Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times

Coursera has 35 employees in Mountain View, Calif. An employee works on a laptop near a new reception area.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.

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India Ink: India's Rape and Sexual Assault Laws Under Scrutiny

The death of a young rape victim in from Delhi has reopened a debate in India about the country’s sexual assault and rape laws, as sweeping changes are being demanded to improve women’s rights in the country.

Compared to the much of the rest of the world, sections of India’s laws covering rape are inadequate and narrowly defined, critics say. And India’s way of delivering justice to rape victims is replete with loopholes, they say.

The debate comes as the Indian government reviews the country’s laws and punishments for sexual assault, in the wake of widespread protests and calls for judicial action. The government has formed a panel of three legal experts, headed by a former chief justice of India, J.S. Verma, to review possible amendments, including those that would impose more stringent punishment. The committee is expected to submit its report by the end of January.

India’s current definition of rape is steeped in outmoded traditions, making the possibility of a conviction unlikely in many cases, human rights activists said. The law, which dates from 1860, has been amended only twice since then, in 1983 and 2003. “There is need for a much broader definition of rape, as is accepted by international standards,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

Currently, section 375 of the Indian Penal Code is defined as vaginal-penile intercourse against a woman’s consent. Excluded from the law is the rape of a woman by her husband if the woman is above 15 years of age.

“The world is changing, and because there are changes in society we need to modify the definition of the rape law,” said Monica Joshi, a law officer at the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi who specializes in women’s cases. “The law needs to include things like oral penetration, anal penetration, insertion of a foreign object into a woman’s body, dating rape, marital rape and deal with direct and indirect consent.”

Both Britain and most states in the United States consider marital rape a legal offense, noted Pinky Anand, a Supreme Court lawyer who specializes in cases for women, constitutional law and international law.

Still, there is a “progressive” part of Indian law compared to laws in some parts of the United States and in Britain, said Mrinal Satish, an associate professor at the National Law University in Delhi, who is completing his doctoral dissertation at Yale Law School. In India, the prosecution is required to prove that the defendant knew that the woman was not consenting to intercourse and only relies on the victim’s testimony, not the defendant’s belief, Mr. Satish said.

But this is also where the ambiguities arise. The court, said Mr. Satish, has to be satisfied that the woman’s testimony is reliable. Stereotyping based on certain characteristics, like whether the victim is a virgin or married, plague judgments in rape cases and usually have a negative impact, he said.

The current law also lacks clarity about punishments for a convicted rapist. According to section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, the minimum sentence for a convicted rapist is seven to 10 years, while the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. Gang rape carries a punishment of 10 years to life imprisonment. However, in certain situations a convicted rapist can get away with serving less time.

“The law allows the judge discretion to award a lesser punishment in special cases such as an aged person or a person of unsound mind,” says Ujjwal Nikam, a special public prosecutor for the government of Maharashtra whose expertise is in criminal law.

Sentencing guidelines for judges in India are nonexistent, which could lead to lenient sentences in rape cases, critics say.

“Unlike some other countries, such as the United States and England, India does not have sentencing guidelines, which provide rules and principles for judges to follow while sentencing,” said Mr. Satish. This contributes to the “rampant disparity” in punishments for rape cases, he said.

Legal experts in India are debating increasing the maximum punishment for rape in India, which could include the death penalty.

Some activists and advocates believe that an enhancement in the punishment will create a greater deterrent against rape. “The principle problem with rape laws in the country is that they don’t seem to be serving enough of a deterrent to criminals,” said Ms. Anand. “The rate of rape is horrifying, and the conviction rate is unsatisfactory. Capital punishment is the only answer.”
·
However, activists warn of the dangers of imposing the death penalty in rape cases, citing the increased chances that rapists would attempt to kill their victims, among other risks.

Another punishment being considered is chemical castration, the administration of medication designed to decrease libido and sexual activity, which is used on sex offenders in South Korea, Russia and Israel. In the United States, chemical castration is used in California, Florida and Louisiana.

Several legal experts argue there is also need to review the sexual assault law in India. Under section 354 of the Indian Penal Code, sexual assault is described as “outraging the modesty of a woman” – a description considered archaic, subjective and limited by legal experts. “We need to increase the ambit of sexual assault to include harassment, verbal abuse, groping, acid attacks, stalking and cyber crime,” said Ms. Anand.

