consumer harm in American history, for which Google played an integral (and profitable) role as an
advertising intermediary where it was earning billions of dollars a year in that role. The financial industry
remains the bedrock of Google's advertising revenues. According to WordStream, a company specializing in helping companies
bid effectively on Google Ads, the three most expensive categories of keyword searches as measured by
cost per click are in financial services (insurance, loans and mortgages), with 45.6 percent of the top 10,000 advertising keywords
falling in those categories. And many of those advertising bidders at Google are from the more bottom-feeding aspects of the industry,
particularly payday loan lenders, who offer extremely high-interest loans for consumers made in exchange for a commitment to repayment from
the person's next paycheck. Such loans have been banned or severely restricted as exploitative in multiple states. Google actively solicits ads from
the payday lending industry, including setting up a trade booth at the Online Lenders Alliance, a trade group comprised mainly of payday lenders.
Robert X. Cringely, who has covered Silicon Valley for over 25 years, argues that out of financial selfinterest, Google is burying bad news about the industry for consumers, since he found Google "placed
the uniformly negative news items near the bottom of the results, below the fold as we used to say in
the newspaper business." Whether Google is actively hiding damning consumer analysis of the evils of its financial advertisers, what is
true is that Google maintained ads from fraudulent mortgage "loan modification" firms preying on
desperate homeowners even after the company was alerted to the problem. Despite consumer group Consumer
Watchdog publishing a scathing report highlighting the concentration of such firms advertising online, Google did nothing until the
Treasury Department took regulatory action in November 2011 under its TARP authority to shut down
85 of these scam advertisers who were luring customers through Google. "Many homeowners who fall prey to these
scams, initially do so through these Web banners and other Web advertising," Christy Romero, Deputy Special Inspector General for the
Troubled Asset Relief Program, said in an interview. You
just can't separate the massive financial destruction of
American households in the recent financial crisis and its aftermath from the corporate use of consumer
data to target ads and suck consumers into those financial scams. Bottom-Feeders Exploiting User Data Online In a
similar vein, a whole range of scam artists, fake drug peddlers and underage "escort" services use user data provided by corporate partners like
Google to find their victims. In 2012, Google
agreed to pay a $500 million civil forfeiture to the federal
government, one of the largest in history, as part of a settlement penalizing the company for illegally
and knowingly allowing illegal pharmacies to advertise on its site. This was not passive activity by Google, but active
complicity with advertisers often selling fake prescription medicine to desperately ill individuals or marketing illegal steroids. "[Google CEO]
Larry Page knew what was going on," Peter Neronha, the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney who led the probe, told the Wall Street Journal. The
National Association of Human Trafficking Victim Advocates (NAHTVA) along with 37 other prominent anti-trafficking organizations have
accused Google of profiting off of the sex trafficking of women, while a recent session of the National Association of Attorneys General noted
the widespread targeting of ads for illegal products to users online, including recruiting children as underage "escorts" and pushing illegal drugs
to kids. Given the
documented history of online corporate exploitation of user data, it becomes ridiculous
to argue that it's a bigger problem that the NSA was grabbing the data then that corporate exploiters
like Google had the data themselves in the first place. Even a lot of ostensible "lefties" seem to be a bit too complacent in
seeing the only problem with centralized data control being when government has it. Imposing Regulation and Transparency on Data Collection
and Use by Both Government and Corporations None of this is to say we don't need to more tightly rein in how the National Security Agency
uses personal data, but some of that has been done already and more is being talked about in Capitol Hill. The missing piece is any serious
movement on reining in corporate control of personal data. Google and Facebook and other data mining companies are trying to position
themselves as defenders of user privacy, but when California
tried to pass simple law this year to allow users to simply
find out what data has been collected about them by online companies -- the privacy equivalent of a
credit report -- those same companies mobilized and killed the bill dead in its tracks. (See Silicon Valley Stomps
on Digital Disclosure Bill). Governments and companies are going to have more data about than we are comfortable with -- that's a fact of life in
the digital age. In many cases, I'm actually happier to have government with the data than private companies -- we all know the ways private
insurance companies have used health data to discriminate against sick patients. But across the board, people should have far greater knowledge
the national
security state can't abuse potential dissidents with that data and that predatory financial firms aren't
assisted by companies like Google in preying on consumers using their data either.
of exactly what data governments and corporations have about them and we need much tougher rules to make sure that
Google is not good for user’s privacy – Nest acquisition proves
Rosenfeld ’14 Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow covering democracy issues. He is a longtime
print and broadcast journalist and has reported for National Public Radio, Monitor Radio,
Marketplace, TomPaine.com and many newspapers. He has written and co-authored three books
on voting rights since 2004, including Count My Vote, 2014 (“4 ways Google is destroying
privacy and collecting your data”, February 5 2014,Available online at
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/05/4_ways_google_is_destroying_privacy_and_collecting_your_
data_partner/, Accessed 07-21-15)
No longer content to vacuum up, scan, index and sell analytics based on the content of our texts, emails,
searches, locations and more, Google now has a new target: tapping, mapping and colonizing the
networks wiring our lives. “Google argues that it has the right to collect your most sensitive data, as long as it flows across an open
WiFi network,” PrivacySOS.org said last month after Google announced a $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest,
which sells WiFi-controlled home heating appliances. “Now do you want to let this company inside your home?” “Uhm… I
hate to break this to the ACLU—given they’re supposed to be on the cutting edge of the privacy debate—but the thing is, Google’s already in our
homes,” commented PandoDaily’s Yasha Levine. “It has been in our homes for a long, long time. And not just in our homes, but at work, in our
cars and even when we’re walking down the street.” “As many have pointed out the privacy concerns of this development are huge,” wrote two
other PandoDaily writers, Carmel Deamicus and Michael Carney. “Nest
products track detailed information about their
users’ movements, in addition to things like a user’s WiFi IP address, and whether the specific address is
a home or a business.” “The acquisition will help Google close the circle of search, people and goods in a
broad Internet of Everything,” wrote Wall Street Journal editor Michael Hickins. “As Aaron Levie, CEO of Box Inc. tweeted, ‘With
home automation, self-driving cars, robots, mobile, and life sciences, Google is setting itself up to own the 21st century.’” Anyone who cares
about maintaining some degree of privacy should pay attention. Google has
been doing a lot more than its lobbyists and
executives have disclosed when defending or promoting its initiatives. Here are four examples that undescrore
Google’s corporate ethos that any data it can grab is Google’s for the taking. 1. Street View: not just street mapping. After being sued by 38
states, Google admitted
last March that its weird-looking cars outfitted with roof cameras facing four directions
collecting data from computers inside homes and structures, including
“passwords, e-mails and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users,” the New York
Times reported. 2. Gmail: prying and spying. This October, a federal judge refused to dismiss a potential classaction lawsuit brought by Gmail users who objected to its practice of analyzing the content of all the
messages on its network and selling byproducts to advertisers. Those suing Google said it violated federal wiretap laws.
were not just taking pictures; they were
This issue isn’t new to Google. In congressional testimony in 2009, Google’s lawyers said its email technology was used for scanning for spam,
computer viruses and serving ads “within the Gmail user’s experience.” But last fall, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh held that Google never
told Gmail users that Google would create personal profiles and target users with ads. Nor did people who are not Gmail users, but who were
writing to Gmail addresses, agree to let Google collect and parse their messages. 3. Google Safari: not just hunting WiFi. Google’s court record
includes more than just grabbing and snatching data. In early 2012, the Wall
Street Journal broke the story that its software
was bypassing security settings for Apple devices using the Safari browser. “Google hated this [Safari’s anti-tracking
features] and used a secret code to bypass this security setting,” the blog GoogleExposed wrote. “This exposed millions of Safari users to tracking
for months without them even knowing about it.” In
August 2012, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5
million, its largest civil fine, noting that Google also had violated previous privacy agreements. 4. Android:
another data gateway. One year after the FTC fine, ComputerWorld.com’s Michael Horowitz, who writes its Defensive Computing feature, noted
Google was back to its old tricks. “Google
knows nearly every WiFi password in the world,” he declared, explaining that was
the result of backdoor access to hundreds of millions of phones and devices using its Android operating system. “Sounds great. Backing up your
data/settings makes moving to a new Android device much easier,” Horowitz wrote, citing how the company sold this feature to consumers. “It
lets Google configure your new Android device very much like your old one. What
is not said, is that Google can read the
WiFi passwords.” The good news, he said, is that this feature can be turned off. “The bad news is that, like any American company,
Google can be compelled by agencies of the U.S. government to silently spill the beans.” ComputerWorld was
careful not to pick just on Google for domestic spying. DropBox, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, FaceBook, Skype—and
others—all do pretty much the same thing: read user data and grant government access to it. But
Google’s mission, detailed in its patents, stands apart. Its business is based on analyzing user metrics
with ever-growing precision, and selling those insights to advertisers. Thus, the recent handwringing by
Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Google—and others—was taken advantage of by America’s top spymasters
following Edward Snowden’s still-unfolding National Security Agency whistleblowing, is more than hollow. It’s a farce. The record shows
that Google knows exactly what it is doing. 2014 is likely to be a year where the trade-off for more profits and data
for Google will be the loss of privacy. It’s not paranoid to say that Google’s acquisition of Nest is at the cutting
edge of colonizing the links between our electronic devices and our lives. The trend of aggregating all the data that’s
out there is behind many privacy-invading social media products, such as an app launching this week that literally allows a man to walk into a
bar, see a woman and know her name “before he even says hello.” Later this summer, Google will
start selling its voice- and
video-capturing Glass eyewear. Google Glass may be fantastic as a hands-liberating computing platform,
but it also enables its users to film, analyze or spy upon others from afar. It’s up to us to say where the
red lines should be drawn.
