Raw Data: Effort to End E.U. Roaming Fees Gains Momentum

When she announced in May her desire to ban the unpopular fees, which travelers pay in the 28-nation European Union outside their home countries, Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner responsible for telecommunications, was greeted with skepticism. And with less than 11 months left before the European Parliament’s legislative session ends June 30, some observers in Brussels thought Mrs. Kroes had run out of time.

But while most of official Brussels is on vacation, Mrs. Kroes and her staff appear to be edging closer to a deal that could abolish the fees, which make up an estimated 5 percent of operators’ sales — but a bigger chunk of profits.

According to a copy of the draft regulation Mrs. Kroes has circulated among members of the European Commission and which has been obtained by the International Herald Tribune, operators would get an incentive to lower roaming rates to the level of domestic calling fees.

The incentive would be a big one: an exemption from a law passed last year, also initiated by Mrs. Kroes, that will give E.U. consumers the option of buying roaming service from any operator on the Continent, not just their own, meaning the local operator could lose a customer who is out of the country altogether if it does not lower the rates.

The draft regulation would remove this right for consumers whose operators joined an alliance of carriers offering pan-European mobile phone roaming service at the same prices that consumers would pay if they did not leave home.

Some operators have objected, arguing that they should not be coerced to lower the fees, which are currently capped by retail price controls that expire at the end of June 2017. The current caps limit roaming charges to €0.24, or $0.32, per minute for a voice call, €0.07 per minute to receive a call, €0.08 to send a text message, and €0.45 for every downloaded megabyte of data.

One person with knowledge of the industry’s lobbying position on the issue, who did not want to be identified because negotiations were at a delicate stage, said some operators were concerned that E.U. consumers would be free to buy low-cost roaming service, a form of “arbitrage” that could lead to the elimination of the fees altogether.

But that is precisely the goal of Mrs. Kroes and a growing number of lawmakers in the European Parliament, who view the fees as a hurdle to broad adoption of mobile broadband.

A new study to be released this month by Nielsen on behalf of Syniverse, a seller of roaming software and services to 900 mobile operators, including Telefónica and Vodafone in Europe, confirmed that the fees were still an obstacle — despite price caps and text messages warning consumers that they were racking up charges.

In a survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 European countries obtained by the International Herald Tribune, the study found that on average 56 percent of cellphone users either limited the use of mobile Internet or turned off the roaming function on their devices entirely while traveling within the European Union.

Danielle Jacobs, chairwoman of the International Telecommunications Users Group, an association in Driebergen, the Netherlands, that represents telecommunications user groups in Europe, South America and Asia, said Europe’s system of roaming fees was slowing the adoption of cloud-based mobile services, especially those used by business travelers. “Intug would be very happy with the abolishment of roaming fees in Europe,” Mrs. Jacobs, who is also the chairwoman of the Belgian users’ group, Beltug, said in an interview. “The uncertainty about mobile data roaming prices and the possible bill shocks are putting the brakes on using more mobile applications.”

Mrs. Kroes’s push to eliminate the fees faces hurdles. The European Parliament must support her plan, as must the Council of Ministers, which comprises representatives of each member state and is where telecommunications companies exert greater influence because they are large employers.

Pressure for change is building in Brussels. On July 9, members of the Parliament’s Industry, Research and Energy committee voted unanimously to end roaming fees by July 2015. The full Parliament is scheduled to take up the issue in September, when Mrs. Kroes is also expected to present details of her plan to lawmakers.

One lawmaker, Paul Rübig, who was a sponsor of the original roaming price controls that took effect in 2007, said that the momentum to end roaming fees had reached a critical intensity in Brussels.

With elections for the European Parliament scheduled for May, Mr. Rübig, a representative from Wels, Austria, said lawmakers were well aware of the possible political gain from banning the unpopular fees. According to Mr. Rübig, a survey this year of voter attitudes before the E.U. election showed that the top issue for Austrian voters — more important than basic freedoms and other civil rights — was the abolition of roaming fees in the European Union.

The survey conducted by the Austrian government found a level of support for ending fees that Mr. Rübig said was common across the bloc.

“The pressure to end roaming fees in the upcoming session will be enormous,” Mr. Rübig said in an interview. “The days of roaming fees are definitely numbered.”

Mary Clark, a vice president at Syniverse, based in Tampa, Florida, has followed the issue closely in Europe because it is central to her company’s business.

She said that whether lawmakers voted to ban roaming fees outright next year or forced operators to eliminate the fees to retain their customers, change was coming.

“The end result is, we are going to get to an environment where the home pricing is the same as roaming pricing from a retail point of view,” Ms. Clark said.