Punishment for sexual assault should also be increased, activists said. Currently sexual assault crimes carry a maximum punishment of two years, but most convicted criminals can walk away by paying a small fee. “Criminals who repeatedly commit sexual assault if not convicted will then progress to higher crimes like rape,” said Ms. Anand.

A sexual assault bill currently pending in Parliament introduces some of these measures by increasing the punishment for molestation from two years to five years in prison, and sexual harassment from one year to three years.

The law itself is not the only problem. “When it comes to the problems – they lie in the system and how the legal system deals with rape cases,” Mr. Satish said. It’s important that the evidence is built. And if that’s weak, then the court is left with evidence on the bases it cannot convict.”

A draft bill has been submitted to the panel by the ruling Congress Party suggests chemical castration of rapists in rare cases, longer sentences for rape and setting up fast-track courts.
The bill should be named after the Delhi gang rape victim, Shashi Tharoor, the Indian minister of state for human resource development, said on Twitter on Jan. 1. The thought struck a chord with the victim’s parents, according to local media reports. (The woman’s name has only been reported so far by a British newspaper, which said it had the father’s permission. Reports Monday said his permission had not been given.)

Lawyers and activists are hopeful that the national attention garnered by this particular rape will spur the government to action. “Gender issues have not been given primacy up until now, but this time around civil society has raised enough of a voice that it cannot be ignored,” said Ms. Anand.

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India Takes Aim at Poverty With Cash Transfer Program

Manish Swarup/Associated Press

Poor and homeless people waited for food on Tuesday at a New Delhi temple.

NEW DELHI — India has more poor people than any nation on earth, but many of its antipoverty programs end up feeding the rich more than the needy. A new program hopes to change that.

On Jan. 1, India eliminated a raft of bureaucratic middlemen by depositing government pension and scholarship payments directly into the bank accounts of about 245,000 people in 20 of the nation’s hundreds of districts, in a bid to prevent corrupt state and local officials from diverting much of the money to their own pockets. Hundreds of thousands more people will be added to the program in the coming months.

In a country of 1.2 billion, the numbers so far are modest, but some officials and economists see the start of direct payments as revolutionary — a program intended not only to curb corruption but also to serve as a vehicle for lifting countless millions out of poverty altogether.

The nation’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, described the cash transfer program to Indian news media as a “pioneering and pathbreaking reform” that is a “game changer for governance.” He acknowledged that the initial rollout had been modest because of “practical difficulties, some quite unforeseen.” He promised that those problems would be resolved before the end of 2013, when the program is to be extended in phases to other parts of the country.

Some critics, however, said the program was intended more to buy votes among the poor than to overcome poverty. And some said that in a country where hundreds of millions have no access to banks, never mind personal bank accounts, direct electronic money transfers are only one aspect of a much broader effort necessary to build a real safety net for India’s vast population.

“An impression has been created that the government is about to launch an ambitious scheme of direct cash transfers to poor families,” Jean Drèze, an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, wrote in an e-mail. “This is quite misleading. What the government is actually planning is an experiment to change the modalities of existing transfers — nothing more, nothing less.”

The program is based on models in Mexico and Brazil in which poor families receive stipends in exchange for meeting certain social goals, like keeping their children in school or getting regular medical checkups. International aid organizations have praised these efforts in several places; in Brazil alone, nearly 50 million people participate.

But one of India’s biggest hurdles is simply figuring out how to distinguish its 1.2 billion citizens. The country is now in the midst of another ambitious project to undertake retinal and fingerprint scans in every village and city in the hope of giving hundreds of millions who have no official identification a card with a 12-digit number that would, among other things, give them access to the modern financial world. After three years of operation, the program has issued unique numbers to 220 million people.

Bindu Ananth, the president of IFMR Trust, a financial charity, said that getting people bank accounts can be surprisingly beneficial because the poor often pay stiff fees to cash checks or get small loans, fees that are substantially reduced for account holders.

“I think this is one of the biggest things to happen to India’s financial system in a decade,” Ms. Ananth said.

Only about a third of Indian households have bank accounts. Getting a significant portion of the remaining households included in the nation’s financial system will take an enormous amount of additional effort and expense, at least part of which will fall on the government to bear, economists said.

“There are two things this cash transfer program is supposed to do: prevent leakage from corruption, and bring everybody into the system,” said Surendra L. Rao, a former director general of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. “And I don’t see either happening anytime soon.”