No difference between metadata and actual data – Google knows everything about
you and don’t use that data effectively
Schneir ’15, Bruce Schneir is a fellow for the Centor of Internet and Security at Harvard
Unviersity, 2015 ( “NSA Doesn’t Need to Spy on Your Calls to Learn Your Secrets”, Available online at
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/data-and-goliath-nsa-metadata-spying-your-secrets/, Accessed online
at 07-22-15)
Web search data is another source of intimate information that can be used for surveillance. (You can argue whether this is data or metadata. The
NSA claims it’s metadata because your search terms are embedded in the URLs.) We
don’t lie to our search engine. We’re
more intimate with it than with our friends, lovers, or family members. We always tell it exactly what we’re thinking
about, in as clear words as possible. Google knows what kind of porn each of us searches for, which old lovers we
still think about, our shames, our concerns, and our secrets. If Google decided to, it could figure out
which of us is worried about our mental health, thinking about tax evasion, or planning to protest a
particular government policy. I used to say that Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than my wife
does. But that doesn’t go far enough. Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than I do, because
Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever. I did a quick experiment with Google’s autocomplete feature. This is the
feature that offers to complete typing your search queries in real time, based on what other people have typed. When I typed “should I tell my w,”
Google suggested “should i tell my wife i had an affair” and “should i tell my work about dui” as the most popular completions. Google
knows who clicked on those completions, and everything else they ever searched for. Google’s CEO Eric
Schmidt admitted as much in 2010: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking
about.” We
kill people based on metadata. FORMER NSA DIRECTOR MICHAEL HAYDEN If you have a Gmail
account, you can check for yourself. You can look at your search history for any time you were logged in. It goes back for as long
as you’ve had the account, probably for years. Do it; you’ll be surprised. It’s more intimate than if you’d sent Google your
diary. And while Google lets you see it, you have no rights to delete anything you don’t want there.
There are other sources of intimate data and metadata. Records of your purchasing habits reveal a lot about who you are.
Your tweets tell the world what time you wake up in the morning, and what time you go to bed each night.
Your buddy lists and
address books reveal your political affiliation and sexual orientation. Your email headers reveal who is central to your
professional, social, and romantic life. One way to think about it is that data is content, and metadata is context.
Metadata can be much more revealing than data, especially when collected in the aggregate. When you
have one person under surveillance, the contents of conversations, text messages, and emails can be more important than the metadata. But
when you have an entire population under surveillance, the metadata is far more meaningful,
important, and useful. As former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said: “Metadata absolutely tells you everything
about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.” In 2014, former
NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden remarked: “We kill people based on metadata.” The truth is,
though, that the difference is largely illusionary. It’s all data about us.
Google’s claims of consumer privacy protections are false – Wall Street Journal proves
Thurne and Kane ’10, Scott Thurm is a Senior Editor for the Wall Street Journal and Yukari I.
Kane was a former reporter of 15 years for the WSJ, 2010 (“Your Apps Are Watching You”,
December 18 2010, Available online at
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704368004576027751867039730, Accessed online at
07-22-15)
Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone
numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don't
keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. An examination of 101
popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's
unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five
sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders. WSJ's Julia Angwin explains to Simon Constable how smartphone apps collect and
broadcast data about your habits. Many don't have privacy policies and there isn't much you can do about it. MORE What Can You Do? Not
Much What Settings to Look For How One App Sees Location Without Asking Unique Phone ID Numbers Explained The Journal's Cellphone
Testing Methodology Complete Coverage: What They Know The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather
personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them. Among the apps tested, the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the
apps on phones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Because of the test's size, it's not known if the pattern holds among the hundreds
of thousands of apps available. Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the
phone's unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and gender, to two of them. Both the Android
and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and
Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone's ID number to at least five
ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies. "In the world of mobile,
there is no anonymity," says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, an industry trade group. A cellphone is "always with us. It's
always on." iPhone maker Apple Inc. says it reviews each app before offering it to users. Both
Apple and Google say they protect
users by requiring apps to obtain permission before revealing certain kinds of information, such as
location. "We have created strong privacy protections for our customers, especially regarding locationbased data," says Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr. "Privacy and trust are vitally important." The Journal
found that these rules can be skirted. One iPhone app, Pumpkin Maker (a pumpkin-carving game), transmits location to an ad
network without asking permission. Apple declines to comment on whether the app violated its rules. Smartphone users are all but powerless to
limit the tracking. With few exceptions, app users can't "opt out" of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular computers. On
computers it is also possible to block or delete "cookies," which are tiny tracking files. These techniques generally don't work on cellphone apps.
The makers of TextPlus 4, Pandora and Grindr say the data they pass on to outside firms isn't linked to an individual's name. Personal details such
as age and gender are volunteered by users, they say. The maker of Pumpkin Maker says he didn't know Apple required apps to seek user
approval before transmitting location. The maker of Paper Toss didn't respond to requests for comment. JOURNAL COMMUNITY Many apps
don't offer even a basic form of consumer protection: written privacy policies. Forty-five of the 101 apps didn't provide privacy policies on their
websites or inside the apps at the time of testing. Neither Apple nor Google requires app privacy policies. To expose the
information being shared by smartphone apps, the Journal designed a system to intercept and record the data they transmit, then decoded the data
stream. The research covered 50 iPhone apps and 50 on phones using Google's Android operating system. (Methodology available here.) The
Journal also tested its own iPhone app; it didn't send information to outsiders. The Journal doesn't have an Android phone app. Among all apps
tested, the
most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a
"supercookie," says Vishal Gurbuxani, co-founder of Mobclix Inc., an exchange for mobile advertisers. On iPhones, this
number is the "UDID," or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These
IDs are set by phone makers, carriers
or makers of the operating system, and typically can't be blocked or deleted. "The great thing about mobile is you
can't clear a UDID like you can a cookie," says Meghan O'Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile
apps. "That's how we track everything." Ms. O'Holleran says Traffic Marketplace, a unit of Epic Media Group, monitors smartphone
users whenever it can. "We watch what apps you download, how frequently you use them, how much time you spend on them, how deep into the
app you go," she says. She says the data is aggregated and not linked to an individual. MORE FROM THE SERIES A Web Pioneer Profiles
Users by Name Web's New Goldmine: Your Secrets Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest Sites Microsoft Quashed Bid to Boost Web Privacy
On Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only Stalking by Cellphone Google Agonizes Over Privacy On the Web, Children Face Intensive
Tracking 'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on Web Facebook in Privacy Breach Insurers Test Data Profiles to Identify Risky Clients Shunned
Profiling Technology on the Verge of Comeback Race Is On to 'Fingerprint' Phones, PCs The Tracking Ecosystem Follow @whattheyknow on
Twitter Complete Coverage: What They Know The main companies setting ground rules for app data-gathering have big stakes in the ad
business. The two most popular platforms for new U.S. smartphones are Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Google and Apple also run the
two biggest services, by revenue, for putting ads on mobile phones. Apple and Google
ad networks let advertisers target
groups of users. Both companies say they don't track individuals based on the way they use apps. Apple limits what can be installed on an
iPhone by requiring iPhone apps to be offered exclusively through its App Store. Apple reviews those apps for function, offensiveness and other
criteria. It's rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ's Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers
use cookies to track your online habits. Apple says iPhone apps "cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission
and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used." Many apps tested by the Journal appeared to
violate that rule, by sending a user's location to ad networks, without informing users. Apple declines to discuss how it interprets or enforces the
policy. Phones running Google's Android
operating system are made by companies including Motorola Inc. and
Samsung Electronics Co. Google doesn't review the apps, which can be downloaded from many vendors.
Google says app makers "bear the responsibility for how they handle user information." Google requires
Android apps to notify users, before they download the app, of the data sources the app intends to
access. Possible sources include the phone's camera, memory, contact list, and more than 100 others. If
users don't like what a particular app wants to access, they can choose not to install the app, Google says. "Our focus is making sure that users
have control over what apps they install, and notice of what information the app accesses," a Google spokesman says. Neither
Apple nor
Google requires apps to ask permission to access some forms of the device ID, or to send it to outsiders.
When smartphone users let an app see their location, apps generally don't disclose if they will pass the
location to ad companies Lack of standard practices means different companies treat the same information differently. For example,
Apple says that, internally, it treats the iPhone's UDID as "personally identifiable information." That's because, Apple says, it can be combined
with other personal details about people—such as names or email addresses—that Apple has via the App Store or its iTunes music services. By
contrast, Google and most app makers don't consider device IDs to be identifying information. A growing
industry is assembling this data into profiles of cellphone users. Mobclix, the ad exchange, matches more than 25 ad networks with some 15,000
apps seeking advertisers. The Palo Alto, Calif., company collects phone IDs, encodes them (to obscure the number), and assigns them to interest
categories based on what apps people download and how much time they spend using an app, among other factors. By tracking a phone's
location, Mobclix also makes a "best guess" of where a person lives, says Mr. Gurbuxani, the Mobclix executive. Mobclix then matches that
location with spending and demographic data from Nielsen Co. In roughly a quarter-second, Mobclix can place a user in one of 150 "segments" it
offers to advertisers, from "green enthusiasts" to "soccer moms." For example, "die hard gamers" are 15-to-25-year-old males with more than 20
apps on their phones who use an app for more than 20 minutes at a time. Mobclix says its system is powerful, but that its categories are broad
enough to not identify individuals. "It's about how you track people better," Mr. Gurbuxani says. Some app makers have made changes in
response to the findings. At least four app makers posted privacy policies after being contacted by the Journal, including Rovio Mobile Ltd., the
Finnish company behind the popular game Angry Birds (in which birds battle egg-snatching pigs). A spokesman says Rovio had been working on
the policy, and the Journal inquiry made it a good time to unveil it. Free and paid versions of Angry Birds were tested on an iPhone. The apps
sent the phone's UDID and location to the Chillingo unit of Electronic Arts Inc., which markets the games. Chillingo says it doesn't use the
information for advertising and doesn't share it with outsiders. Apps have been around for years, but burst into prominence when Apple opened
its App Store in July 2008. Today, the App Store boasts more than 300,000 programs. Other phone makers, including BlackBerry maker
Research in Motion Ltd. and Nokia Corp., quickly built their own app stores. Google's Android Market, which opened later in 2008, has more
than 100,000 apps. Market researcher Gartner Inc. estimates that world-wide app sales this year will total $6.7 billion. Many developers offer
apps for free, hoping to profit by selling ads inside the app. Noah Elkin of market researcher eMarketer says some people "are willing to tolerate
Ad sales on
phones account for less than 5% of the $23 billion in annual Internet advertising. But spending on mobile
ads is growing faster than the market overall. Central to this growth: the ad networks whose business is connecting advertisers
advertising in apps to get something for free." Of the 101 apps tested, the paid apps generally sent less data to outsiders.
