This article first appeared in The Economist on January 12th 2012

Paul Wallich usually walks his small son to the bus stop a stone’s throw from their Vermont home. But he can use a robot too: a football-sized drone, hovering several metres off the ground, follows a beacon stashed in the little boy’s school bag. A smartphone strapped to the device beams back video.

Few parents are as handy as that, but even Luddites like the idea of keeping an electronic eye on the young. An early offering, in 2003, was Wherify, a tracking device which locks to a child’s wrist. Devices invented since then protect autistic children, who easily get lost, or into danger. Youngsters on Canadian farms wear radio tags on bracelets to signal their proximity to adults operating heavy machinery.

Longer battery life and miniaturisation are making tracking cheaper and more practical. The easiest way is to use smartphones. Many mobile operators offer child-tracking at extra cost, but the number of free tracking applications is growing fast. Life360 rocketed from 1m registered users in 2010 to nearly 26m now. Berg Insight, a research firm, reckons that 70m Americans and Europeans will be tracking family members by 2016.

These services and devices can provide children’s location, or send alerts about their behaviour: when they return home, or stray beyond an agreed boundary, or go out late. Speed detection reveals when somebody is in a vehicle—and whether it is breaking the speed limit.

No devices, so far, have full chaperone functions—such as revealing furtive movements in a stationary vehicle. But some providers do have ingenious extra features. The pocket-sized tracking beacons of Amber Alert GPS, a company based in Utah, carry a microphone to let parents eavesdrop. SecuraTrac, a Californian firm, has a product that disables a phone’s e-mail and text functions when it is moving: that stops boy-racers from typing while driving. Life360’s maps highlight the addresses of sex offenders.

Parents in Japan and America are the keenest on such gizmos. Europeans, seemingly more relaxed about child safety and with more complex privacy laws, are less enamoured. Some European countries require minors’ consent for some kinds of surveillance. Child tracking appeals particularly to middle-class families in South American countries who worry about gang crime and kidnapping, says André Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight.

Public authorities are keen, too. Schools in Osaka began issuing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to students in 2004. Sensors in school buildings read them to check pupils’ attendance and location (though not what they do off the premises). In Dubai the same technology notifies parents when their progeny get on or off school buses. In March last year 20,000 schoolchildren in the Brazilian city of Vitoria da Conquista had radio tags sewn into their uniforms to help detect truants.

In August 2012 two schools in San Antonio, Texas, embedded RFID tags in identity badges belonging to their 4,200 students. These help administrators to count students who turn up to class but miss the morning register. Because funding is linked to daily attendance, the system enables schools to claim more taxpayer cash. On January 8th a court lifted an earlier injunction halting the expulsion of a child who refused to wear the badge on religious grounds (some Christians liken the devices to the Mark of the Beast, foreseen in the Bible). The family intends to appeal.

X marks the child

But what about privacy? Enthusiasts say tracking means more freedom, not less. Parents who know they can easily find their children may be happier to let them roam. Teenagers are spared annoying phone calls. Daisy Ashford, a mother of children aged ten and eight who lives in Ashland, Virginia, says her children like the “James Bond” feel of their Amber Alert trackers. Her military family moves every 18 months, making it hard to develop a protective network of friends and neighbours: the devices are “another set of eyes”.

Critics say tracking does not really protect children. Savvy kidnappers will dispose of phones or other devices (implantable tracking chips are, so far, the stuff of spy movies only). And strangers rarely attack children anyway: parents are the most likely murderers, and accidents are a far graver danger than assault. “Location tracking won’t stop your child falling into a river,” says Anne-Marie Oostveen, who studies surveillance at Oxford University. For fretful parents the new devices may just mean still more grounds for worry.

The same technology also enables snooping on adults. In America mobile subscribers can buy location-tracking services for all users of a family phone plan. Some survivors of domestic violence say this makes it harder to escape. Parents use webcams to keep an eye on their children’s carers (generally legal, though the ethics of hidden cameras are contested, and covertly captured audio can break laws on wiretapping). A Saudi government agency that sends men text messages if their children leave the country also helps track wives.

Others fear that children who submit to tracking in schools will more readily accept state surveillance in adulthood. In August a coalition of American civil-rights outfits advised schools not to make such tracking mandatory. It termed the technology “dehumanising” and said that, where it operates, sensors should be visible.

Small fixes can make tracking by parents more palatable, too. Services that help kids report their location, perhaps by “checking in” as they move around, calm anxious grown-ups with less annoyance for the young. An app called Glympse lets users share their location for a few minutes at a time; WalkMeHome, a Swedish app also available in English, helps people share their whereabouts with trusted contacts any time they feel unsafe. A prototype tracker built by Microsoft substituted detailed location data for broader descriptions (“at school”, “at home” or “at work”). Such humdrum messages may be less fun than child-tracking drones—but they are also less alarming.

Sal Paradise, hero of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, carries only one book on his three-year travels across America. On a Greyhound bus to St Louis he produces a second-hand copy of “Le Grand Meaulnes”, stolen from a Hollywood stall. Entranced by the Arizona landscape, he decides not to read it after all.