The great promise of the cash transfer program — as well as its greatest point of contention — would come if it tackled India’s expensive and inefficient system for handing out food and subsidized fuel through nearly 50,000 government shops.

India spends almost $14 billion annually on this system, or nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product, but the system is poorly managed and woefully inefficient.

Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.

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Skin Deep: Questions Surround Iris Implant Procedure – Skin Deep

ANITA ADAMS was born with one green eye and one brown eye. While differently colored irises, a condition otherwise known as heterochromia, may look exotic on David Bowie and Kate Bosworth, Ms. Adams did not like them on herself.

“I wanted my irises to match,” said Ms. Adams, 41, who works as a caretaker for at-risk adolescents in Grand Junction, Colo.

In mid-2008, she began looking online to see if there was any solution other than colored contact lenses (which comprised about 20 percent of the $7.8 billion global contact lens market in 2011, according to a January 2012 report published by BCC Market Research). She found a company, New Color Iris, marketing a device invented by a Panamanian ophthalmologist, Dr. Alberto Delray Kahn, that could apparently implant an artificial or prosthetic iris over her natural one.

The device was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, nor were there any clinical studies or peer-reviewed publications about it. But Ms. Adams found Facebook posts and YouTube testimonials from patients whose eyes had gone from drab brown to an icy blue and were thrilled with the results. On his Web site, Kahnmedical.com, Dr. Kahn wrote that he supported “programs for the prevention of blindness in the Kuma and Embera Indians of Panama,” who have high rates of ocular albinism, which makes them sensitive to light. 

Ms. Adams was impressed. At the company’s request, she went for routine tests to her ophthalmologist, who told her he had never heard of the procedure and advised against it. She didn’t listen. “I went, ‘Oh, whatever,’ ” she said. “I don’t think anything was going to convince me not to do it. At that point my mind was made up.”

Ms. Adams is not alone in her quest for symmetry, whatever the risk.

Dr. Gregory J. Pamel, a corneal and refractive surgeon in Manhattan and a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at New York University, said that for the last two years he has received about three inquiries a month from patients who have learned from his Web site that he implants artificial irises for medical reasons. “They’d want to enroll in the clinical trial, and I would say, ‘There’s nothing available in the U.S.,’ ” he said. “There are no approved devices in the U.S. to change the eye color cosmetically. There are no clinical trials to date that are looking into this. There’s nothing on the horizon.”

There are, however, iris implants for patients with serious conditions like aniridia, a rare hereditary absence or partial absence of the iris, that are available under a special “compassionate use” F.D.A. provision. The provision allows patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions to be treated with devices that have not been approved by the F.D.A., but “we can only use it for people with trauma,” Dr. Pamel said. “I would be very hesitant and skeptical about any technology that purports to change the iris color for cosmetic reasons.” 

Dr. Kenneth Steinsapir, an oculofacial surgeon and ophthalmologist in Los Angeles, also received calls from patients wanting their eye color changed, so he began investigating New Color Iris. He found no positive reports, but he did find a number of studies reporting serious complications. In July 2010, he blogged about it on his Web site, lidlift.com. “The colored disk that is put in the eye has been shown to cause harm,” he wrote.  “If you are not albino and missing iris pigment or have part of the iris missing either from a birth defect or from trauma, then there is no compelling medical reason for this surgery.” 

But Ms. Adams was determined to fix her perceived imperfection. In September 2008, she wired nearly $2,000 to New Color Iris, and a month later flew with her mother (paying their airfare) to Panama. She was told the surgery would present no complications other than a slight risk of glaucoma. She signed a consent form, paid an additional $5,000 and underwent the 15-minute procedure.

For two days, Ms. Adams’s vision was blurry, which she was told was normal. By the third day, she could see well enough to tour around the city. “I was happy with the experience at the time,” she said.

She appeared on “Inside Edition” to talk about how delighted she was, for which she said New Color Iris paid her $500, promising an additional $500 for every future media appearance she did. She also allowed the company to use her likeness on its Web site and on YouTube.

Ms. Adams was pleased with her matching irises for about two years. But in fall 2010, she said, her vision grew “spotty,” and she was “scared to death I was going blind.” She repeatedly tried to contact Dr. Kahn as well as the company in New York, but said she received no response. She started a Facebook page (now dismantled) highlighting her negative experience, noticing that other people had shared similar stories.

And when she returned to the New Color Iris Web site, she was redirected to another site, Brightocular.com, which was marketing another implant to cosmetically change eye color and offering more glowing testimonials.

