Archivists in France Fight a Privacy Initiative

One of the European Union’s measures would grant Internet users a “right to be forgotten,” letting them delete damaging references to themselves in search engines, or drunken party photos from social networks. But a group of French archivists, the people whose job it is to keep society’s records, is asking: What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?

The archivists and their counteroffensive might seem out of step, as concern grows about American surveillance of Internet traffic around the world. But the archivists say the right to be forgotten, as it has become known, could complicate the collection and digitization of mundane public documents — birth reports, death notices, real estate transactions and the like — that form a first draft of history.

“Today, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter — this is the correspondence of the 21st century,” said Jean-Philippe Legois, president of the Association of French Archivists, which has around 1,700 members. “If we want to understand the society of today in the future, we have to keep certain traces.”

The group represents a wide swath of professionals who specialize in preserving and cataloging documents from institutions as diverse as town halls or museums. Still, supporters of the French campaign acknowledged the growing concern about digital privacy, after the disclosure of the extensive United States intelligence project known as Prism to mine data from Internet companies for security purposes.

To try to persuade European Union lawmakers to drop or soften the proposed rules on digital privacy, the French archivists introduced a petition, circulated to their counterparts in other countries. The group says the petition has received almost 50,000 signatures, which it will present to the European Parliament.

The group also commissioned advertising posters underlining the threat it sees. One shows a metaphorical image of demonstrators marching through Paris, their faces hidden by digitally appended clown masks. It asks: “Without a name, does individual commitment still have the same meaning?”

The archivists know that their influence is limited as the Parliament is lobbied by myriad Internet companies, governments and other organizations, which have submitted about 4,000 amendments to the proposed law for the European Union’s 27 member states. This month, several proposals were softened, including the plan to require companies to obtain “explicit” consent from users to collect and process their data, though the United States surveillance revelations could renew the push for tougher rules.

The right to be forgotten is one of the most contentious items.

The European Commission has drawn support from consumer organizations and privacy advocates, but the archivists have received backing from other European professionals who rely on record-keeping, including genealogists and history professors.

Advocates of the right to be forgotten say it is unrealistic to expect Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which collect huge amounts of data on their users in order to direct relevant advertising to them, to put safeguards in place without stricter regulations.

European Union lawmakers want to establish two separate, but related, digital privacy rules. One would guarantee Internet users the right to delete pictures, writings and other data on social networks and other online forums. In theory, this is already permitted, but regulators say removal can be cumbersome and deleted material often lingers in search engines and elsewhere.

Under the proposal, search engines would have to remove the material immediately. Internet companies balk at that. They say that they generally favor giving people control over material they have posted themselves, but oppose letting Internet users demand that search engines and other sites remove information about them that has been posted by others, perhaps including official documents.

The principle of a right to be forgotten is being tested under existing laws in Spain, where the government has ordered Google to remove unflattering references to dozens of individuals who filed complaints with the Spanish Data Protection Agency. Google has refused, insisting that only publishers or courts, not individuals or search engines, should have the power to remove information, assuming that it was legally published.

Obama to Unveil Initiative to Map the Human Brain

A senior administration scientist compared the new initiative to the Human Genome Project, in that it is directed at a problem that has seemed insoluble up to now: the recording and mapping of brain circuits in action in an effort to “show how millions of brain cells interact.”

It is different, however, in that it has, as yet, no clearly defined goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the scientists involved and may take more than year.

The effort will require the development of new tools not yet available to neuroscientists and, eventually, perhaps lead to progress in treating diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy and traumatic brain injury. It will involve both government agencies and private institutions.

The initiative, which scientists involved in promoting the idea have been calling the Brain Activity Map project, will officially be known as Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain for short; it has been designated a grand challenge of the 21st century by the Obama administration.

Three government agencies will be involved: the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. A working group at the N.I.H., described by the officials as a “dream team,” and led by Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and William Newsome of Stanford University, will be charged with coming up with a plan, a time frame, specific goals and cost estimates for future budgets.

The initiative exists as part of a vast landscape of neuroscience research supported by billions of dollars in federal money. But Dr. Newsome said that he thought a small amount of money applied in the right way could nudge neuroscience in a new direction.

“The goal here is a whole new playing field, whole new ways of thinking,” he said. “We are really out to catalyze a paradigm shift.”

Brain researchers can now insert wires in the brain of animals, or sometimes human beings, to record the electrical activity of brain cells called neurons, as they communicate with each other. But, Dr. Newsome said, they can record at most hundreds at a time.

New technology would need to be developed to record thousands or hundreds of thousands of neurons at once. And, Dr. Newsome said, new theoretical approaches, new mathematics and new computer science are all needed to deal with the amount of data that will be garnered.

