N.H.T.S.A. Issues Guidelines to Combat Distracted Driving

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released guidelines on Tuesday aimed at lessening the risks of “distracted driving,” recommending that automakers voluntarily limit the functions of electronic devices built into vehicles.

The guidelines, which are not mandatory, focus on amenities including communication, entertainment and navigation devices that the makers include.

It could be a few years before any of the guidelines are adopted. Automakers have scrambled in recent years to offer the latest technology — whether 3-D displays, access to Facebook, internal Wi-Fi or voice-activated calling.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers commended the agency, but it pointed out that the guidelines did not apply to cellphones or other devices, an issue the agency plans to examine.

A new driving study by the agency showed that the visual and manual tasks required by hand-held phones and other devices tripled the risks of an accident. The study found that text messaging required drivers to take their eyes off the road for an average of 23.3 seconds total, for example.

The guidelines recommend limiting the amount of time drivers have to take their eyes off the road to perform any task to two seconds at a time and a total of 12 seconds. The agency wants automakers to make it impossible for drivers to use some electronic functions, like text messaging, Internet browsing and video-based entertainment or communications, unless the vehicle is stopped and is locked in park.

Consumers Union — the advocacy division of Consumer Reports — was among those that asked the safety agency to impose a motor vehicle standard, which would require automakers to comply or face civil penalties. Still, Ellen Bloom, the senior director of federal policy for Consumers Union, welcomed the guidelines. “We’re glad that they took this step,” Ms. Bloom said, adding that her organization would monitor automakers’ responses.

The agency’s 281-page report indicates that safety officials did consider imposing regulations, but concluded that more research was needed to determine whether compliance could be evaluated uniformly.

Kelly Issues Rules for New York Police Officers’ Use of Social Media

As word of the order spread, police officers across the city checked their accounts to see if anything they had posted might run afoul of the new rules. Some edited their personal accounts to remove references to the department.

One officer, who had served in the military, replaced a Twitter profile photo of himself in his blue patrol hat with a portrait of himself in an Army uniform. Another wondered if his profile should include the word “detective.”

For years, officers faced relatively few official restrictions on social media, where many proudly posted photos of themselves in uniform and listed their job as “N.Y.P.D.” Indeed, the Police Department has lagged behind other jurisdictions in formalizing rules for personal online behavior.

“Such an order is not unexpected,” said Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents high-ranking officers. “The only surprise is that the order was not put out before now.”

The order followed recent embarrassing online activity at the Fire Department in which two of its members, including the fire commissioner’s son, wrote racially inflammatory Twitter posts. Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, however, said on Thursday that his order had been in the works long before.

The Fire Department is drafting its own social media policy, a spokesman said.

In issuing the new rules, Mr. Kelly sought to motivate officers to scrutinize their postings in what appeared to be an effort to defuse any lurking social media land mines.

The three-page order dated Monday details online behavior that could land officers in trouble, including posting photos of other officers, tagging them in photos or putting photos of themselves in uniform — except at police ceremonies — on any social media site.

Members of the department are also “urged not to disclose or allude to their status” with it. Doing so could make that person ineligible for certain sensitive roles.

Other regulations were more straightforward: Do not post images of crime scenes, witness statements or other nonpublic information gained through work as a police officer; do not engage with witnesses, victims or defense lawyers; do not “friend” or “follow” minors encountered on the job.

Violations of the order can result in disciplinary action, including dismissal. Officers with existing social media accounts are ordered to “immediately ensure that their personal social media site is reviewed and in compliance with this order.”

The order, which builds on the city’s general social media policy and was reported on Thursday in The Daily News, comes a year and a half after officers posted insulting Facebook comments about the West Indian American Day Parade. In that case, more than a dozen members of the department were disciplined.

It also barred local commanders from sending out posts without approval from the department. Last year, one Brooklyn precinct commander was criticized for posting photographs of men about to be released from custody to a Twitter account maintained by the precinct.