Ms. Adams said she contacted it using a fake name and was told that the procedure was being offered in Istanbul and soon “in all of Europe” and that the company was not affiliated with New Color Iris. Convinced this was untrue, she contacted Dr. Steinsapir in February 2011, and he began blogging about a possible relationship between the two companies. On Aug. 16, 2011, Dr. Steinsapir received a certified letter from Kevin J. Abruzzese, a lawyer in Mineola, N.Y., representing Stellar Devices, which owns the trademark for Brightocular, that denied that any association existed between the two companies. The letter also asserted that Stellar Devices was working with Minnesota Eye Consultants, in Minneapolis, to obtain “F.D.A. compassionate approval for a patient with aniridia,” and ordered  the doctor to remove “any and all defamatory content” about Brightocular.

Still skeptical, Dr. Steinsapir found a registered trademark for Brightocular, originally filed March 18, 2010 and granted registration on April 19, 2011.

But the company to which the trademark was registered was not Stellar Devices, but New Color Iris. What’s more, New Color Iris and Stellar Devices shared the same Midtown Manhattan address. Dr. Steinsapir later published his findings. He said he also arranged surgery for people who had iris color surgery and needed urgent help.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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Skin Deep: Questions Surround Iris Implant Procedure – Skin Deep

ANITA ADAMS was born with one green eye and one brown eye. While differently colored irises, a condition otherwise known as heterochromia, may look exotic on David Bowie and Kate Bosworth, Ms. Adams did not like them on herself.

“I wanted my irises to match,” said Ms. Adams, 41, who works as a caretaker for at-risk adolescents in Grand Junction, Colo.

In mid-2008, she began looking online to see if there was any solution other than colored contact lenses (which comprised about 20 percent of the $7.8 billion global contact lens market in 2011, according to a January 2012 report published by BCC Market Research). She found a company, New Color Iris, marketing a device invented by a Panamanian ophthalmologist, Dr. Alberto Delray Kahn, that could apparently implant an artificial or prosthetic iris over her natural one.

The device was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, nor were there any clinical studies or peer-reviewed publications about it. But Ms. Adams found Facebook posts and YouTube testimonials from patients whose eyes had gone from drab brown to an icy blue and were thrilled with the results. On his Web site, Kahnmedical.com, Dr. Kahn wrote that he supported “programs for the prevention of blindness in the Kuma and Embera Indians of Panama,” who have high rates of ocular albinism, which makes them sensitive to light. 

Ms. Adams was impressed. At the company’s request, she went for routine tests to her ophthalmologist, who told her he had never heard of the procedure and advised against it. She didn’t listen. “I went, ‘Oh, whatever,’ ” she said. “I don’t think anything was going to convince me not to do it. At that point my mind was made up.”

Ms. Adams is not alone in her quest for symmetry, whatever the risk.

Dr. Gregory J. Pamel, a corneal and refractive surgeon in Manhattan and a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at New York University, said that for the last two years he has received about three inquiries a month from patients who have learned from his Web site that he implants artificial irises for medical reasons. “They’d want to enroll in the clinical trial, and I would say, ‘There’s nothing available in the U.S.,’ ” he said. “There are no approved devices in the U.S. to change the eye color cosmetically. There are no clinical trials to date that are looking into this. There’s nothing on the horizon.”

There are, however, iris implants for patients with serious conditions like aniridia, a rare hereditary absence or partial absence of the iris, that are available under a special “compassionate use” F.D.A. provision. The provision allows patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions to be treated with devices that have not been approved by the F.D.A., but “we can only use it for people with trauma,” Dr. Pamel said. “I would be very hesitant and skeptical about any technology that purports to change the iris color for cosmetic reasons.” 

Dr. Kenneth Steinsapir, an oculofacial surgeon and ophthalmologist in Los Angeles, also received calls from patients wanting their eye color changed, so he began investigating New Color Iris. He found no positive reports, but he did find a number of studies reporting serious complications. In July 2010, he blogged about it on his Web site, lidlift.com. “The colored disk that is put in the eye has been shown to cause harm,” he wrote.  “If you are not albino and missing iris pigment or have part of the iris missing either from a birth defect or from trauma, then there is no compelling medical reason for this surgery.” 