As part of the initiative, the president will require a study of the ethical implications of these sorts of advances in neuroscience.

While news of the announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm by many researchers in fields as diverse as neuroscience, nanotechnology and computer science, there are skeptics.

“The underlying assumptions about ‘mapping the entire brain’ are very controversial,” said Donald Stein, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta. He said changes in brain chemistry were “not likely to be able to be imaged by the current technologies that these people are proposing.”

Emphasizing the development of technologies first, he said, is not a good approach. “I think the monies could be better spent by first figuring out what needs to be measured and then figuring out the most appropriate means to measure them.” he said. “In my mind, the technology ought to follow the concepts rather than the other way around.”

However, supporters of the initiative argued that it could have a similar impact as the Sputnik satellite had in the 1950s, when the United States started a significant nationwide effort to invest in science and technology.

“This is a different time,” said Michael Roukes, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “It makes sense to have a brain activity map now because the maturation of an array of nanotechnologies can be brought to bear on the problem.”

While the dollar amount committed by the Obama administration does not match the level of spending on the Human Genome Project, scientists said that whatever was spent on the brain initiative would have a significant multiplier effect. The Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is contributing money, said Terrence J. Sejnowski, head of the institute’s computational biology laboratory, adding that the project would have an impact at the neighboring University of California, San Diego, campus.

“One concrete example is that the chancellor has gotten excited about this and has decided that it is a great thing to invest in,” Dr. Sejnowski said. “That means hiring new faculty and creating new space.”

The project grew out of an interdisciplinary meeting of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in London in September 2011. Miyoung Chun, a molecular biologist who is vice president of scientific programs at the Kavli Foundation, had organized the conference. Her foundation, she said, supports the idea that the next big scientific discoveries will come from interdisciplinary research.

“Federal funding is scarce these days, and I realized we need inspiring projects that can awake everyone’s imagination,” she said. “It occurred to me that this is a very inspiring idea.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 4, 2013

An article on Tuesday about a research initiative to invent and refine technologies to understand the human brain misstated the relationship between the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego. The Salk Institute, which is giving money to the research initiative, is an independent institute; it is not based at, or part of, the university.

Media Decoder Blog: Disney Delays Release of Video Game and Toy Initiative

LOS ANGELES — The introduction of Disney Infinity, an ambitious video game and toy initiative, has been pushed from June to late August, a retail window that Disney said on Wednesday was more favorable.

But the delay also shifts Infinity from Disney’s fiscal third quarter to its fourth, meaning that any chance of a turnaround at the company’s video game unit will occur later than some investors expected.

Infinity will now reach stores on Aug. 18 in North America and on Aug. 20 overseas, said John Pleasants, co-president of Disney Interactive, in a telephone interview. A June rollout had been planned, pegged to the release of Pixar’s “Monsters University.”

Mr. Pleasants said retailers, impressed with the public reaction to Disney’s demonstration of Infinity in January, pushed for an introduction closer to the all-important holiday season, which starts in October. “The date became an issue in terms of them asking, ‘Is there a better opportunity here?’ ” Mr. Pleasants said.

There may also be competitive reasons for the August date. Disney hopes that Infinity will be its version of Skylanders, a popular product from Activision Blizzard in which players collect action figures and then transfer them into the game’s action by plugging them into a sensor base. Skylanders has generated more than $1 billion in sales since its 2011 arrival; about 100 million of its toys have been sold.

The next edition of Skylanders is scheduled to arrive in stores this fall. Mr. Pleasants downplayed comparisons, but said, “We think it’s good to be first and really lean into the most important selling season of the year.”

August is traditionally a quiet time for video games as families spend money on vacations and back-to-school clothes. But Mr. Pleasants said retailers were willing to devote significant shelf space to the Infinity product line. Disney also hopes that children will return to school with the Infinity action figures in their backpacks, leading to trading.

It is not unusual for video game studios to push back release dates, but the reason usually involves glitches and missed deadlines. Mr. Pleasants insisted that was not the case here.

“We could deliver in June if we wanted to,” he said, adding: “Will a two-month timing change help us? Sure, of course. It gives us a little more time to add bells and whistles and make sure it really sings and pops.”

Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive and chairman, told Wall Street analysts and investors in May that “we’re targeting 2013 as a year of profitability” for Disney Interactive. He technically fulfilled that pledge in the last quarter; Disney’s video game and Web business turned an operating profit of $9 million after 16 consecutive quarters of losses.

But most people interpreted Mr. Iger’s remark to mean that the unit, Disney’s smallest by far, would make money for the fiscal year, which ends in mid-September. There is now little chance of that, as revenue from Infinity will be mostly pushed into 2014. “This will definitely impact our goal of achieving profitability for the year,” Mr. Pleasants said.