House Defeats Effort to Rein In N.S.A. Data Gathering

The 205-to-217 vote was far closer than expected and came after a brief but impassioned debate over citizens’ right to privacy and the steps the government must take to protect national security. It was a rare instance in which a classified intelligence program was openly discussed on the House floor, and disagreements over the  program led to some unusual coalitions.

Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive intelligence programs. The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership to try to block it.

House members pressing to rein in the N.S.A. vowed afterward that the outrage unleashed by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures would eventually put a brake on the agency’s activities. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and a longtime critic of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts, said lawmakers would keep coming back with legislation to curtail the dragnets for “metadata,” whether through phone records or Internet surveillance.

At the very least, the section of the Patriot Act in question will be allowed to expire in 2015, he said. “It’s going to end — now or later,” Mr. Nadler said. “The only question is when and on what terms.”

Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, promised lawmakers that he would draft legislation this fall to add more privacy protections to government surveillance programs even as he begged the House to oppose blanket restrictions.

The amendment to the annual Defense Department spending bill, written by Representatives Justin Amash, a libertarian Republican from Western Michigan, and John Conyers Jr., a veteran liberal Democrat from Detroit, turned Democrat against Democrat and Republican against Republican.

It would have limited N.S.A. phone surveillance to specific targets of law enforcement investigations, not broad dragnets. It was only one of a series of proposals — including restricting funds for Syrian rebels and adding Congressional oversight to foreign aid to Egypt — intended to check President Obama’s foreign and intelligence policies.

But in the phone surveillance program, the House’s right and left wings appeared to find a unifying cause. Representative Raúl R. Labrador, Republican of Idaho, called it “the wing nut coalition” and Mr. Amash “the chief wing nut.”

Mr. Amash framed his push as a defense of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, and he found a surprising ally, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin and one of the principal authors of the Patriot Act. Mr. Sensenbrenner said his handiwork was never meant to create a program that allows the government to demand the phone records of every American.

“The time has come to stop it,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

Opposing them were not only Mr. Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, but also the leaders of the nation’s defense and intelligence establishment.

On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, spent hours providing classified briefings to lawmakers about the program, and the White House took the unusual step of issuing a statement urging lawmakers not to approve the measure. On Wednesday, James L. Jones, the retired Marine Corps general who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser from 2009-10, added his name to an open letter in support of preserving the N.S.A. programs that more than half a dozen top national-security officials from the Bush administration had signed.

“Denying the N.S.A. such access to data will leave the nation at risk,” said the letter, which was circulated to undecided members.

Mr. Rogers took a personal swipe at Mr. Amash, a darling of social media, when he said the House was not in the business of racking up “likes” on Facebook. He said the calling log program was an important tool for protecting against terrorist attacks.

“This is not a game,” he fumed. “This is real. It will have real consequences.”

But many rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats appeared impervious to such overtures. Representative Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado and a supporter of the amendment, said that if the Obama administration felt strongly about defending the program, Mr. Obama would have spoken out personally. Instead, the White House released a statement under the name of the press secretary, Jay Carney.

“The press secretary says hundreds of things every day,” Mr. Polis said.

The divisions in Congress seemed to reflect the ambivalence in the nation. In a CBS News poll released Wednesday, 67 percent of Americans said the government’s collection of phone records was a violation of privacy. At the same time, 52 percent called it a necessary tool to help find terrorists.

But the final tally in the House suggested the tide was shifting on the issue. In the weeks after the Snowden leaks, the united voices of Congressional leaders and administration officials in support of the N.S.A. programs seemed to squelch the outrage Mr. Snowden had hoped for. Anger seemed to be trained more on Mr. Snowden than on the programs he revealed.

As the news media and the government chronicled Mr. Snowden’s flight from law enforcement, a web of privacy activists, libertarian conservatives and liberal civil liberties proponents rallied support behind Congressional action. House members said they received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails before Wednesday’s vote, all in favor of curtailing the N.S.A.’s authority.

Ultimately, 94 House Republicans defied their leadership; 111 Democrats — a majority of the Democratic caucus — defied their president.

“This is only the beginning,” Mr. Conyers vowed after the vote. The fight will shift to the Senate, where two longtime Democratic critics of N.S.A. surveillance, Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon, immediately took up the cause.

“National security is of paramount importance, yet the N.S.A.’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records violates innocent Americans’ privacy rights and should not continue as its exists today,” Mr. Udall said after the vote. “The U.S. House of Representatives’ bipartisan vote today proposal should be a wake-up call for the White House.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

DealBook: Google’s Effort to Skirt Regulation May Invite More Scrutiny

Harry Campbell

Google’s motto is “don’t be evil.” But its recent acquisition of Waze, reportedly for $1 billion in cash, shows that just because you’re not evil, it doesn’t mean you can’t be aggressive in pushing the boundaries of the law.