with apps. Many ad networks offer software "kits" that automatically insert ads into an app. The kits also track where users spend time inside the
app. Some developers feel pressure to release more data about people. Max Binshtok, creator of the DailyHoroscope Android app, says adnetwork executives encouraged him to transmit users' locations. Mr. Binshtok says he declined because of privacy concerns. But ads targeted by
location bring in two to five times as much money as untargeted ads, Mr. Binshtok says. "We are losing a lot of revenue." Other apps transmitted
more data. The
Android app for social-network site MySpace sent age and gender, along with a device ID, to Millennial
Media, a big ad network. In its software-kit instructions, Millennial Media lists 11 types of information about people that
developers may transmit to "help Millennial provide more relevant ads." They include age, gender,
income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views. In a re-test with a more complete profile, MySpace also sent
a user's income, ethnicity and parental status. A spokesman says MySpace discloses in its privacy policy that it will share
details from user profiles to help advertisers provide "more relevant ads." My Space is a unit of News Corp., which publishes the Journal.
Millennial did not respond to requests for comment on its software kit. App makers transmitting data say it is anonymous to the outside firms that
receive it. "There is no real-life I.D. here," says Joel Simkhai, CEO of Nearby Buddy Finder LLC, the maker of the Grindr app for gay men.
"Because we are not tying [the information] to a name, I don't see an area of concern." Scott Lahman, CEO of TextPlus 4 developer Gogii Inc.,
says his company "is dedicated to the privacy of our users. We do not share personally identifiable information or message content." A Pandora
spokeswoman says, "We use listener data in accordance with our privacy policy," which discusses the app's data use, to deliver relevant
advertising. When a user registers for the first time, the app asks for email address, gender, birth year and ZIP code. Google was the biggest data
recipient in the tests. Its AdMob, AdSense, Analytics and DoubleClick units collectively heard from 38 of the 101 apps. Google, whose ad units
operate on both iPhones and Android phones, says it doesn't mix data received by these units. Google's main mobile-ad
network is
AdMob, which it bought this year for $750 million. AdMob lets advertisers target phone users by
location, type of device and "demographic data," including gender or age group. A Google spokesman says
AdMob targets ads based on what it knows about the types of people who use an app, phone location, and profile information a user has
submitted to the app. "No profile of the user, their device, where they've been or what apps they've downloaded, is created or stored," he says.
Apple operates its iAd network only on the iPhone. Eighteen of the 51 iPhone apps sent information to Apple. Apple targets ads to phone users
based largely on what it knows about them through its App Store and iTunes music service. The targeting criteria can include the types of songs,
videos and apps a person downloads, according to an Apple ad presentation reviewed by the Journal. The presentation named 103 targeting
categories, including: karaoke, Christian/gospel music, anime, business news, health apps, games and horror movies. People familiar with iAd
say Apple doesn't track what users do inside apps and offers advertisers broad categories of people, not specific individuals. Apple has signaled
that it has ideas for targeting people more closely. In a patent application filed this past May, Apple outlined a system for placing and pricing ads
based on a person's "web history or search history" and "the contents of a media library." For example, home-improvement advertisers might pay
more to reach a person who downloaded do-it-yourself TV shows, the document says. The patent application also lists another possible way to
target people with ads: the contents of a friend's media library. How would Apple learn who a cellphone user's friends are, and what kinds of
media they prefer? The patent says Apple could tap "known connections on one or more social-networking websites" or "publicly available
information or private databases describing purchasing decisions, brand preferences," and other data. In September, Apple introduced a socialnetworking service within iTunes, called Ping, that lets users share music preferences with friends. Apple declined to comment. Tech companies
file patents on blue-sky concepts all the time, and it isn't clear whether Apple will follow through on these ideas. If it did, it would be an evolution
for Chief Executive Steve Jobs, who has spoken out against intrusive tracking. At a tech conference in June, he complained about apps "that want
to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up."
Google is the largest data collector in the world – It is inevitable for them to gain your
data
If you are anything like me, you love a lot of what Google offers. As soon as I fire up my Google Chrome browser, I head over to Google Search,
Google Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs or Picasa. And whenever I stop wasting my time on Google+, I continue doing so on
YouTube. These
services are mostly free and reliable, why should I think twice about using them? There is a
more data about people in its data bases than any other organization in the
reason. Google most likely has
world. More than the former Soviet KGB could have hoped to get in its wildest dreams. If you have teenaged kids with an Android phone, then
Google almost certainly knows quite a few things about them, that you don't. Google may know where
they are at any moment via Google Latitude, who all their friends and acquaintances are via their
synchronized contact list, what they did last night via their uploaded pictures, and what they say about
you via Google Talk. Now, one might say if you are worried about this, then simply stop using these Google services and you are off the
hook. Really? If you don't go near the Internet, then that's probably the case. But if you happen to live in the 21st century, Google will still
collect data from your website visits via services they provide for webmasters. We collect statistics about a number
of such services for our surveys. These services are Service Percentage of websites using it Google Analytics 55.6% AdSense 18.3%
DoubleClick 1.6% Teracent < 0.1% Google Web Servers 1.0% Blogger 0.9% Google Sites < 0.1% Google +1 (incl. the old Google Buzz) 11.3%
Google Library API soon to be published Taking these figures, we investigated how many sites are not using any of these services. We had
to
take into account the overlaps, e.g. some sites use Analytics and AdSense, therefore we cannot simply
add the usage figures. This is what we found out: the percentage of websites that use any of these Google services is 63.5%. In other
words Only 36.5% of the web is Google-free. This is a very conservative estimate, because there are several popular Google services that we
don't monitor: embedded YouTube videos, embedded Google Maps, Google Site Search, Google Checkout and Feedburner are some examples.
However, the services that we left out tend to be used on individual web pages only, whereas the services from our surveys are typically used on
all or on most pages of a site. Therefore, the percentage of web pages that are Google-free is almost certainly even lower than 36.5%, but
probably not much lower. What does that mean?
Suppose somebody wants to stay away from Google out of concern
for privacy or for any other reason. Suppose that person does some research on the web and visits any 5
websites that are not owned by Google. Then the chance that none of these sites uses any Google
service, so that no traces are left on any Google server, is 0.65% The probability of providing data to
Google when visiting 5 random websites, without actively using any Google service, is 99.35%. There are a
few things one could discuss concerning that figure, I will try to address some of them: The various Google services run on separate servers, it is
not possible to combine all these data. While it is technically not possible to have something like a super-cookie covering all Google property
and thus readily identifying a visitor along the way, techniques such as Browser Fingerprinting combined with all the other data a website visitor
leaves behind, can achieve pretty much the same. I think of this like a jigsaw puzzle, where Google tries to bring all these little data points
together. They will never find and properly locate all the pieces, but it's sufficient to have plenty of them in place in order to recognize the
picture. I'm quite confident that the smart guys at Google know a thing or two about digging into large amounts of data. You can turn off
JavaScript and use Ad Blockers, so that you are not affected. Disabling some (but not all) of the Google data collection is possible. Google itself
provides tools such as the Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-ons, and there are any number of third-party tools. However, selecting, configuring
and updating these tools on several browsing platforms such as PCs, smartphones and tablets, is more effort than most people and most
I trust Google
more than I trust any government in the world, including my own, but that's a low bar. Call me naive, but I don't believe
terrible misuse of the data is planned at the Googleplex at this moment. I think that Google knows best that
one can lose people's confidence only once, and as soon as a Google ad is generally perceived as a
severe privacy issue, that would pretty much be the end of the company. But that doesn't mean that things can't go
company's IT administrators are willing to spend. Who cares? Some people do, others don't. I personally must say that
wrong at some stage. Certainly, seeing all those mountains of data in one place does leave a nervous feeling. Mistakes are made, even at Google,
as has been known to happen again and again. There could be data leaks, or outright criminal conduct, or a change of Google's policies at any
time. And while
at the subject of governments of the world, all that data being available may well, under
certain circumstances, give them too more information about me than I want them to have. Whatever your
personal conclusions are, I hope that this little investigation will contribute to making data collectors, surfers, webmasters and law makers alike
aware of the magnitude of the problem. We
have reached a critical point where it's next to impossible for an
individual to decide where and when he or she wants to give away some data to the biggest data
collector. It all happens with or without you.
Revenue ≠ K2 Cars
Even Google officials admit that Google won’t build the entire car itself – no way
revenue is key.
