As kids head back to school next week, many will be walking with a new smartphone.

And that means they won’t be as attentive as they should be to automobile traffic, according to researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Their research found that a child’s ability to safely cross the street is hindered more during a cellphone conversation than an adult’s. The study, “Cell phone conversations and child pedestrian’s crossing behavior; a simulator study,” is in the November 2016 issue of “Safety Science.”

According to the researchers, although many children have been carrying cell phones for a number of years, the effect that cell phone conversations can have on children’s crossing behavior had not been thoroughly examined previously. As might be expected, the researchers found “cell phone conversations jeopardize pedestrians’ ability to safely cross the road.”

With the end of summer vacation, drivers need to take special care.

We used to warn drivers of the potential for kids to be darting onto the road running after a ball. Now we have video games, messaging and parents calling to “check in”, each serving as distractions for kids heading to and from school.

It isn’t enough to avoid using our phones while driving; be sure to watch out for pedestrians, especially children, who may forget to watch out for you.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the importance of being exposed to sufficient diversity of views. That post was inspired by Nick Cohen’s article last weekend in The Guardian, which asked “who wants to live their life with only the echo of their own voice for company?”

I like reading a diverse range viewpoints and in particular, I have been known to read dissenting opinions in regulatory decisions.

Last week, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai issued a dissenting statement, following a review of media cross-ownership. It is an entertaining read, regardless of where you stand on the issue.

Commissioner Pai states:

If I were to detail all of this Order’s deficiencies, my dissenting statement would be almost as long as the Order itself (161 pages). In the interest of space, I’ll focus on what I consider to be the Order’s most problematic aspects.

His dissent runs 14 pages, taking strong issue with the concept of media concentration in an internet age (an issue frequently raised in Canada as well).

But the larger problem with the Commission’s conclusion is that it ignores the realities of the modern media marketplace. This isn’t the 1970s anymore. Most Americans don’t wait for the morning newspaper or the 11:00 PM newscast to learn what’s going on around the globe or at home. That world set sail with The Love Boat. Today, most Americans get the information they want when they want it by going online and scouring a wide variety of sources, including digital-only news outlets and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. When it comes to news, we can now choose from an amazingly diverse array of options. Last year, for example, Pew Research Study counted 143 news providers in Denver alone.

When I saw Commissioner Pai’s statement, I observed:

We used to have a history of great dissent in the CRTC. For example, in 2008, I wrote about a pair of dissents associated with a CRTC review of the broadcast distribution framework. Michel Morin’s dissenting view was 45 pages of the total 141 page decision.

In 2007, I described a well written dissent written by Barbara Cram associated with an application to review and vary an earlier decision.

Stuart Langford wrote his dissents colourfully, as I observed in 2007.

The Majority decision invites a Robin Hood approach to assessing user fees. Taken to its logical conclusion it could result in provincial schemes that take from the rich and give to provincial coffers not as directly as the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest once redistributed wealth, but just as surely. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be to the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin of Locksley. Either way, it strikes me as a formula for anything but regulatory fairness.

As I observed in 2008, dissenting opinions “provide a fascinating peek at what some of the debates must have been during the decision making process.”

In 2012, there must have been fascinating discussions at the CRTC when the Commission got rid of the Local Programming Improvement Fund. The majority decision, which ran just 22 paragraphs, spawned 3 dissenting opinions and a concurring statement. One of the dissents was three times the length of the main decision.

More recently, there have been dissenting opinions that the CRTC has failed to publish at the same time as the majority decision. Hopefully, the Commission has fixed its processes that led to such errors.

Dissenting views are important – perhaps none so important as Justice Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States, a case that looked at whether warrants were required prior to a wiretap. The majority said no; Brandeis wrote:

If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.

An article in The Atlantic, “In Praise of Dissent,” observed that the US Supreme Court “justices seem to have lost even the energy to argue with each other”, with few dissents appearing in recent decisions.

Colourful dissenting views in regulatory decisions provide insight into enthusiastic discussions among the Commissioners, passionately debating the issues raised by parties.

After all, “who wants to live their life with only the echo of their own voice for company?”

A few years ago, Nick Carr wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. Carr found the assumption unsettling that we would be better off “if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence.”

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

I was reminded of Carr’s 2008 article by the opening sentence in a weekend piece in The Guardian by Nick Cohen that asks “Did better broadband make Americans more partisan?” Cohen writes “It is easy to suspect that the web makes us stupid” but he also observes “Suspecting the web has made us stupid is not the same as proving it.”

The article refers to a research paper [by Yphtach Lelkes, Gaurav Sood and Shanto Iyengar] published last December in the American Journal of Political Science, “The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect.” That paper found “that access to broadband Internet boosts partisans’ consumption of partisan media, a likely cause of increased polarization.”

As a result, Cohen writes:

Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would work on the assumption that liberals were wicked. Both sides could dismiss uncomfortable facts as lies. Both sides allowed their politics to become so bound up with their identity, opposing arguments felt almost as if they were physical assaults.

Cohen asks us to consider “a world where people are so alienated from each other they cannot accept the good faith of an opponent who produces a discomforting argument.”

In “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization” [Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood], the authors “document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit and behavioral indicators,” finding:

Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.

In the absence of opposing viewpoints, partisanship continues to be amplified. People watch just the programs that serve up the same viewpoints; read articles from sources that reinforce the opinions already held. Cohen’s article in the Guardian asks that legislation be introduced such that Facebook and others be prohibited from using “algorithms to deliver news that users want to hear, rather than need to hear.”