The question now is whether the United States government pushes back and forces Google to give back its new toy.

Waze is yet another one of those blockbuster deals for a technology company with little or no revenue that makes you jealous. Five-year-old Waze has just 110 employees, so Google appears to be paying almost $10 million per employee. As for profits, Waze’s chief executive, Noam Bardin, has said, “This is Silicon Valley. We don’t talk about those things here.” Right.

Google is paying top dollar for Waze because it is at the intersection of two hot fields: map search and social media. Users download Waze’s app to their phone and then supply information about locations, routes and traffic, making the maps more intelligent. And Waze has the usual phenomenal growth in users, with 50 million worldwide. This is a field where there is believed to be oodles of money to be made in related advertising.

From this vantage point, the deal has a number of “must” business justifications for Google. Google is the top dog, dominating the “turn-by-turn” market for mobile maps on smartphones, and Waze makes Google a bigger dog.

Perhaps more important, buying Waze keeps the technology out of the hands of Facebook, which had reportedly bid about $1 billion for the company, and Microsoft and Apple, which also reportedly bid $400 million for the company earlier this year.

A billion dollars not only cements Google’s lead in map search, it does so in a big way. Google has paid large sums to have cars drive around the world to give its maps information content. But Waze is doing the same thing on the cheap by having its own users do the work.

Both types of systems are difficult and hard to build, meaning new entrants are unlikely to come. Just witness the difficulties Apple faced with the controversy over the accuracy of its own map app. If Apple can’t do this easily with its built-in user base of some 400 million iPhone users, not many others can.

So one might think that there would be significant antitrust issues with the acquisition. Google, already the dominant player, is buying what looks like a rising competitor, and it is doing so in a way that deprives other big players an easier way to compete.

It’s here where Google is pushing as hard as it can on the law.

Normally, to acquire a company in the United States, a buyer is required to supply the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission with what is known as a Hart-Scott-Rodino filing. This notifies the agencies of the transaction so either can review it for compliance with the antitrust laws.

The filing also prompts a waiting period during which the government can delay the acquisition to begin an in-depth investigation to determine if there is an antitrust problem. This is one reason that public takeovers are completed months after they are announced: the companies involved are waiting to clear antitrust review in the United States or another country.

This is the normal process. Yet Google’s only announcement of the deal appears to say that the companies signed and closed the deal that day, leaving Google the proud owner of Waze.

According to a person close to Google, the company skipped the Hart-Scott-Rodino filing by relying on an exemption. This filing is not required if the acquisition is of a foreign company that has sales and assets in the United States of less than $70.9 million. Waze is an Israeli company with headquarters in Silicon Valley, so it comes under this test.

Waze probably doesn’t have $50 million in revenue worldwide, yet the test also looks at assets. Given that Waze is worth $1 billion, it is hard to see that the value of its intellectual property in the United States business doesn’t meet the test. And the F.T.C. has previously indicated that companies should include this type of intellectual property in informal guidance.

Nonetheless, Google appears to have taken this aggressive position and is forgoing any antitrust review, instead plunging ahead with the acquisition.

So why did Google do this?

A representative from Google declined to comment.

Google may be playing hardball with the government here. Psychologically, it may be harder for the government to undo something that is done. And once Google acquires this company, it will become harder to force it to undo any integration it may have done with its own services. (For now, Google has said it will keep Waze separate.)

Not only that, but the Waze owners may have wanted to sell precisely on this basis, avoiding this huge possibility that the United States government would reject the deal, a risk that Google may have been willing to take with Facebook and Apple hovering.

But given the publicity over the acquisition, the government will almost certainly step in to review. Consumer groups are circling, and the Consumer Watchdog Group has written the government to ask for an in-depth review. That group has noted that Google’s purchase of Doubleclick and AdMob led it to a 93 percent market share in mobile advertising.

As with previous deals, the government can force Google to sell Waze, or put other restrictions in place, if there is a problem.

The standard was set forth in a piece of legislation passed a century ago: Will the acquisition “substantially lessen competition”? In part, this will come from how the market is defined — if it is just maps, well, you have to include companies like Rand McNally.

If it is turn-by-turn maps on smartphones, then according to Berg Insight, Telenav has a 33 percent market share while Google and Waze’s combined North American market share would be 28 percent. But Telenav’s business is stagnant and Google’s grew 30 percent last year, while Waze’s business grew 100 percent, according to Berg.

It may all come down to how easy it would be for another company to replicate what Waze is doing — it built an enormous user base that made it worth a billion dollars.

Even if Google can show that this deal does not decrease competition, the acquisition can be unwound if Waze is found to meet Justice Department guidelines as a “firm that plays a disruptive role in the market to the benefit of customers.” André Malm, a senior analyst at Berg, told me, “There is nothing like Waze.” He noted that the company was shaking up the market, so the authorities will pursue this line of investigation.