But Ms. Adams was determined to fix her perceived imperfection. In September 2008, she wired nearly $2,000 to New Color Iris, and a month later flew with her mother (paying their airfare) to Panama. She was told the surgery would present no complications other than a slight risk of glaucoma. She signed a consent form, paid an additional $5,000 and underwent the 15-minute procedure.

For two days, Ms. Adams’s vision was blurry, which she was told was normal. By the third day, she could see well enough to tour around the city. “I was happy with the experience at the time,” she said.

She appeared on “Inside Edition” to talk about how delighted she was, for which she said New Color Iris paid her $500, promising an additional $500 for every future media appearance she did. She also allowed the company to use her likeness on its Web site and on YouTube.

Ms. Adams was pleased with her matching irises for about two years. But in fall 2010, she said, her vision grew “spotty,” and she was “scared to death I was going blind.” She repeatedly tried to contact Dr. Kahn as well as the company in New York, but said she received no response. She started a Facebook page (now dismantled) highlighting her negative experience, noticing that other people had shared similar stories.

And when she returned to the New Color Iris Web site, she was redirected to another site, Brightocular.com, which was marketing another implant to cosmetically change eye color and offering more glowing testimonials.

Ms. Adams said she contacted it using a fake name and was told that the procedure was being offered in Istanbul and soon “in all of Europe” and that the company was not affiliated with New Color Iris. Convinced this was untrue, she contacted Dr. Steinsapir in February 2011, and he began blogging about a possible relationship between the two companies. On Aug. 16, 2011, Dr. Steinsapir received a certified letter from Kevin J. Abruzzese, a lawyer in Mineola, N.Y., representing Stellar Devices, which owns the trademark for Brightocular, that denied that any association existed between the two companies. The letter also asserted that Stellar Devices was working with Minnesota Eye Consultants, in Minneapolis, to obtain “F.D.A. compassionate approval for a patient with aniridia,” and ordered  the doctor to remove “any and all defamatory content” about Brightocular.

Still skeptical, Dr. Steinsapir found a registered trademark for Brightocular, originally filed March 18, 2010 and granted registration on April 19, 2011.

But the company to which the trademark was registered was not Stellar Devices, but New Color Iris. What’s more, New Color Iris and Stellar Devices shared the same Midtown Manhattan address. Dr. Steinsapir later published his findings. He said he also arranged surgery for people who had iris color surgery and needed urgent help.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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Slipstream: Legislation Would Regulate Tracking of Cellphone Users

THERE are three things that matter in consumer data collection: location, location, location.

E-ZPasses clock the routes we drive. Metro passes register the subway stations we enter. A.T.M.’s record where and when we get cash. Not to mention the credit and debit card transactions that map our trajectories in comprehensive detail — the stores, restaurants and gas stations we frequent; the hotels and health clubs we patronize.

Each of these represents a kind of knowing trade, a conscious consumer submission to surveillance for the sake of convenience.

But now legislators, regulators, advocacy groups and marketers are squaring off over newer technology: smartphones and mobile apps that can continuously record and share people’s precise movements. At issue is whether consumers are unwittingly acquiescing to pervasive tracking just for the sake of having mobile amenities like calendar, game or weather apps.

For Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, the potential hazard is that by compiling location patterns over time, companies could create an intimate portrait of a person’s familial and professional associations, political and religious beliefs, even health status. To give consumers some say in the surveillance, Mr. Franken has been working on a locational privacy protection bill that would require entities like app developers to obtain explicit one-time consent from users before recording the locations of their mobile devices. It would prohibit stalking apps — programs that allow one person to track another person’s whereabouts surreptitiously.

The bill, approved last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers’ locations.

“Someone who has this information doesn’t just know where you live,” Mr. Franken said during the Judiciary Committee meeting. “They know the roads you take to work, where you drop your kids off at school, the church you attend and the doctors that you visit.”

Yet many marketers say they need to know consumers’ precise locations so they can show relevant mobile ads or coupons at the very moment a person is in or near a store. Informing such users about each and every ad network or analytics company that tracks their locations could hinder that hyperlocal marketing, they say, because it could require a new consent notice to appear every time someone opened an app.

“Consumers would revolt if this was the case, and applications could be rendered useless,” said Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who promulgated industry arguments during the committee meeting. “Worse yet, free applications that rely on advertising could be pushed by the consent requirement to become fee-based.”

Mr. Franken’s bill may seem intended simply to protect consumer privacy. But the underlying issue is the future of consumer data property rights — the question of who actually owns the information generated by a person who uses a digital device and whether using that property without explicit authorization constitutes trespassing.