“I think the captain’s actions were actually another example of the innovative thinking of our precinct commanders,” Mr. Richter said on Thursday. “He was thinking outside the box and he should be commended.”

Mr. Kelly said the order was intended partly to avoid confusion between the department’s official statements on social media, and personal statements by officers. He likened the rules to those put in place by many other agencies and private businesses.

“One of the issues in a complex business like this is that people say they’re part of an organization, this organization, and make a statement that the public can interpret as policy,” he said. “You can’t run an organization like that.”

But, he said, the department had not assigned anyone to comb through social media sites looking for violations; the new rules would be enforced when the department learned of potentially troublesome postings.

The guidelines appeared to broadly match those adopted by other big city departments around the country.

The Detroit Police Department issued its guidelines in 2011 after an officer posted photos of a suspect wielding a machete on his Facebook page. That same year, the Albuquerque police also barred department members from identifying themselves on social media. That order came shortly after an officer, involved in a fatal police shooting, was seen on Facebook describing his job as “human waste disposal.”

Special Report: Technology and Innovation: Microsoft Inherits Sticky Data Collection Issues From Skype

BARCELONA — When Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion, it acquired not only the technology behind the world’s dominant Internet voice and video service, but a connection with more than 250 million active users.

But perhaps what Microsoft did not anticipate when it made the purchase was that it would inherit the delicate privacy aspects of Skype’s business, including its billions of encrypted, peer-to-peer Internet conversations.

Those conversations, and the access Microsoft grants to them, are now the focus of a lobbying campaign by 50 digital rights groups and dozens of individuals.

In a letter sent in January, the group asked Microsoft to disclose what data it collected from Skype users and whether that data was passed on — whether to potential advertisers or to law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations.

The group, a collection of Internet activists from around the world that includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and Zwiebelfreunde, a German university group, called on Microsoft to begin publishing regular transparency reports listing the requests made by government agencies for Skype client information around the world.

Amid the pressure, there are signs that Microsoft may be preparing to relent and publish what are known as transparency reports, which disclose the level of government requests for information. Google has provided the reports since 2010. Since then, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others, have moved toward offering regular reports — but not Microsoft.

Besides public disclosures, said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group also wanted to know the location of Skype’s headquarters — whether in Luxembourg, as it was before it was acquired by Microsoft, or at Microsoft’s base in Redmond, Washington.

The location is important, Ms. Galperin said, because if Skype’s headquarters are in the United States, Microsoft and Skype would be required to comply with requests made by U.S. intelligence services under Calea, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which gives agencies easier access to monitor data from online businesses like Skype.

Internet activists in countries with authoritarian regimes also need to know whether their Skype conversations, once considered a hack-proof way of avoiding government phone wiretaps because of the peer-to-peer nature of the exchanges, are still secure, she said.

“What we know right now is that we don’t know,” said Paul Bernal, a lawyer and professor of technology, intellectual property and media law at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, one of 61 individuals who also signed the open letter to Microsoft.

“We need to know how Microsoft and Skype cooperate with law enforcement and others around the world,” Mr. Bernal said. “People living under authoritarian regimes need to know what kinds of personal risks they are taking when using Skype.”

Dominic Carr, a Microsoft spokesman in Redmond, said that Skype’s headquarters, even after the purchase, remained in Luxembourg and the company was subject to laws of Luxembourg and the European Union, not the United States.

Luxembourg, like other E.U. countries, has mutual assistance pacts and other legal mechanisms that permit companies like Microsoft to share information with foreign law enforcement agencies in continuing investigations. The purchase of Skype by Microsoft has not changed the ability of law enforcement to gain access to Skype data, Mark Gillett, a corporate vice president responsible for Skype engineering and operations, wrote in a blog post.

According to Microsoft’s published privacy policy, three types of information are generated by Skype: personally identifiable information on users; nonidentifiable information; and the actual contents of Skype-to-Skype audio and video conversations.