Either way, the comments of Mr. Bardin are not going to help, but they do serve as a reminder to other start-up chiefs looking to sell to their competitor not to say they that are the only game in town.

At the least, this all means that the Waze acquisition is likely to get a thorough review by the government. The battle will now begin. That Google will keep Waze without restrictions is no certainty. But the government faces a challenge. If it does decide to try to unwind this acquisition, Google is going to push the bounds of the law as hard as it can. The future of map search is at stake, and Google may not be evil, but this is business.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated the threshold that would require a buyer of a foreign company to supply the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission with what is known as a Hart-Scott-Rodino filing, which notifies the agencies of the transaction so either can review it for compliance with antitrust laws. It is $70.9 million in sales and assets in the United States for the foreign company, not $60.9 million.

Concerns Arise on U.S. Effort to Allow Internet ‘Wiretaps’

Surveillance can be a tricky affair in the Internet age.

A federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act allows law enforcement officials to tap a traditional phone, as long as they get approval from a judge. But if communication is through voice over Internet Protocol technology — Skype, for instance — it’s not as simple.

That conversation doesn’t pass through a central hub controlled by the service provider. It is encrypted — to varying degrees of protection — as it travels through the Internet, from the caller’s end to the recipient’s.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made it clear it wants to intercept Internet audio and video chats. And that, according to a new report being released Friday by a group of technologists, could pose “serious security risks” to ordinary Internet users, giving thieves and even foreign agents a way to listen in on Americans’ conversations, undetected.

The 20 computer experts and cryptographers who drafted the report say the only way that companies can meet wiretap orders is to re-engineer the way their systems are built at the endpoints, either in the software or in users’ devices, in effect creating a valuable listening station for repressive governments as well as for ordinary thieves and blackmailers.

“It’s a single point in the system through which all of the content can be collected if they can manage to activate it,” said Edward W. Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton and one of the authors of the report, released by the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group in Washington.

“That’s a security vulnerability waiting to happen, as if we needed more,” he said.

The report comes as federal officials say they are close to reaching consensus on the F.B.I.’s longstanding demand to be able to intercept Internet communications. Companies that say they were unable to modify their operations to comply with the new wiretap orders would be subject to a fine, according to the plan. The White House has yet to review it.

Neither the F.B.I. nor White House officials have provided technical details of how the Web service providers would comply.

Law enforcement officials regularly seek information from Web companies about the communications of their users, from e-mail messages to social network posts and chats.

Microsoft, which owns Skype, reported receiving 4,713 requests in 2012 from law enforcement, which covered just over 15,000 Skype accounts; the company said it released only “noncontent data, such as a Skype ID, name, e-mail account, billing information and call detail records” if an account is connected to a telephone number.

Skype is a Luxembourg company, even after its acquisition by Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash. United States wiretap law does not apply to the company.

Along with Mr. Felten, who served as a technologist with the Federal Trade Commission until recently, the report’s authors include the cryptographer Bruce Schneier and Phil Zimmermann, who created what has become the most widely used software to keep e-mails private.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 18, 2013

An article on Friday about a report criticizing the F.B.I.’s proposal to intercept Internet chats described the report’s authors incorrectly and misspelled the surname of one of them. The authors included 20 computer experts and cryptographers, not a dozen lawyers and cryptographers, and one of the authors is Phil Zimmermann, not Zimmerman. The article also erroneously included one person among the authors. Peter Swire, a former White House privacy lawyer, did not participate in the writing of the report.

As ‘Do Not Track’ Effort Seems to Stall, Web Companies Race to Look Privacy-Friendly

In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals. For example, Mozilla, an underdog in the browser market, suggested last week that it would allow its users to disable third-party tracking software altogether.

At the same time, Web platform companies are setting limits on other companies with which they do business. Last year, for instance, Apple began requiring applications in its operating system to get permission from users before tracking their location or peering into calendars and contacts stored on an iPhone. Also, a host of companies big and small are offering a variety of privacy tools like ways to encode Facebook posts and ways to secure personal data stored in the cloud.

During a panel at the RSA Conference, a security-focused industry gathering here last week, Brendon Lynch, chief privacy officer at Microsoft, declared that companies like his had come to appreciate the “market forces at play with privacy.”

“It’s not just privacy advocates and regulators pushing,” Mr. Lynch said. “Increasingly, people are concerned more about privacy as technology intersects their life.”

That statement might sound somewhat odd to those who recall Microsoft’s troubles 10 years ago with European regulators. At that time, it was compelled to make substantial changes to how its online login system, .Net Passport, stored addresses, ages and other personal details.