In common law, a property intrusion is known as “trespass to chattels.” The Supreme Court invoked the legal concept last January in United States v. Jones, in which it ruled that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment — which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure — by placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car for 28 days without getting a warrant.

Some advocacy groups view location tracking by mobile apps and ad networks as a parallel, warrantless commercial intrusion. To these groups, Mr. Franken’s bill suggests that consumers may eventually gain some rights over their own digital footprints.

“People don’t think about how they broadcast their locations all the time when they carry their phones. The law is just starting to catch up and think about how to treat this,” says Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco. “In an ideal world, users would be able to share the information they want and not share the information they don’t want and have more control over how it is used.”

Even some marketers agree.

One is Scout Advertising, a location-based mobile ad service that promises to help advertisers pinpoint the whereabouts of potential customers within 100 meters. The service, previously known as ThinkNear and recently acquired by Telenav, a personalized navigation service, works by determining a person’s location; figuring out whether that place is a home or a store, a health club or a sports stadium; analyzing weather and other local conditions; and then showing a mobile ad tailored to the situation.

Eli Portnoy, general manager of Scout Advertising, calls the technique “situational targeting.” He says Crunch, the fitness center chain, used the service to show mobile ads to people within three miles of a Crunch gym on rainy mornings. The ad said: “Seven-day pass. Run on a treadmill, not in the rain.”

When a person clicks on one of these ads, Mr. Portnoy says, a browser-based map pops up with turn-by-turn directions to the nearest location. Through GPS tracking, Scout Advertising can tell when someone starts driving and whether that person arrives at the site.

Despite the tracking, Mr. Portnoy describes his company’s mobile ads as protective of privacy because the service works only with sites or apps that obtain consent to use people’s locations. Scout Advertising, he adds, does not compile data on individuals’ whereabouts over time.

Still, he says, if Congress were to enact Mr. Franken’s location privacy bill as written, it “would be a little challenging” for the industry to carry out, because of the number and variety of companies involved in mobile marketing.

“We are in favor of more privacy,” Mr. Portnoy says, “but it has to be done within the nuances of how mobile advertising works so it can scale.”

A SPOKESMAN for Mr. Franken said the senator planned to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress. It is one of several continuing government efforts to develop some baseline consumer data rights.

“New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy and many people may find the trade-off worthwhile,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote last year in his opinion in the Jones case. “On the other hand,” he added, “concern about new intrusions on privacy may spur the enactment of legislation to protect against these intrusions.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

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India Takes Aim at Poverty With Cash Transfer Program

Manish Swarup/Associated Press

Poor and homeless people waited for food on Tuesday at a New Delhi temple.

NEW DELHI — India has more poor people than any nation on earth, but many of its antipoverty programs end up feeding the rich more than the needy. A new program hopes to change that.

On Jan. 1, India eliminated a raft of bureaucratic middlemen by depositing government pension and scholarship payments directly into the bank accounts of about 245,000 people in 20 of the nation’s hundreds of districts, in a bid to prevent corrupt state and local officials from diverting much of the money to their own pockets. Hundreds of thousands more people will be added to the program in the coming months.

In a country of 1.2 billion, the numbers so far are modest, but some officials and economists see the start of direct payments as revolutionary — a program intended not only to curb corruption but also to serve as a vehicle for lifting countless millions out of poverty altogether.

The nation’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, described the cash transfer program to Indian news media as a “pioneering and pathbreaking reform” that is a “game changer for governance.” He acknowledged that the initial rollout had been modest because of “practical difficulties, some quite unforeseen.” He promised that those problems would be resolved before the end of 2013, when the program is to be extended in phases to other parts of the country.

Some critics, however, said the program was intended more to buy votes among the poor than to overcome poverty. And some said that in a country where hundreds of millions have no access to banks, never mind personal bank accounts, direct electronic money transfers are only one aspect of a much broader effort necessary to build a real safety net for India’s vast population.

“An impression has been created that the government is about to launch an ambitious scheme of direct cash transfers to poor families,” Jean Drèze, an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, wrote in an e-mail. “This is quite misleading. What the government is actually planning is an experiment to change the modalities of existing transfers — nothing more, nothing less.”

The program is based on models in Mexico and Brazil in which poor families receive stipends in exchange for meeting certain social goals, like keeping their children in school or getting regular medical checkups. International aid organizations have praised these efforts in several places; in Brazil alone, nearly 50 million people participate.