Levy 15 — Ari Levy is CNBC's senior technology reporter in San Francisco, 2015 ("Google driverless car
needs users, then revenue," CNBC, 5-27-2015, Available Online at
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/27/google-driverless-car-needs-users-then-revenue.html, Accessed 726-2015)//CM
Google's self-driving car needs users before the company can even think about the business model, says
Chief Business Officer Omid Kordestani. "You got to build it first and if the users come, then you figure out how to
monetize it," Kordestani said on Wednesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. "That's true of all of our
friends in the industry from the Facebooks of the world and others." In a wide-ranging interview covering everything
from the core search business and relations with Apple to the European Union's investigation and
Google's crazy "moonshots," Kordestani acknowledged that the company is unlikely to build and sell its
own car. Read MoreApple vs. Google: Mapping "We'd like to do that through partnerships," he said. Auto-related
technology has been a hot topic at the conference. General Motors CEO Mary Barra announced that 14 new Chevrolet
models are baking in connected media technology from Apple and Google, and Apple's Jeff Williams
called cars "the ultimate mobile device." Despite Kordestani's statement, Google recently showed a driverless car that it built
from the ground up.
Google is planning on partnering up with companies – means no unique internal link
Langley 14 — Hugh Langley is the Associate Editor @TechRadar, 2014 ("Google won't build its own
self-driving cars, it's going to partner up instead," TechRadar, 12-22-2014, Available Online at
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/car-tech/google-won-t-build-its-own-self-driving-cars-it-s-going-topartner-up-instead-1278028, Accessed 7-26-2015)//CM
2015 is set to be a big year for driverless cars, and Google is on the prowl for manufacturers to build
them. Project director Chris Urmson has confirmed that Google won't build its autonomous vehicles
itself, but will partner up with established names to do grafting instead. "We don't particularly want to
become a car maker," Urmson told The Wall Street Journal. "We are talking [with] and looking for
partners." Fleet commander Urmson said that the team is working with a number of car suppliers to build a
fleet of 'beta one' cars, which will be more advanced that the dinky prototypes we've already seen in
action. These will be tested starting early 2015. "It would be goofy for us to try to replicate their success," said
Urmson on not going it alone. He added that Google's laser radar technology (LIDAR) can create an accurate image of the car's
surrounding at a "reasonable" cost. If that sounds familiar it's because Google's Project Tango will boast a similar environment-mapping feature
when it launches next year.
No Spillover
No spillover — pro-privacy legislative action is dependent without crisis.
Kerr 4 — Orin S. Kerr, Associate Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School, B.S.E.
1993, Princeton University; M.S. 1994, Stanford University; J.D. 1997, Harvard Law School, 2004
(“Technology, Privacy, And The Courts: A Reply To Colb And Swire,” Michigan Law Review (102 Mich. L.
Rev. 933), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
Contrary to Swire's suggestion, I think that statutory protections also tend to reach a middle ground. If
there is a general trend toward lesser statutory protection over time, it is not clear to me. Swire focuses
on the fact that Congress did not act on an Internet privacy bill that the House Judiciary Committee
approved in 2000, but then passed the USA Patriot Act in 2001. To Swire, this suggests that the
legislative process is broken: Congress passed (bad) pro-government legislation but not (good) proprivacy legislation, leading to less privacy. n19 I find it difficult to draw a lesson from this example. It is
worth noting, however, that in Swire's own example the legislative process rejected FBI and DOJ
proposals and instead attempted to push the law in a strongly pro-privacy direction. Then, when
Congress passed some of the proposals a few years later, it did so only under remarkable circumstances
and even then only subject to a sunset provision. n20 If Swire's example is supposed to show a trend
toward [*938] lessening privacy protection over time, then it is at best a mixed signal. More broadly,
the privacy/security pendulum swings both ways; while there may be times of crisis when the
pendulum swings in favor of law enforcement, there are other periods when the pendulum swings in
favor of privacy. I would pose this question to Swire: if there is a systematic tendency toward greater
surveillance, in what year was privacy most protected by the legislative process? In 1960, when federal
law did not forbid wiretapping? In 1970, before FISA was enacted? In 1980, before Congress passed
ECPA?
Turn: Surveillance causes public backlash which increases privacy.
Moncrieff, Venkatesh, and West 9 — Simon Moncrieff, research fellow in the Department of
Computing at Curtin University of Technology, Svetha Venkatesh, professor in the Department of
Computing at Curtin University of Technology, and Geoff West, professor in the Department of Spatial
Sciences at Curtin University of Technology and at the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial
Information, 2009 (“Dynamic privacy in public surveillance” Computer, 42(9)
http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/DU:30044204/venkatesh-dynamicprivacy-2009.pdf)
As surveillance becomes increasingly intrusive, public opposition to these technologies will grow.
Lawmakers will be pressured to force organizations that develop and deploy surveillance systems to
incorporate additional privacy protections. However, because legislation tends to lag behind technology,
such measures will inevitably inhibit preexisting systems’ functionality. Designing surveillance systems
with privacy in mind, rather than as an afterthought, will accelerate the adoption of privacy policies in
surveillance and reduce the impact of enforced privacy measures.6 For example, Google did not foresee
privacy issues with Street View and thus did not incorporate privacy protections into the initial release
of this feature in 2007. In response to public outcry, the company instituted several measures including
the blurring of facial images and vehicle number plates and reducing image resolution to limit
discernible information about pedestrians and vehicles. However, there is still considerable debate as to
whether these measures go far enough; other identifying data such as location, clothes, and stature/gait
are evident in Street View and may violate local privacy laws.
Electronic Medical Records DA
Notes
This is a DA that links to affs that increase privacy regulations of some sort. The
evidence on government privacy regulations spilling over and hurting private
companies’ abilities to collect data/operate efficiently is pretty good.
A lot of the cards for uniqueness/internal link section of the Google DA apply here — I
recommend using them for extensions in the block.
These cards are simply those cards but specific to electronic medical records.
Also, probably some of the generic disease impact cards/big data solves health care
cards may apply here as well.
Good luck! Let me know if I can update/cut/change anything ~Rishika 
UQ: EMRS are being adopted now — done with 1 card. Cut more if/when finished with the rest
IL: Obama supports EMRs — part of ACA. Then we can find that republicans will do anything to take
down Obamacare. If they now have the tool of privacy protections to chip away at it, they’ll use it. The
plan gives them the tools to kill Obamacare.
EMRs predict when diseases happen — faster finding/predicting means preventing diseases.
Clusters argument.
Impact: Disease that are directly connected to EMRs. And, healthcare cost devastates the economy.
1NC Shell
1NC — Electronic Medical Records DA
Privacy regulations impose costs on hospitals that prevent them from adopting EMR
systems
Miller and Tucker 9 — Amalia R. Miller, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of
Virginia, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and an S.B. in Economics from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan, Chair
of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital privacy, the Erin
Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award for contributions
to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic medical records,
holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of Oxford, 2009
(“Privacy Protection and Technology Diffusion: The Case of Electronic Medical Records,” Management
Science, Vol. 55, No. 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JStor, Accessed 7/22/15)
At the same time, privacy laws may impose additional network costs on hospitals who wish to transfer
information electronically, for example, by demanding more of a paper trail, or by requiring more robust
software. The design of networked EMR systems with strong security and confidentiality protections
involves well-known challenges. Individual consent requirements that can be limited to particular types
of information and provider destinations demand a flexibility that is costly to implement (Win and
Fulcher 2007). It is more expensive to design a system that has the additional flexibility to limit the flow
of information by the type of detail in a patient medical record and by the type of external destination,
irrespective of how many patients refuse to have their records shared. Confidentiality protection that
demands prior patient consent, which can be revoked at any time, also increases the costs of
information exchange. McCarthy et al. (1999) give details of how privacy legislation that requires
subjects to give their consent for each study used in research led to lower response rates. When
individual consent was required by state law, it was granted by 19% of individuals, as opposed to 93% of
patient records made available directly by providers in states without this privacy protection. Finally, in
addition to the fixed costs that are added to the complexity of designing the EMR system, the laws
require additional documentation, and that burden increases with the flow of information between
providers. Theoretically, therefore, privacy regulation can affect the fixed or the variable costs of EMR
adoption, and without detailed breakdowns of the costs involved, we cannot distinguish between the
two.
Privacy protection inhibits EMR diffusion not by creating a different legal requirement for different
record types, but by raising compliance costs. Complying with privacy laws increases the costs of
electronic record systems and, in particular, the costs of sharing information. This is particularly
important if one of the key benefits of EMRs is the reduced costs of sharing information as compared
with paper records. In this sense, the laws may pose an institutional barrier to information flow, which
in turn reduces the potential benefits to hospitals from the adoption of EMRs, a technology that would
otherwise reduce the physical barriers to information exchange. Although it would be desirable to
estimate the effects of privacy regulation on network costs and benefits separately, we observe neither
of these outcomes. Using data on adoption decisions, we can identify only the net effect of privacy law
on network benefits.
Privately collected data is the backbone of effective health care systems — reduces
costs and mortality rates
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, part of the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, devoted $19.2 billion to increase the use of electronic
medical records (EMRs) by health care providers. Underlying this substantial public subsidy is a belief
that creating an electronic rather than a paper interface between patient information and health care
providers can improve health care quality, facilitate the adoption of new technologies, and also save
money.
EMRs are the backbone software system that allows health care providers to store and exchange
patient health information electronically. As EMRs diffuse to more medical practices, they are expected
to reduce medical costs and improve patient care. For example, they may reduce medical costs by
reducing clerical duplication; however, there are no universally accepted estimates concerning how
much money EMRs will save. Hillestad et al. (2005) suggest that EMRs could reduce America’s annual
health care bill by $34 billion through higher efficiency and safety, assuming a 15-year period and 90%
EMR adoption.
In contrast, the clinical benefits from EMR systems have been demonstrated in recent empirical work
(Miller and Tucker 2011a).1 This research examines effects of the digitization of health care on neonatal
outcomes over a 12-year period. Neonatal outcome is a measure commonly used to assess the quality of
a nation’s health care system and is important in its own right. As we discuss in depth later, Miller and
Tucker (2011a) is also directly relevant to the current chapter, as it measures the relationships among
health care outcomes, hospitals’ adoption of information technology, and state-level privacy regulation.