Perhaps recognizing the impossibility (and we might argue the impropriety of such legislation), Cohen concludes with what we might consider to be an important element of improved digital literacy:

More important would be a cultural reaction against the impoverishment so many supporters of the populist movements exhibit. Their inability to argue, their denial of hard evidence, their certainties, and their fanatical denunciations of sellouts, traitors and apostates speak of men and women whose souls have withered along with their minds.

They should be made to face their own inadequacies, and asked politely but repeatedly: who wants to live their life with only the echo of their own voice for company?

Are our students being exposed to sufficient diversity of views?

How do we encourage reading alternate perspectives, consideration of dissenting viewpoints, and engaging in cooperative dialog?

As Canada seeks to develop an innovation agenda, a new report [pdf, 6MB] from the MacDonald Laurier Institute warns Canada to avoid Europe’s state-imposed mandates and top-down regulations that have contributed to underinvestment and poor network quality.

The report, “Winners and Losers in the Global Race for Ultra-Fast Broadband: A cautionary tale from Europe,” was authored by Andrea Renda, who is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Regulatory Policy Unit at CEPS, the Centre for European Policy Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Rethinking Regulation Program, based at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

MacDonald Laurier Institute says the report “demonstrates Europe’s policy of mandatory network sharing has discouraged investment in the continent’s networks and diminished the positive economic benefits that high-quality networks can enable.”

For example, fibre to the premises coverage is approximately double in the US compared to Europe (23 percent versus 12 percent); and overall next generation access coverage reaches 82 percent in the United States versus 54 percent in Europe. Furthermore, telecommunications revenues are dramatically higher in Australia, the US, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Iceland, and Norway than in EU nations, which all fall below the OECD average.

It warns that “continuing down the European path could lead to a substantial price to pay in terms of growth and jobs.”

As indicated by Renda’s report, the development of broadband communications creates both challenges and opportunities for policy-makers.

• How does public policy create the conditions for high-quality broadband infrastructure?
• How does it ensure market competition and protect consumer interests?
• And to what extent are these objectives in conflict?

Renda says the tension of these conflicting objectives resulted in many governments mandating “network sharing” where the owners of broadband infrastructure are required to grant access to competitors, particularly in the “narrowband” era of lower capacity networks.

But today’s ultra-fast broadband has become an information superhighway on which users can find all sorts of products and services that run “on top of” the network (so-called “over-the-top” services such as Netflix). These services are what users want when they connect to the broadband network; having 10 alternative identical ways to reach the same slow Internet is not going to add a lot of value to end users, especially if competition stifles incentives to deploy better networks, or to ultimately create products or services that highly depend on network speed.

The study investigates the policies most likely to create conditions for a jurisdiction to win the race for leadership in global ultra-broadband connectivity, with significant economic implications. It observes that the experience from Japan and South Korea suggests “a light regulatory touch can create the conditions for private investment in broadband networks and in turn help to produce the digital networks that can serve as the foundation for innovation, digital adoption, and economic growth.”

On the other hand, the study observes that the European Union has largely applied heavier-handed regulation (originally crafted for the age of legacy copper networks), with very different results. “The main takeaway is that Europe’s policy of mandatory network sharing has discouraged investment in the continent’s networks and diminished the positive economic benefits that high-quality networks can enable.”

While the report discusses the impact of the EU regulatory approach on competition, innovation, and investment with exclusive reference to wireline telecommunications, the author states “many of the findings apply also to wireless.”

“The lesson for the Trudeau government is that heavy-handed telecommunications regulations such as mandatory network sharing can lead to underinvestment in digital networks and in turn undermine its broader goals with regard to innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner has issued its report on the customer information data breach for Ashley Madison discovered in July, 2015. The Privacy Commissioner’s office launched its investigation a month later, under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Canada’s Privacy Commission worked together with Australia’s Information Commission, which also issued an identical report on the findings of the joint investigation.

The Compliance Agreement between the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and Avid Life Media, the owners of Ashley Madison, is considered to be legally binding. The Agreement outlines steps Ashley Madison must take, including:

• enhancing privacy safeguards;
• amending information retention practices;
• improving information accuracy; and,
• increasing transparency.

Ashley Madison was found to have used a fictitious security trustmark, and concluded that meant individuals’ consent was improperly obtained.

Finally, with respect to transparency, investigators found that at the time of the breach, the home page of the Ashley Madison website included various trustmarks suggesting a high level of security, including a medal icon labelled “trusted security award.” ALM officials later admitted the trustmark was their own fabrication and removed it.

The Privacy Commissioner also identified important lessons for all organizations to consider. The Privacy Commissioner’s website organizes some of the key takeaways from the investigation, using the following headings.

• General
  • Harm extends beyond financial impacts.
  • Safeguards should be supported by a coherent and adequate governance framework.
• Safeguards
  • Documentation of privacy and security practices can itself be part of security safeguards.
  • Use multi-factor authentication for remote administrative access.
• Deletion and Retention
  • There is a high bar associated with charging a fee for deletion.
  • Retention policies should be based on a demonstrable rationale and timeline.
• Accuracy
  • The level of accuracy required is impacted by the foreseeable consequences of inaccuracy, and should also consider interests of non-users.
• Transparency
  • False or misleading statements may impact the validity of consent.
  • Omission or lack of clarity of material statements may also impact the validity of consent.

Each of these items is more completely described with a paragraph and links for further information to aid in corporate best practices and compliance with the legislation. Among the more interesting items was the consideration that a lack of email address verification could allow “the creation of a potentially reputation-damaging fake profile for an email address owner.”

Ashley Madison‘s website encourages its members to “find your moment” while the company tries to promote discretion, promising to help its members keep their private life private.

A year after its data breach, the lessons from Ashley Madison need to help other firms ensure that they won’t find their own moment in the spotlight, and keep their customers’ private information private.