But one of India’s biggest hurdles is simply figuring out how to distinguish its 1.2 billion citizens. The country is now in the midst of another ambitious project to undertake retinal and fingerprint scans in every village and city in the hope of giving hundreds of millions who have no official identification a card with a 12-digit number that would, among other things, give them access to the modern financial world. After three years of operation, the program has issued unique numbers to 220 million people.

Bindu Ananth, the president of IFMR Trust, a financial charity, said that getting people bank accounts can be surprisingly beneficial because the poor often pay stiff fees to cash checks or get small loans, fees that are substantially reduced for account holders.

“I think this is one of the biggest things to happen to India’s financial system in a decade,” Ms. Ananth said.

Only about a third of Indian households have bank accounts. Getting a significant portion of the remaining households included in the nation’s financial system will take an enormous amount of additional effort and expense, at least part of which will fall on the government to bear, economists said.

“There are two things this cash transfer program is supposed to do: prevent leakage from corruption, and bring everybody into the system,” said Surendra L. Rao, a former director general of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. “And I don’t see either happening anytime soon.”

The great promise of the cash transfer program — as well as its greatest point of contention — would come if it tackled India’s expensive and inefficient system for handing out food and subsidized fuel through nearly 50,000 government shops.

India spends almost $14 billion annually on this system, or nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product, but the system is poorly managed and woefully inefficient.

Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.

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F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Checking the temperature of lettuce at an Arizona farm. Safety measures would start at farms.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Checking the temperature of lettuce at an Arizona farm. Safety measures would start at farms.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..

F.D.A. Offers Rules to Stop Food Contamination

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed two sweeping rules aimed at preventing the contamination of produce and processed foods, which has sickened tens of thousands of Americans annually in recent years.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Checking the temperature of lettuce at an Arizona farm. Safety measures would start at farms.

The proposed rules represent a sea change in the way the agency polices food, a process that currently involves taking action after contamination has been identified. It is a long-awaited step toward codifying the food safety law that Congress passed two years ago.

Changes include requirements for better record keeping, contingency plans for handling outbreaks and measures that would prevent the spread of contaminants in the first place. While food producers would have latitude in determining how to execute the rules, farmers would have to ensure that water used in irrigation met certain standards and food processors would need to find ways to keep fresh food that may contain bacteria from coming into contact with food that has been cooked.

New safety measures might include requiring that farm workers wash their hands, installing portable toilets in fields and ensuring that foods are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill bacteria.

Whether consumers will ultimately bear some of the expense of the new rules was unclear, but the agency estimated that the proposals would cost food producers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

A big question to be resolved is whether Congress will approve the money necessary to support the oversight. President Obama requested $220 million in his 2013 budget, but Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the F.D.A., said “resources remain an ongoing concern.”

Nonetheless, agency officials were optimistic that the new rules would protect consumers better.

“These new rules really set the basic framework for a modern, science-based approach to food safety and shift us from a strategy of reacting to problems to a strategy for preventing problems,” Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in an interview. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs.

One in six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, the government estimates; most of them recover without concern, but roughly 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The agency estimated the new rules could prevent about 1.75 million illnesses each year.

Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 after a wave of incidents involving tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

But it took the Obama administration two years to move the rules through the regulatory agency, prompting complaints that the White House was more concerned about protecting itself from Republican criticism than about public safety.

Mr. Taylor said that the delay was a function of the wide variety of foods and the complexity of the food system. “Anything that is important and complicated will always take longer than you would like,” he said.

The first rule would require manufacturers of processed foods sold in the United States to come up with ways to reduce the risk of contamination. Food companies would be required to have a plan for correcting problems and for keeping records that government inspectors could audit.

An example might be to require the roasting of raw peanuts at a temperature guaranteed to kill salmonella, which has been a problem in nut butters in recent years. Roasted nuts would then have to be kept separate from raw nuts to further reduce the risk of contamination, said Sandra B. Eskin, director of the safe food campaign at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is very good news for consumers,” Ms. Eskin said. “We applaud the administration’s action, which demonstrates its strong commitment to making our food safer.”

The second rule would apply to the harvesting and production of fruits and vegetables in an effort to combat bacterial contamination like E. coli, which is transmitted through feces. It would address what advocates refer to as the “four Ws” — water, waste, workers and wildlife.

Read More..