Miller and Tucker (2011a) find that a 10% increase in basic EMR adoption would reduce neonatal
mortality rates by 16 deaths per 100,000 live births, roughly 3% of the annual mean (521) across
counties. Furthermore, they find that a 10% increase in hospitals that adopt both EMRs and obstetricspecific computing technology reduces neonatal mortality by 40 deaths per 100,000 live births. This
finding suggests there are increasing gains from the digitization of health care. The paper shows that
the reduction in deaths is driven by a decrease in deaths from conditions that can be treated with
careful monitoring and data about patient histories. There is no such decrease for conditions where
prior patient data are not helpful from a diagnostic standpoint.
Overall, Miller and Tucker (2011a) document that the use of patient data by hospitals helps to improve
monitoring and the accuracy of patient medical histories. More broadly, even basic EMR systems can
improve the quality of data repositories and ease access to relevant patient information. Adoption of
technologies that facilitate data collection and analysis can help hospitals to improve outcomes and
perhaps to reduce costs.
Diseases coming now and risk extinction – effective healthcare is key to check
Naish 12 (Reporter for Daily Mail, “The Armageddon virus: Why experts fear a disease that leaps from
animals to humans could devastate mankind in the next five years Warning comes after man died from a
Sars-like virus that had previously only been seen in bats Earlier this month a man from Glasgow died
from a tick-borne disease that is widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217774/The-Armageddon-virus-Why-experts-feardisease-leaps-animals-humans-devastate-mankind-years.html#ixzz3E5kqxjQI)
The symptoms appear suddenly with a headache, high fever, joint pain, stomach pain and vomiting. As the illness progresses, patients can develop large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding. In at least 30 per cent of cases,
Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever is fatal. And so it proved this month when a 38-year-old garage owner from Glasgow, who had been to his brother’s wedding in Afghanistan, became the UK’s first confirmed victim of the
tick-borne viral illness when he died at the high-security infectious disease unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital. It is a disease widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia — and one that has jumped the species
barrier to infect humans with deadly effect. But the unnamed man’s death was not the only time recently a foreign virus had struck in this country for the first time. Last month, a 49-year-old man entered London’s St Thomas’
hospital with a raging fever, severe cough and desperate difficulty in breathing. He bore all the hallmarks of the deadly Sars virus that killed nearly 1,000 people in 2003 — but blood tests quickly showed that this terrifyingly
. Nor was it any other virus yet known to medical science. Worse still, the gasping,
sweating patient was rapidly succumbing to kidney failure, a potentially lethal complication that had
never before been seen in such a case. As medical staff quarantined their critically-ill patient, fearful questions began to mount. The stricken man had recently come from Qatar in the
virulent infection was not Sars
Middle East. What on earth had he picked up there? Had he already infected others with it? Using the latest high-tech gene-scanning technique, scientists at the Health Protection Agency started to piece together clues from tissue
The results were extraordinary. Yes, the virus is from the
same family as Sars. But its make-up is completely new. It has come not from humans, but from
animals. Its closest known relatives have been found in Asiatic bats. The investigators also discovered that the virus has already killed someone. Searches of global medical
databases revealed the same mysterious virus lurking in samples taken from a 60-year-old man who had
died in Saudi Arabia in July. Scroll down for video Potentially deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa
samples taken from the Qatari patient, who was now hooked up to a life-support machine.
Potentially deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa When the Health Protection Agency warned the world of this newly- emerging virus last
month, it ignited a stark fear among medical experts. Could this be the next bird flu, or even the next ‘Spanish flu’ — the world’s biggest pandemic, which claimed between 50 million and 100 million lives across the globe from 1918
In all these outbreaks, the virus responsible came from an animal. Analysts now believe that the Spanish flu pandemic originated from a
The terrifying fact is that viruses that manage to jump to us from animals — called zoonoses —
can wreak havoc because of their astonishing ability to catch us on the hop and spread rapidly through
the population when we least expect it. The virus's power and fatality rates are terrifying One leading British virologist, Professor John Oxford at
Queen Mary Hospital, University of London, and a world authority on epidemics, warns that we must
expect an animal-originated pandemic to hit the world within the next five years, with potentially
cataclysmic effects on the human race. Such a contagion, he believes, will be a new strain of super-flu, a highly infectious
virus that may originate in some far-flung backwater of Asia or Africa, and be contracted by one person
from a wild animal or domestic beast, such as a chicken or pig. By the time the first victim has succumbed to this unknown, unsuspected new illness, they will
have spread it by coughs and sneezes to family, friends, and all those gathered anxiously around them. Thanks to our crowded, hyper-connected world, this
doomsday virus will already have begun crossing the globe by air, rail, road and sea before even the best
brains in medicine have begun to chisel at its genetic secrets. Before it even has a name, it will have started to cut its lethal swathe through the world’s
to 1919?
wild aquatic bird.
population. The high security unit High security: The high security unit where the man was treated for the potentially fatal disease but later died If this new virus follows the pattern of the pandemic of 1918-1919, it will cruelly reap
They die because of something called a ‘cytokine storm’ — a vast overreaction of their
strong and efficient immune systems that is prompted by the virus. This uncontrolled response burns them with a fever and wracks their bodies with
nausea and massive fatigue. The hyper-activated immune system actually kills the person, rather than killing the
super-virus. Professor Oxford bases his prediction on historical patterns. The past century has certainly provided us with many disturbing
precedents. For example, the 2003 global outbreak of Sars, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed
mass harvests of young and fit people.
nearly 1,000 people, was transmitted to humans from Asian civet cats in China. More... Man, 38, dies from deadly tropical disease after
returning to the UK from Afghanistan Nine-year-old who turns YELLOW with anger: Brianna must spend 12 hours a day under UV lights because of rare condition In November 2002, it first spread among people working at a live
Nowadays, the threat from such zoonoses is far greater than
ever, thanks to modern technology and human population growth. Mass transport such as airliners can quickly fan outbreaks of newly- emerging
animal market in the southern Guangdong province, where civets were being sold.
zoonoses into deadly global wildfires. The Sars virus was spread when a Chinese professor of respiratory medicine treating people with the syndrome fell ill when he travelled to Hong Kong, carrying the virus with him. By February
2003, it had covered the world by hitching easy lifts with airline passengers. Between March and July 2003, some 8,400 probable cases of Sars had been reported in 32 countries. It is a similar story with H1N1 swine flu, the 2009
Once
these stowaway viruses get off the plane, they don’t have to learn a new language or new local customs.
Genetically, we humans are not very diverse; an epidemic that can kill people in one part of the world
can kill them in any other just as easily. On top of this, our risk of catching such deadly contagions from
wild animals is growing massively, thanks to humankind’s relentless encroachment into the world’s
jungles and rainforests, where we increasingly come into contact for the first time with unknown viral
killers that have been evolving and incubating in wild creatures for millennia. This month, an international research team announced it had
influenza pandemic that infected hundreds of millions throughout the world. It is now believed to have originated in herds of pigs in Mexico before infecting humans who boarded flights to myriad destinations.
identified an entirely new African virus that killed two teenagers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009. The virus induced acute hemorrhagic fever, which causes catastrophic widespread bleeding from the eyes, ears,
nose and mouth, and can kill in days. A 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who attended the same school both fell ill suddenly and succumbed rapidly. A week after the girl’s death, a nurse who cared for her developed similar
A
report in the journal PLoS Pathogens says the virus probably originated in local wildlife and was passed
to humans through insect bites or some other as-yet unidentified means. There are plenty of other new
viral candidates waiting in the wings, guts, breath and blood of animals around us. You can, for example, catch leprosy from
symptoms. He only narrowly survived. The new microbe is named Bas-Congo virus (BASV), after the province where its three victims lived. It belongs to a family of viruses known as rhabdoviruses, which includes rabies.
armadillos, which carry the virus in their shells and are responsible for a third of leprosy cases in the U.S. Horses can transmit the Hendra virus, which can cause lethal respiratory and neurological disease in people. In a new book
award-winning U.S. natural history writer David Quammen points to a host of animalderived infections that now claim lives with unprecedented regularity. The trend can only get worse, he warns.
that should give us all pause for thought,
Quammen highlights the Ebola fever virus, which first struck in Zaire in 1976. The virus’s power is terrifying, with fatality rates as high as 90 per cent. The latest mass outbreak of the virus, in the Congo last month, is reported to
have killed 36 people out of 81 suspected cases. According to Quammen, Ebola probably originated in bats. The bats then infected African apes, quite probably through the apes coming into contact with bat droppings. The virus
then infected local hunters who had eaten the apes as bushmeat. Quammen believes a similar pattern occurred with the HIV virus, which probably originated in a single chimpanzee in Cameroon.
'It is inevitable
we will have a global outbreak' Studies of the virus’s genes suggest it may have first evolved as early as 1908. It was not until the Sixties that it appeared in humans, in big African cities. By the
Eighties, it was spreading by airlines to America. Since then, Aids has killed around 30 million people and infected another 33 million. There is one mercy with Ebola and HIV. They cannot be transmitted by coughs and sneezes.
If HIV could be transmitted by air,
you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus — another zoonosis — could be transmitted by air, it
would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet.’ Viruses such as Ebola have another limitation, on top of their method of transmission. They kill and incapacitate
‘Ebola is transmissible from human to human through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can be stopped by preventing such contact,’ Quammen explains. ‘
people too quickly. In order to spread into pandemics, zoonoses need their human hosts to be both infectious and alive for as long as possible, so that the virus can keep casting its deadly tentacles across the world’s population.