Nonetheless, earlier this year, Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., signaled its sensitivity to user privacy by turning on, by default, an antitracking signal in its latest Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft also took aim at its rival Google with a marketing campaign declaring that consumers were being “scroogled” with targeted advertisements based on their e-mails and search histories.

Mr. Lynch’s counterpart at Google, Keith Enright, called that marketing campaign “intellectually dishonest.” At the RSA Conference, Mr. Enright said Google took pains to secure consumer information and simplify privacy settings.

Joel R. Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School, said Microsoft had made a 180-degree turn in emphasizing consumer data protection. “You’re seeing more companies trying to do that — develop privacy protecting services,” said Professor Reidenberg, whose Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham has received donations from both Microsoft and Google. “Platforms recognize they have to deal with privacy. They’re looking at how they can be competitive.”

To some degree, these developments signal that the industry is working hard to stave off government regulation, which is moving at a glacial pace anyway. There seems to be no movement on broad privacy legislation on Capitol Hill, and no consensus has been reached on standards for “Do Not Track,” a browser setting that would let Internet users indicate that they did not want their activity tracked by marketers.

Advertisers have said openly that they will not stop tracking just because a consumer sends a Do Not Track signal through his or her browser. Facebook has said it needs more clarity on whether a Do Not Track signal applies, for instance, to social plug-ins like the Facebook “like” button, which is integrated into millions of Web sites.

Still, companies are refining the controls users have over their data, on mobile devices as well as on desktop computers.

In addition to requiring applications to seek user permission before tracking location, Apple has included in its latest mobile operating system a way for users to disable or reset a series of digits that identify a particular device for tracking purposes. The Advertising Identifier, as it is called, replaces what was an immutable unique device identifier. It allows app developers to monitor user behavior, but it also gives consumers the option of turning it off.

Facebook requires applications in its App Center to offer customers a privacy policy, and last year it introduced privacy controls that let users fine-tune who sees which posts and pictures.

In 2011, Google sought to distinguish its social networking tool, Google Plus, as privacy-sensitive. It introduced the idea of “circles” as a way to limit sharing certain things with certain people.

Market rivalry does not mean that companies are not worried about regulatory scrutiny of their use of personal data. Facebook agreed to 20 years of audits by the Federal Trade Commission after the agency found that the company had deceived consumers by making data public that they had intended to be private. In a measure of change, Facebook began nudging its users to review their privacy settings before they could start using the new search tool the company introduced this year.

“What does privacy mean?” Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, asked at the RSA Conference. “It’s understanding what happens to your data and having the ability to control it.”

That very imperative seems to be buoying a cottage industry of privacy start-ups. A Boston-based company, Abine, is testing what is effectively the opposite of a Facebook single sign-in for the Web. Instead of exposing your Facebook login credentials to dozens of Web sites, the company offers a proxy e-mail address or phone number for every transaction. You sign in with the e-mail address and a password you remember; Abine creates one address for an e-commerce site you visit, another for a news site, another for a dating site.

Abine offers the basic service for free and plans to charge a monthly fee for more advanced features.

Another company, Wave Systems, showed off its new consumer privacy tool on the RSA exhibition floor last week. Named Scrambls, it encrypts a social network post or e-mail, effectively locking it, and lets the author choose who should have a key to read it. The company plans to market Scrambls to parents, among others, as “a seat belt” to protect their children on social media. For now, it is free.

Whether Internet users are ready to pay to protect their personal data is unclear, though surveys have repeatedly pointed to consumer anxiety.

In a national survey last year, Forrester Research found that one in three consumers were concerned about companies having access to their behavioral data. More than 40 percent said they had stopped short of completing a transaction on a Web site because of something they read in a privacy policy.

Consumer trust is an increasingly vital commodity for Web companies, said Fatemeh Khatibloo, a Forrester analyst. “There’s enough market traction and momentum from the consumer side and the business side to drive this forward,” Ms. Khatibloo said.

Mozilla, which makes the Firefox browser, ruffled the feathers of the online advertising industry when it announced that it was testing a new tool that blocked third-party tracking software, known as cookies. The company said it had not made a final decision on whether to incorporate the tool into its browser, though some version of it was likely to be included.

Already, said Alex Fowler, Mozilla’s chief privacy officer, nearly 12 percent of desktop users of Firefox and 14 percent of Firefox users on Google’s Android mobile operating system have turned on the Do Not Track signal. “They’re asking for a different level of privacy on your service,” he said. “You have to listen to that. It’s critical to your business.”

Fair Game: Dell Shareholders Look Hard at Takeover Effort

That’s what more and more Dell shareholders appear to believe about the $13.65 per-share price proposed on Feb. 5 by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake Partners, a technology investment firm. Initial objectors to the buyout have been joined by additional shareholders concerned about getting a fair shake.