But there is one zoonosis that can do all the right (or wrong) things. It is our old adversary, flu. It is easily
transmitted through the air, via sneezes and coughs. Sars can do this, too. But
flu has a further advantage. As Quammen points out: ‘With Sars, symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that
Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the
spread of infection Isolation: Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the spread of infection ‘That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and
placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. But with influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed.’ Someone
who has an infectious case of a new and potentially lethal strain of flu can be walking about
innocently spluttering it over everyone around them for days before they become incapacitated. Such reasons
lead Professor Oxford, a world authority on epidemics, to warn that a new global pandemic of animal-derived flu
is inevitable. And, he says, the clock is ticking fast. Professor Oxford’s warning is as stark as it is certain: ‘I think it is inevitable that we will have another
big global outbreak of flu,’ he says. ‘We should plan for one emerging in 2017-2018.’ But are we adequately prepared to cope? Professor
Oxford warns that vigilant surveillance is the only real answer that we have. ‘New flu strains are a day-to-day problem and we have to be very
careful to keep on top of them,’ he says. ‘We now have scientific processes enabling us to quickly identify the genome of the virus behind a new illness, so that we know what we are dealing
with. The best we can do after that is to develop and stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs that can fight
new strains that we see emerging.’ But the Professor is worried our politicians are not taking this certainty of mass death seriously enough. Such laxity could come at a human cost so
unprecedentedly high that it would amount to criminal negligence. The race against newly-emerging animal-derived diseases is one that we have to win every time. A pandemic virus needs to
win only once and it could be the end of humankind.
person becomes highly infectious. Isolation:
2NC/1NR Uniqueness
EMR adoption high in the status quo
Health and Human Services 14 — U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, HHS Press Office,
2014 (“More physicians and hospitals are using EHRs than before: CDC data provides baseline for EHR
adoption among health care providers,” Health and Human Services, August 7, Available Online at
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2014pres/08/20140807a.html, Accessed 7/26/15)
Significant increases in the use of electronic health records (EHRs) among the nation’s physicians and
hospitals are detailed in two new studies published today by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator
for Health Information Technology (ONC).
The studies, published in the journal Health Affairs, found that in 2013, almost eight in ten (78 percent)
office-based physicians reported they adopted some type of EHR system. About half of all physicians
(48 percent) had an EHR system with advanced functionalities in 2013, a doubling of the adoption rate
in 2009.
About 6 in 10 (59 percent) hospitals had adopted an EHR system with certain advanced functionalities in
2013, quadruple the percentage for 2010. Unlike the physician study, the hospital study does not have
an equivalent, established measure of adoption of some type of EHR system; it only reports on adoption
of EHRs with advanced functionalities.
“Patients are seeing the benefits of health IT as a result of the significant strides that have been made
in the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records,” said Karen DeSalvo, M.D., M.P.H.,
national coordinator for health information technology. “We look forward to working with our partners
to ensure that people’s digital health information follows them across the care continuum so it will be
there when it matters most.”
The information in the studies was collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
National Center for Health Statistics and the American Hospital Association in 2013.
These data provide an early baseline understanding of provider readiness to achieve Stage 2 Meaningful
Use of the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive programs. Stage 2 will begin later this year for
providers who first attested to Stage 1 Meaningful Use in 2011 or 2012. About 75 percent of eligible
professionals and more than 91 percent of hospitals have adopted or demonstrated Stage 1 Meaningful
Use of certified EHRs.
2NC/1NR Links/ILs
Privacy restrictions on privately collected data hurt health care effectiveness
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
Consequences.—Although EMRs were invented in the 1970s, by 2005 only 41% of U.S. hospitals had
adopted a basic EMR system. Anecdotal evidence suggests that privacy protection may partially explain
this slow pace of diffusion. Expensive state-mandated privacy filters may, for example, have played a
role in the collapse of the Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange in 2007.
Miller and Tucker (2009) examine the empirical consequences of privacy regulation and, in particular,
how it suppresses network effects in adoption of medical information technology. Network effects
may shape the adoption of EMRs because hospitals derive network benefits from EMRs when they can
electronically exchange information about patient histories with other providers such as general
practitioners. Exchanging EMRs is quicker and more reliable than exchanging paper records by fax, mail,
or patient delivery. It is especially useful for patients with chronic conditions when a new specialist
requires access to previous tests. Emergency room patients whose records (containing information
about previous conditions and allergies) are stored elsewhere also benefit.
Privacy regulations directly inhibit private sector data collection and innovation
Goldfarb and Tucker 12 — Avi Goldfarb, Professor of Marketing in the Rotman School of
Management at University of Toronto, has published over 50 articles in a variety of outlets in
economics, marketing, statistics, computing, and law, holds a PhD from Northwestern, MA from
Northwestern, and BAH from Queens University, with Catherine Tucker, Professor of Marketing at MIT
Sloan, Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program, received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital
privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Paul E. Green Award
for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research and a Garfield Award for her work on electronic
medical records, holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and a BA from the University of
Oxford, 2012 (“Privacy and Innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy, Chicago Journals, The
National Bureau of Economic Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 65-90, January, Available Online via
Subscribing Institutions at JStor, Accessed 7/21/15)
The relationship between innovation and privacy policy runs deeper than this superficial similarity
suggests. This paper argues that ultimately privacy policy is interlinked with innovation policy and
consequently has potential consequences for innovation and economic growth. Drawing on empirical
analysis of privacy regulations in online advertising and health care, we summarize evidence that privacy
regulations directly affect the usage and efficacy of emerging technologies in these sectors.
Furthermore, because these impacts are heterogeneous across firms and products, regulations affect
the direction of innovation.
This linkage sets up a tension between the economic value created by the use of personal data and the
need to safeguard consumers’ privacy in the face of the use of such data. As discussed by Hui and Png
(2006), it is not straightforward to incorporate notions of privacy into economic models, because such
notions are often based on consumer emotions as well as on strict economic concerns. As such, it is
important for regulators to balance consumer uneasiness with (or repugnance toward) data collection
and usage with the consequences such regulations may have on certain types of innovation.
More broadly, the extent of privacy regulation should represent a trade-off between the benefits of
data-based innovation and the harms caused by violations of consumer privacy. Much of the policy
discussion appears to assume substantial harms, perhaps citing survey evidence that people do not like
to be tracked (FTC 2010). It is important to measure the size of these harms carefully, ideally in a realworld revealed-preference setting where the costs and benefits can be explicitly traded off. These
studies should be conducted across many industries and settings, because such harms likely affect
different sectors in different ways. The fact that there may be differential effects in terms of both harm
and incentives to innovate across different sectors means that there may be potential adverse
consequences of using a single policy tool to regulate all sectors. These adverse consequences should
be set against the benefits of simplicity and uniformity of comprehensive cross-sector privacy
regulation.
Data driven healthcare is the critical factor in disease prevention – revolutionizes
planning and treatment
Marr 15 — Bernard Marr, contributor to Forbes, he also basically wrote the book on internet data –
called Big Data – and is a keynote speaker and consultant in strategic performance, analytics, KPIs and
big data, 2015 (“How Big Data Is Changing Healthcare”, Forbes, April 21, Available Online at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/04/21/how-big-data-is-changing-healthcare/)
If you want to find out how Big Data is helping to make the world a better place, there’s no better
example than the uses being found for it in healthcare. The last decade has seen huge advances in the
amount of data we routinely generate and collect in pretty much everything we do, as well as our ability to use
technology to analyze and understand it. The intersection of these trends is what we call “Big Data” and it is helping
businesses in every industry to become more efficient and productive. Healthcare is no different. Beyond improving
profits and cutting down on wasted overhead, Big Data in healthcare is being used to predict epidemics, cure
disease, improve quality of life and avoid preventable deaths. With the world’s population increasing and everyone living
longer, models of treatment delivery are rapidly changing, and many of the decisions behind those changes
are being driven by data. The drive now is to understand as much about a patient as possible, as early in
their life as possible – hopefully picking up warning signs of serious illness at an early enough stage that treatment
is far more simple (and less expensive) than if it had not been spotted until later. So to take a journey through Big Data in healthcare, let’s start
at the beginning – before we even get ill. Wearable blood pressure monitors send data to a smartphone app, then off to the doctor. (Photo by
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) Prevention is better than cure Smart phones were just the start. With apps enabling them to
be used as everything from pedometers to measure how far you walk in a day, to calorie counters to help you plan your diet, millions of us are
now using mobile technology to help us try and live healthier lifestyles. More recently, a steady stream of dedicated wearable devices have
emerged such as Fitbit, Jawbone and Samsung Gear Fit that allow you to track your progress and upload your data to be compiled alongside
everyone else’s. In the very near future, you could also be sharing this data with your doctor who will use it as part of his or her diagnostic
toolbox when you visit them with an ailment. Even
if there’s nothing wrong with you, access to huge, ever growing
databases of information about the state of the health of the general public will allow problems to be
spotted before they occur, and remedies – either medicinal or educational – to be prepared in advance This is
leading to ground breaking work, often by partnerships between medical and data professionals, with the
potential to peer into the future and identify problems before they happen. One recently formed example of such
a partnership is the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance – which aims to take data from various sources (such as medical and insurance records,
wearable sensors, genetic data and even social media use) to draw a comprehensive picture of the patient as an individual, in order to offer a
tailored healthcare package. That person’s data won’t be treated in isolation. It will be compared and analyzed alongside thousands of others,
highlighting specific threats and issues through patterns that emerge during the comparison. This enables sophisticated predictive modelling to
take place – a doctor will be able to assess the likely result of whichever treatment he or she is considering prescribing, backed up by the data
from other patients with the same condition, genetic factors and lifestyle. Programs such as this are the industry’s attempt to tackle one of the
biggest hurdles in the quest for data-driven healthcare: The medical industry collects a huge amount of data but often it is siloed in archives
controlled by different doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, clinics and administrative departments. Another partnership that has just been announced
is between Apple and IBM. The two companies are collaborating on a big data health platform that will allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to
share data to IBM’s Watson Health cloud healthcare analytics service. The aim is to discover new medical insights from crunching real-time
activity and biometric data from millions of potential users.
EMRs provide faster and more complete patient data analysis and diagnosis
Wilson and Bock 12 — John Wilson, MD, Vice President of Clinical Analytics, OptumInsight, and
Adam Bock, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Minneapolis Veterans Hospital, 2012 (“The benefit
of using both claims data and electronic medical record data in health care analysis,” Optum, February,
Available Online at https://www.optum.com/content/dam/optum/resources/whitePapers/Benefits-ofusing-both-claims-and-EMR-data-in-HC-analysis-WhitePaper-ACS.pdf, Accessed 7/26/15)
More complete condition identification
There are a variety of reasons that physicians may fail to completely record on a claim all the diagnoses
from a visit. For one thing, physicians are constantly pressed for time, and every second spent recording
billing codes is a second that takes them away from direct patient care. Additionally, in a fee-for-service
setting, the payment that a physician receives for an office visit is not directly related to the number or
type of conditions for which the physician codes (see Appendix A for more detail). Hence, in many cases,
the EMR will have a more complete set of diagnoses for a given patient than claims data.
Because of this, claims data is often an imperfect reflection of the actual status of a patient. Several
studies support this.
One study examined how often people with the condition of chronic kidney disease (CKD) had a claimsbased diagnosis code for this condition over a one-year period. In this study,3 results of a blood test (the
estimated glomerular filtration rate or eGFR) were used to determine whether or not kidney disease
existed. If this test was abnormal on at least two separate occasions over a year, the patients met the
definition CKD. The authors then examined all claims data for the patients who had CKD diagnosed by
virtue of lab testing. They found that only 20–42 percent of these patients had a diagnosis code for CKD
on a claim over the one-year period. Put another way, if one year of claims data was all that had been
present, 58–80 percent of people with CKD would not have been identified.
Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)4 showed that of
children with EMR blood pressure values that were high on at least three separate doctor visits, only 26
percent of them had a claim with a diagnosis of hypertension on it.
In addition to showing the shortcomings of claims data in identifying conditions, these data suggest
another powerful conclusion: Use of clinical data from the EMR can significantly improve condition
identification. The use of lab result data elements can support identification of people with CKD even
without a coded diagnosis. In addition, the use of vital sign data can allow identification of people with
hypertension despite the lack of a claim-based diagnosis of this condition.
In fact, there are a variety of data elements that might be available in the EMR which, when analyzed,
can allow the identification of a condition that was either not recognized or not coded for by the
physician. So, one way in which EMR data enables better condition identification is by providing access
to data elements (e.g., lab results and vital signs) that allow one to impute a diagnosis—even if that
diagnosis was never made.
Allowing for imputed diagnosis is just one way in which EMR data improves condition identification
over and above the use of claims data. The EMR also has something which claims data do not: the
concept of a ‘problem list’.
Claims data is, by its nature, temporally limited. Meaning the claim reflects only the diagnoses and
services that occurred on the date when the claim was submitted. It is not designed to convey
information about what happened in the past. So for a patient who had heart surgery or an
appendectomy two years ago, there is no reason that those items will appear on a claim today. Similarly,
if a patient had a diagnosis of heart failure two years ago, that diagnosis may not appear on a claim
during a subsequent time period, even if the condition persists. The EMR, however, has a way to
transcend the concept of time by which claims data are constrained: the problem list.
The problem list is an area in the electronic record where providers can keep track of the list of medical
problems affecting a patient. The EMR maintains this list independently from any particular medical
visit/encounter. Hence, use of the EMR problem list allows identification of conditions which may not be
identified via claims data.
More timely
In addition to the ability of EMR data to enhance condition identification as discussed above, EMR data
has another advantage: timeliness. Sometimes we would like to understand that a patient has
experienced a certain event as soon as that event has occurred. For example, we might like a nurse to
provide a follow-up call to a patient the day after an emergency room visit. If we are dependent on
claims data alone to identify the emergency room visit, there may be a delay (sometimes of months)
until a claim for this visit is received and processed. However, providers interact with the EMR during (or
soon after) the patient encounter. Hence, EMR data is generated in real time, and a system which
evaluates data from the EMR can allow a much more rapid response.
EMRs are based in Obamacare
Hughes 15 — Jane Lindell Hughes, M.D., F.A.C.S., Clinical Professor in the Department of
Ophthalmology at the University of Texas Health Science Center, 2015 (“Obamacare: Why Washington
wants your medical file,” Washington Times, February 11, Available Online at
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/11/electronic-medical-records-governmentmedicine-101/, Accessed 7/26/15)
Medicare and Medicaid have served as the template for Obamacare and government-controlled
medicine. This began with price controls on doctors and hospitals resulting in cost-shifting to the private
sector and spiraling health care costs. Politicians used this predictable outcome to clamor for healthcare
overhaul. The crucial cost-control piece in the final implementation of Obamacare is the centrally
connected EMR database. It is to be the vehicle by which the patients’ conditions are monitored and
their treatment options elucidated based on centrally determined “best practices” and factors such as
age and pre-existing pathology.
Physician compliance with recommended treatments will be monitored and corrected when necessary.
People the likes of Jonathan Gruber and Ezekiel Emmanuel will be deciding these parameters as
appointees to the Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research and the Independent Payment
Advisory Board (IPAB).
2NC/1NR Impact
EMRs key to preventing short term and chronic disease and saves over $10B
Hillestad et. al. 15 — Richard Hillestad, policy expert RAND Corporation, holds a Ph.D. in engineering
and applied science and an M.S. and B.S. in electrical engineering; James Bigelow, Associate Professor in
the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, holds a B.S. degree in Microbiology and Ph.D. in
Biochemistry; Anthony Bower, researcher at Synageva BioPharma with degrees in Business Economics
and Microeconomics; Federico Girosi, Associate Professor in Population Health at the School of
Medicine, holds a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Physics; Robin Meili, senior
management systems analyst and director of International Programs at the RAND Corporation, holds an
M.B.A. from NYU; Richard Scoville, Adjunct Associate Professor at UNC, holds a BA, MA in Education,
and a PhD in Psychology; Roger Taylor, holds a Bachelor of Science (BSc), Politics, Philosophy and
Economics, 2015 (“Can Electronic Medical Record Systems Transform Health Care? Potential Health
Benefits, Savings, And Costs,” Health Affairs, Available Online at
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/5/1103.full, Accessed 7/22/15)
Using HIT for near-term chronic disease management.
The U.S. burden of chronic disease is extremely high and growing. In one study, fifteen chronic
conditions accounted for more than half of the growth in health care spending between 1987 and 2000,
and just five diseases accounted for 31 percent of the increase.28 Disease management programs
identify people with a potential or active chronic disease; target services to them based on their level of
risk (sicker patients need more-tailored, more-intensive interventions, including case management);
monitor their condition; attempt to modify their behavior; and adjust their therapy to prolong life,
minimize complications, and reduce the need for costly acute care interventions.
EMR systems can be instrumental throughout the disease management process. Predictive-modeling
algorithms can identify patients in need of services. EMR systems can track the frequency of preventive
services and remind physicians to offer needed tests during patients’ visits. Condition-specific encounter
templates implemented in an EMR system can ensure consistent recording of disease-specific clinical
results, leading to better clinical decisions and outcomes. Connection to national disease registries
allows practices to compare their performance with that of others. Electronic messaging offers a lowcost, efficient means of distributing reminders to patients and responding to patients’ inquiries. Webbased patient education can increase the patient’s knowledge of a disease and compliance with
protocols.
For higher-risk patients, case management systems help coordinate workflows, including
communication between multiple specialists and patients. In what may prove to be a transformative
innovation, remote monitoring systems can transmit patients’ vital signs and other biodata directly from
their homes to their providers, allowing nurse case managers to respond quickly to incipient problems.
Health information exchange via RHINs or personal health records promises great benefits for patients
with multiple chronic illnesses, who receive care from multiple providers in many settings.
We examined disease management programs for four conditions: asthma, congestive heart failure
(CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and diabetes (Exhibit 4⇓) and estimated the
effects of 100 percent participation of people eligible for each program.29 By controlling acute care
episodes, these programs greatly reduce hospital use at the cost of increased physician office visits and
use of prescription drugs. As shown, the programs could generate potential annual savings of tens of
billions of dollars. Keeping people out of the hospital is, of course, a health benefit, but we can also
expect important outcomes such as reductions in days lost from school and work and in days spent sick
in bed.
AFF
EMRs are Inefficient/Expensive
EMRs are inefficient and hurt health care systems
Hensley 14 — Scott Hensley, Assistant Professor at the Wistar Institute, holds a PhD in biology from
UPenn, 2014 (“Electronic Medical Records, Built For Efficiency, Often Backfire,” National Public Radio,
November 7, Available Online at http://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2014/11/07/361148976/electronic-medical-records-built-for-efficiency-often-backfire, Accessed
7/26/15)
Electronic medical records were supposed to usher in the future of medicine.
Prescriptions would be beamed to the pharmacy. A doctor could call up patients' medical histories
anywhere, anytime. Nurses and doctors could easily find patients' old lab results or last X-rays to see
what how they're doing. The computer system could warn doctors about dangerous drug combinations
before it was too late.
Many of those things are an everyday reality in doctors' offices and hospitals across the country. But a
survey of more than 400 internists with experience using electronic medical records, or EMRs,
documents what doctors have complained about for years: computerized records chew up a lot of
time.
Writing up a patient's visit on the computer can take more time than you might expect. More than 60
percent of the doctors surveyed said that note writing took longer using computerized records than
before they were implemented.
One reason: There are all kinds of boxes to check that have more to do with the billing department than
the patient.
Overall, the survey found that attending physicians, the doctors in charge of care, lost an average of 48
minutes a day because of EMRs. Doctors in training lost 18 minutes a day.