The issue of fairness is a hazard of management-led buyouts, of course. Are insiders, who have an enormous information advantage owing to their deep knowledge of a company’s operations, trying to get control of an enterprise when its shares are perhaps temporarily depressed? Over the last year, Dell’s stock has lost 19 percent of its value.

Some investors wonder if Mr. Dell, who owns 14 percent of the shares outstanding, might have a hot new product on the drawing board that has the potential to make the company a highflier again.

Neither management nor Mr. Dell is saying much of anything about the company’s prospects. Last Tuesday, when Dell announced mixed earnings for the year, the company declined to make any projections for coming quarters on the conference call with investors and analysts. Its chief financial officer cited the pending deal as the reason no outlook was given.

As is the case with all insider deals, there’s great potential for outside shareholders to be treated unfairly. Making the deal even more problematic, Dell’s shareholders have little data upon which to assess its price. Dell’s regulatory filings say that the $13.65 per-share price is the result of extensive “bids and arms-length negotiations” between Silver Lake and the special committee of Dell’s board beginning in late October 2012.

Still, there’s no mention of how the $13.65 per-share offer stacks up against the company’s long-term enterprise value, an assessment of future earnings potential that is a typical measure in a takeover. Instead, the offer by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake seems based on the company’s recent stock price. Their $24.4 billion deal represents a 37 percent premium to the stock’s average price over the previous three months, they say.

Meanwhile, Southeastern Asset Management, one of Dell’s largest outside shareholders, estimates that the company is worth $23.72 a share, almost 75 percent more than the buyers are offering. Southeastern has come to that conclusion using publicly available information, however, because that’s all it has access to.

Naturally, both of these parties have a vested interest in getting their price in the deal. Mr. Dell and his group want to pay as little as possible, while long-suffering outside owners hope for more.

Trying to remedy this unsatisfying situation, an uninvolved investor organization has made an excellent suggestion: an independent, peer-reviewed analysis of Dell’s enterprise value should be done on behalf of its outside shareholders. Based on the same information Dell’s management has, such an assessment would assure investors that they are being bought out at a fair value.

This idea comes from the Shareholder Forum, a nonpartisan, independent creator of programs devised to provide the kind of information investors need to make astute decisions. The Forum, overseen by Gary Lutin, a former investment banker at Lutin & Company, suggests hiring a qualified expert to analyze the company’s operations. This would be similar to the so-called fairness opinions provided to shareholders in takeovers by outsiders. The analysis would be subject to confidentiality when necessary and would be reviewed by recognized analysts, academics and other investment professionals.

On Feb. 14, Mr. Lutin sent a letter to Mr. Dell and Alex Mandl, chairman of the special committee of Dell’s board charged with ensuring the deal’s fairness to all shareholders. In the letter, Mr. Lutin asked that the company support the independent analysis and provide assistance in its preparation.

Mr. Lutin said he had assumed that the board committee and Mr. Dell would want to support this project. “Shareholders have a very well-established right to any information relevant to their investment decisions under Delaware law,” Mr. Lutin said last week. “They also have the right to expect management to be responsible for addressing those interests.”

But last week, Mr. Lutin said that lawyers representing Mr. Mandl and his committee told him they would not be supporting the independent analysis.

Slipstream: Effort to Clarify Mobile App Data Rights Hits Snags

We think they’re free, or nearly free, and invite them in — without always knowing exactly what’s inside.

Apps often collect all kinds of information from our smartphones, like our contact lists and data on our precise locations. Both Android and iPhone apps are supposed to ask users’ permission first. But many people probably don’t know that third parties, like ad networks, analytics companies and data brokers, may also gain access to that information, security experts say.

An Android photo-sharing app, for instance, might request access to a user’s contacts, making it easy for that user to share photos, says Harry Sverdlove, the chief technology officer at Bit9, a cybersecurity firm. But a banner ad running on that same app, he says, might also be able to get access to that list, too, and use it to profile the user’s activities.

“It’s like the app is asking, ‘May I have permission to enter your home?’ ” Mr. Sverdlove says. “Maybe I am coming over to visit and have dinner. Maybe I am coming over to steal.”

Now, a new joint effort of the app industry and advocacy groups is working to give consumers more clarity on this issue. Last month, the coalition — it includes the Application Developers Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union, Consumer Action and the World Privacy Forum — proposed that mobile apps voluntarily display standardized, short-form notices that would list the main types of data they collect and the entities with which that information is shared.

The idea came in response to a federal effort to update consumer privacy rights for the digital era.

“App developers want to do something that advances consumers’ trust in their industry,” says Tim Sparapani, senior adviser for policy and law at the Application Developers Alliance, an industry group. “To make it work, they want it to be implementable and easy.”