EMR implementation is time consuming, ineffective, and wasteful spending
Denning 13 — Steve Denning, Program Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank,
studied law and psychology at Sydney University, worked as a lawyer in Sydney for several years, holds a
postgraduate degree in law at Oxford, 2013 (“Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Electronic Medical Records
Run Amok,” Forbes, April 25, Available Online at Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Electronic Medical Records
Run Amok, Accessed 7/26/15)
In the last year or two, there’s been a shift. Much of my time with doctors has been spent watching
them type. In one case, the doctor tapped away on his laptop, occasionally looking up to ask questions
before returning to the main focus of his attention: his computer. In another case, the doctor
intermittently tapped on an iPad while we spoke. In a third instance, the doctor had a conversation with
me and then apologized that he would be spending the next half of our session typing up the results of
our conversation. All this typing was required, he said, if he was ever going to be reimbursed for his
services. It was getting in the way of being a doctor.
Surely, I said, computerized medical records generate benefits. They are easily retrievable. They can be
transferred from one practice to another and accessible to the many different service providers—
hospitals, laboratories, specialists, radiology and so on—that might be involved in any one patient.
“In theory, perhaps,” he replied. “But in practice, it’s a horrible and costly bureaucracy that is being
imposed on doctors. I spend less time with patients, and more time filling out multiple boxes on forms
that don’t fit the way I work. Often I am filling out the same information over and over again. A lot of it
is checking boxes, rather than understanding what this patient really needs.”
What about retrieving information? Isn’t that easier?
“Again, in theory, retrieval should be easy and quick,” he said, “But you can’t flip through these records
the way you do with a paper file and easily find what you want. The other day, for instance, I inherited a
new patient along with her electronic records. Her previous care-givers had checked forty-five boxes of
problems. There’s no way that I can deal with a patient with forty-five problems. She and I talked for
some time and eventually we figured out that she had six real health problems: then we could begin to
discuss what to do. And then I had to input that discussion into the computer. The electronic record
didn’t save time. It made everything take longer.”
But at least now you can get the records electronically?
“Sometimes,” he said. “But each network has its own system and often the systems are incompatible.
The systems don’t talk to each other. So transferring records from one system to another becomes
another nightmare.”
But why do you type while the patient is there?
“Filling out these forms and checking all the boxes takes me a lot of time,” he said, “If I don’t do it now, I
will spend half the night trying to remember the discussion and typing up the results of the day’s visits.
The outcome is that I have less time to spend with patients. Instead of making the system better, it’s
making everything more costly.”
What we are seeing here is the implementation of Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act—which has
provided reimbursement incentives and an electronic medical records deadline for those who adopt
electronic medical records (EMR). However, for those who don’t meet the electronic medical records
deadline for implementation, the government has laid out a series of penalties. The message to doctors
is clear: implement electronic records or pay a price.
“The government already is wasting billions on the medical EMR,” my doctor told me. “They are
committed to giving each health care system $17,000 per doctor who is successfully using electronic
medical records to help them cover their software investment. This money goes to the health care
system and not the docs. So it’s basically a very lucrative pass through to the software people for
generating an inadequate and burdensome system.”
Survey: most doctors lose money with electronic records
My doctor is not alone in seeing problems with the way that electronic medical records are being
implemented.
A recent survey published in Health Affairs by Julia Adler-Milstein, Carol Green and David W. Bates,
estimates that doctors who install electronic medical records systems should expect an initial loss of
around $44,000 on their investment. Almost two-thirds of the practices using electronic records would
lose money even with government subsidies, the researchers said.
Having electronic records is in principle a good idea, but only if one imagines implementation as quick
and intuitive so that it’s easier for doctors to input and retrieve information rather than from scribbling
notes on paper. Reformers imagine some kind of well-tuned iPhone or iPad with lots of cool gadgets and
apps that make life easier.
But in practice, implementation of electronic health records today is anything but quick and intuitive
or easy to use. It’s mostly like old-style form-filling software that is an aggravating pain to use. It takes
forever, involves continuous repetition, is counter-intuitive to use and offers few benefits in return.
Along with upfront costs, doctors said they have to work longer hours because of the software. Smaller
offices, those with five doctors or fewer, struggled the most.
The study shows that 27 percent of practices are projected to gain by seeing more patients or getting
more claims approved by insurers, though there is no indication what happened to the quality of care in
such accelerated throughput.
Implementing electronic records is expensive and difficult to use
Denning 13 — Steve Denning, Program Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank,
studied law and psychology at Sydney University, worked as a lawyer in Sydney for several years, holds a
postgraduate degree in law at Oxford, 2013 (“Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Electronic Medical Records
Run Amok,” Forbes, April 25, Available Online at Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Electronic Medical Records
Run Amok, Accessed 7/26/15)
Despite the theoretical potential for quality improvement from computerized records, they found that
few physician practices use electronic records. Miller and Sim argue that “the path to quality
improvement and financial benefits lies in getting the greatest number of physicians to use the
electronic medical records [EMR] (and not paper) for as many of their daily tasks as possible. The key
obstacle in this path to quality is the extra time it takes physicians to learn to use the EMR effectively
for their daily tasks.”
Miller and Sim report:
“Interviewees reported that most physicians using EMRs spent more time per patient for a period of
months or even years after EMR implementation. The increased time costs resulted in longer workdays
or fewer patients seen, or both, during that initial period… Even highly regarded, industry-leading EMRs
to be challenging to use because of the multiplicity of screens, options, and navigational aids… Although
vendors are slowly improving EMR usability, most vendor interviewees doubted that any “silver bullet”
technology (for example, voice recognition, tablet computers, or mobile computing) will dramatically
simplify EMR usage. Designing easy-to-use software for knowledge workers is a challenge that spans the
software industry beyond health care.”
Miller and Sim suggest policy interventions to overcome these barriers, including providing
work/practice support systems, improving electronic clinical data exchange, and providing financial
incentives for quality improvement.
This thinking is fanciful. Paying people to work unintelligently doesn’t work and ultimately will be
ineffective. What is needed are systems that actually help doctors do their work.
The world didn’t need incentives or support systems to get people to adopt iPhones or iPads. We
embraced the iPhones and iPads because they are easy to use and they made our lives better.
When the software embedded in electronic records isn’t adapted to the doctor’s needs and the way
they work, hopes of major productivity gains through policy fixes like incentives or training are
doomed.
EMRs Don’t Work
EMRs don’t improve data sharing
Creswell 14 — Julie Creswell, reporter at the New York Times, JD from University of Iowa, 2014
(“Doctors Find Barriers to Sharing Digital Medical Records,” New York Times, September 30, Available
Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/business/digital-medical-records-become-commonbut-sharing-remains-challenging.html?_r=0, Accessed 7/26/15)
Regardless of who is at fault, doctors and hospital executives across the country say they are distressed
that the expensive electronic health record systems they installed in the hopes of reducing costs and
improving the coordination of patient care — a major goal of the Affordable Care Act — simply do not
share information with competing systems.
The issue is especially critical now as many hospitals and doctors scramble to install the latest versions
of their digital record systems to demonstrate to regulators starting Wednesday that they can share
some patient data. Those who cannot will face reductions in Medicare reimbursements down the road.
On top of that, leading companies in the industry are preparing to bid on a Defense Department
contract valued at an estimated $11 billion. A primary requirement is that the winning vendor must be
able to share information, allowing the department to digitally track the medical care of 9.6 million
beneficiaries around the globe.
The contract is the latest boon to an industry that taxpayers have heavily subsidized in recent years with
over $24 billion in incentive payments to help install electronic health records in hospitals and
physicians’ offices.
While most providers have installed some kind of electronic record system, two recent studies have
found that fewer than half of the nation’s hospitals can transmit a patient care document, while only 14
percent of physicians can exchange patient data with outside hospitals or other providers.
“We’ve spent half a million dollars on an electronic health record system about three years ago, and
I’m faxing all day long. I can’t send anything electronically over it,” said Dr. William L. Rich III, a member
of a nine-person ophthalmology practice in Northern Virginia and medical director of health policy for
the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Alt Cause
Alt cause to healthcare industry — bureaucratization and bad management
Denning 13 — Steve Denning, Program Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank,
studied law and psychology at Sydney University, worked as a lawyer in Sydney for several years, holds a
postgraduate degree in law at Oxford, 2013 (“Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Electronic Medical Records
Run Amok,” Forbes, April 25, Available Online at Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Electronic Medical Records
Run Amok, Accessed 7/26/15)
As Brown points out, the biggest challenge in enterprise software delivery lies not in these software
practices themselves, but rather in the overall management culture. If the organization remains in a
vertical, hierarchical mode, with an approach of “here’s the system—implement it”, none of the
advantages of computerization will accrue. In fact, costs will increase.
The problem is that hierarchical bureaucracy is still pervasive in the health sector. Producing easy-touse software or the agility to make continuous adjustments from experience lies beyond the
performance envelope of this type of management.
A radically different kind of management is needed. It needs to begin, not with a goal of “introducing
electronic medical records”, but rather with the goal of “improving the working lives of doctors through
better technology”.
Instead of producing outputs in the form of electronic records, the goal needs to be generating positive
outcomes for doctors. Once outcomes for doctors are positive, the need for incentives vanishes: doctors
will want to improve their working lives. There will be stampede to use the new technology.
But this entails a revolution in management thinking. Instead of seeing electronic records as merely a
shift in technology from paper to IT, it involves a transformation in the way the health sector thinks
about and manages work. It means new goals, new roles for managers, new ways of coordinating work,
new values and new ways of communicating.
Fortunately, there is a vast experience in thousands of organizations around the world for over a decade
to show the way. It’s still the best kept secret in the management world.
We need to stop torturing doctors with systems that make work more difficult and generate systems
that are better—better for doctors, better for patients and better for the health system overall. And for
that to happen, we need a different kind of management.