The White House earlier this year asked the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a division of the Commerce Department, to gather industry and advocacy groups together in an effort to develop a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.” After reviewing public commentary on the process, the telecommunications agency announced its first step would be to convene interested parties to work out a code of conduct for transparency in how mobile apps handle consumer data.

The process has been bumpy. The mobile app meetings have been beset by animosity and incivility. And some of the parties are operating on different channels. Some advocacy groups have been publicly pushing for comprehensive, detailed disclosures on data use by apps and third parties. Meanwhile, an advertising industry alliance has been working outside of the process to privately develop its own self-regulatory code of conduct.

A recent report about the collection of mobile device location data issued by the Government Accountability Office faulted the telecommunications agency for its unstructured approach. Although the collection and sharing of location data could put consumers at serious risk of surveillance, stalking and identity theft, the report said, the telecommunications agency “has not set specific goals, milestones and performance measures for this effort.”

“Consequently, it is unclear if or when the process would address mobile location privacy,” the G.A.O. said.

The telecommunications agency sees its role as a facilitator or convener of the process, not as a director or active member.

“I am pretty pleased with the progress the stakeholders have made so far,” John Morris, the agency’s director of the Office of Policy, Analysis and Development, said in a phone interview last Thursday. “I am looking forward to seeing them reach a conclusion.”

But some stakeholders say they have been frustrated with the lack of progress. That is why the app developer and advocacy groups worked on their own to develop a more practical approach, designing what they call “voluntary transparency screens.”

“There’s a whole lot of shouting going on about process. There’s a whole lot of shouting going on about substance,” Jon Potter, the president of the Application Developers Alliance, said at a meeting of the stakeholders on Nov. 30. “What if we close the door, lower the temperature and try to get something done?”

THE level of strife so far over the narrow issue of mobile app transparency, some advocates say, doesn’t bode well for the larger federal effort to work out a comprehensive consumer bill of privacy rights.

App industry representatives and advocates wrangled for months to hammer out prototypes for their short-form notices, negotiating over the data disclosures they felt consumers should see and different ways to present them. They came up with an idea that users could click on a disclosure screen or two before they downloaded an app.

A first screen, the coalition proposed, might list the types of data an app collected, like a device’s location, personal contacts, Web browsing history, photos, financial or health information. A second screen could list the kinds of entities — ad networks, data brokers, data analytics companies, government agencies, social networks and so on — that could also gain access to that data. Or it could all be on one screen.

The idea, Mr. Potter says, is to give consumers a quick way to compare apps not just on utility but also on the extent of data collection. In an industry where long-winded, opaque privacy policies have become the norm, the proposed short notices seem radical in their clarity and brevity.

“The process is about effectively communicating to consumers what data is being collected and who it is being shared with,” Mr. Potter says.

Ad industry representatives applauded the simplicity of the notices. But they vociferously objected to the idea that app users would have to click through a screen before they could use an app.

“That you’d have to scroll through all this privacy stuff before you get to the app, there’s no public call for that,” said Stuart P. Ingis, a lawyer representing the Direct Marketing Association, an industry group, in the negotiations on mobile app transparency. “Consumers don’t want that.”

Mr. Ingis also represents the Digital Advertising Alliance, an ad industry self-regulatory initiative that offers an ad-choices program for Internet users. The alliance, he says, has been working outside of the telecommunications agency process to privately develop its own guidelines for third parties that collect consumer data across apps.

But advocates and app developers argue that consumers should receive clear notices of mobile app and third-party data collection practices before they download apps. It would be good for consumers and for commerce, they say.

“I think app developers see the market advantage to this,” says Michelle De Mooy, a senior associate at Consumer Action, a consumer group based in San Francisco. “The goal is to provide transparency that consumers, who after all are the customer of the apps, have asked for.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com

City Room: Technology Leaders Endorse Effort to Overhaul Campaign Finance

A group of more than 30 technology industry leaders has endorsed an effort to overhaul the state’s campaign-finance laws, and is urging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to push for a system of public financing for state elections.

The technology industry leaders include Dennis Crowley, a founder of Foursquare, and Kevin P. Ryan, the founder of Gilt Groupe. The effort has also won the support of the venture capitalist Fred Wilson and his partners at Union Square Ventures, which has invested in start-ups including Meetup, Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr and Zynga.

Arguing for a campaign fund-raising system that would provide public matching funds to candidates who solicit small donations from individuals, the technology leaders pointed to the success of crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, through which people can pool resources to support projects.

“It is time to bring this same way of doing things to campaign finance in New York State, and create a national model that will strengthen small-d democracy,” they wrote on Thursday in a letter to Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who has said overhauling the state’s campaign-finance system is one of his top goals.

The letter to Mr. Cuomo was also signed by a founder of Meetup, Scott Heiferman; the scholars Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig and Clay Shirky; and the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, Andrew Rasiej, who is the chairman of the New York Tech Meetup.

Mr. Rasiej, who ran unsuccessfully for New York City public advocate in 2005, said as technology leaders sought to advance their policy agenda in areas like privacy rights, broadband access and immigration reform, they were growing concerned that the political system in New York State and across the country had been “severely compromised by the influence of money.”

“It’s pretty obvious that the governor is presenting himself to the public as a reformer and as an innovator, and we as innovators believe that innovation doesn’t just stop at the computer terminal, it should continue on in our political system,” Mr. Rasiej said in an interview. “If the governor wants to be an innovator, the way to do it is not just by talking about it, but by actually doing it, and we think that comprehensive campaign-finance reform in New York State would be a validating step by the governor to show his innovation credibility.”

Advocates of public financing for state elections had hoped that Mr. Cuomo might be able to reach a deal with lawmakers in a lame-duck legislative session before the end of the year. But Hurricane Sandy and the continued uncertainty about which party will control the State Senate next year have combined to make such a session less likely, according to lawmakers. The next regularly scheduled session of the Legislature is to begin in January.

Affective Programming Grows in Effort to Read Faces

At Cambridge University, an eerily realistic robotic head named Charles sits in a driving simulator, furrowing its brows, looking interested or confused.

And in a handful of American middle school classrooms this fall, computers will monitor students’ emotions in an effort to track when they are losing interest and when they are getting excited about lessons.

All three are examples of an emerging approach to technology called affective computing, which aims to give computers the ability to read users’ emotions, or “affect.”

People are good at understanding one another’s emotions. We realize quickly that now is not a good time to approach the boss or that a loved one is having a lousy day. These skills are so essential that those without them are considered disabled.

Yet until recently, our machines could not identify even seemingly simple emotions, like anger or frustration. The GPS device chirps happily even when the driver is ready to hurl it out the window. The online class keeps going even when half the students are lost in confusion. The airport security system can’t tell whether someone is behaving as if he were concealing something or is just anxious about flying.

Technology that masters these skills could also help people who struggle to read the emotions of others, like those on the autism spectrum, or provide companionship and encouragement for nursing home residents. Without a grasp of emotions, some researchers argue, computers will never reach their full potential to support people.

“Our digital world is for the most part devoid of rich ways of expressing our emotions,” said Rosalind Picard, director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

She has been working for more than two decades to translate emotions into 1’s and 0’s, the language of machines. One early project, with a collaborator, Rana el Kaliouby, was to design glasses for people with Asperger syndrome, a mild variant of autism, that warned them when they were boring someone. People with Asperger’s often fixate on particular topics and find it hard to read the social cues, like yawning, fidgeting and looking away, that indicate the listener is bored.

The prototype included a tiny traffic light, visible only to the wearer, that flashed yellow when the conversation was starting to drag and red when facial cues suggested the listener had completely tuned out.

More recently, Dr. Picard and Dr. el Kaliouby have been developing software that maps 24 points on the face to intuit an emotion. In the past, computer algorithms have had trouble distinguishing among genuine smiles, smirks and the gritted teeth that come with frustration, Dr. el Kaliouby said, because they are often fleeting and result in only very small changes to the overall configuration of the face.

To capture these subtleties, webcams needed to have high frame rates and resolutions not possible until recently. The software also requires thousands of examples of each facial expression, labeled by humans — hence the women in Cairo coding recorded expressions.

“If we don’t have enough examples, across cultures and age ranges, the machine won’t be able to discriminate these subtle expressions,” Dr. el Kaliouby said.

Affective technology one day may help online education programs provide better learning experiences. Now, when a student makes a mistake, a program can’t tell if it’s because the student is bored or befuddled. A program that distinguishes this, Dr. el Kaliouby said, could offer more challenging problems to the bored students and simpler exercises to the struggling ones.

Dr. el Kaliouby and Dr. Picard also are working to develop something called Q Sensors, bands worn on the wrist that measure emotional arousal through the skin’s electrical conductance and temperature, as well as activity level. For people with autism, many of whom can’t speak or can’t articulate their feelings — or for anyone else — the sensors provide insights into emotional state that the users may not be able to articulate themselves.

“With this technology in the future, we’ll be able to understand things about our loved ones that we weren’t able to see before, things that calm them, things that stress them,” Dr. Picard said, adding that it will be true even for people without communication challenges.

“I’ve always thought of the skin as a covering, hiding what goes on inside our body,” she said. “Who would have ever thought of our skin as a peephole?”

Major Retailers Plan Mobile Payments Effort

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