Such is the fortune of Alain-Fournier’s story, one of France’s most popular novels, in the English-speaking world. Much loved yet little read, for almost a century this strange, earnest and inconsolable novel has haunted the fringes of fiction. Henry Miller venerated its hero; F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed its title for “The Great Gatsby” (and some critics think Fournier’s main characters were models for Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, and his lovelorn pal). John Fowles claimed it informed everything he wrote. “I know it has many faults,” he sighed, as if trying to shake the obsession, “yet it has haunted me all my life.”

Despite its famous advocates, “Le Grand Meaulnes”—100 years old in 2013—is a masterpiece in peril. The stream of pilgrims who visit Fournier’s childhood home, near Bourges, is starting to thin. These days readers in Britain and America often choose denser, more overtly philosophical French authors. A decade ago, one British fan, Tobias Hill, noted that the book survived through “a barely audible system of Chinese whispers”.

Why are many English-speaking readers unfamiliar with a book adored by some of their most respected writers? And what accounts for the curious grip that this simply written and nostalgic tale of adolescent romance holds over its most besotted fans? Some love the poetry of its language, others the interlocking mysteries of its plot. Many are entranced by the elegiac sadness that rises from the prose, as one critic remarked, “like mist over the heath”. But its appeal partly lies in the romantic life and early death of its author, and the story of the woman who inspired him.

A brief encounter

The life of Henri Fournier (pictured), now better known by his pen name, spun round a single, sunny afternoon in 1905, described in Robert Gibson’s valuable biography “The End of Youth”. Leaving an art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, when he was 18, he spotted a young woman walking with an older lady. Captivated, he followed them across the river to the door of a Left Bank apartment, afterwards returning to the building whenever his studies would allow. Too timid to knock, he paced the streets outside. Ten days later he saw the girl again—walking unaccompanied to mass—and approached her. Wary but flattered, she agreed to stroll with him by the Seine.

He told her he was a writer (or that he would be one day), the son of a country schoolmaster, now studying in Paris. She told him her name was Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, and that she was staying in the city with relatives, but leaving the next day. At her request they separated at the Pont des Invalides. Waiting where she left him, Fournier saw her look back twice. Years later he was still decoding this gesture: “Was it because, silently, from a distance, she wanted to reinforce her order that I should not follow her? Or was it to let me see her face one more time?”

Fournier clung to the memory long after it should have faded into his adolescence. He waited at the steps of the Grand Palais on the anniversary of his first glimpse of her (knowing, in rational moments, that she would not be there). He returned frequently to the apartment, hoping to spot her at a window. The word “She”, its first letter meaningfully capitalised, peppered his letters.

Other frustrations in his life helped this childish attachment foment into something powerful. He twice failed his university entrance exam, which kept him at school long after his peers had left. Mandatory military service prevented a third failure, but brought another two years of gloom. In 1909 he returned to Paris and moved in with his parents, plagued by “the feeling that youth is over and you haven’t done what you ought”.

Attempts to contact Yvonne brought Fournier further disappointment. In July 1907 he had finally called at the apartment building—to be told by the concierge that she had married the previous winter. Two years later, still disconsolate, he hired a private investigator. He learned her address, and that she had a child.

These discoveries distressed Fournier. Five years after the encounter he still labelled his fixation a “sickness”; occasionally his melancholy brought on bouts of real fever. But it also suited his nature to love at a distance. The memorable months he spent perfecting his English in Chiswick, in west London—where the young anglophile delighted in tea, jam and the landmarks made famous by his beloved Dickens—were marred only by the unsettling worldliness of British girls, who “get too friendly too soon”.

What is more, with Yvonne as his muse Fournier’s literary career gathered startling speed. His first published poems, all addressed or dedicated to the absent girl, earned him a job as a gossipy literary columnist for the Paris-Journal, which allowed him to befriend (and irritate) André Gide, Paul Claudel and other popular French writers. He founded an eccentric rugby club with the novelist Charles Péguy and Gaston Gallimard, a publisher. He briefly taught French to the young T.S. Eliot. In 1912 Fournier entered high society, becoming personal secretary and speechwriter to Claude Casimir-Périer, son of a former French president.

Love affairs arrived, eventually. He had a lengthy, tumultuous relationship with a milliner. An affair with a neighbour began when she dropped a note from her window onto the pavement in front of him. (It ended after her husband, sensing infidelity but uncertain of the culprit, vowed to murder his rival.)

Fantasy and reality

But none of these paramours could compare to Yvonne, whom Fournier had come to believe only the grandest gestures might win. By the end of 1912 he was carrying around a letter to the woman who had haunted him for seven years. “You left me only one way to rejoin you and communicate with you and that was to win literary fame,” it read. “A long novel which I’m finishing, a novel which is centred all around you—you whom I hardly knew—is coming out this winter.”

In truth Fournier’s literary ambitions were not born outside the Grand Palais—however fierce that singular thunderbolt—but forged years earlier in his father’s schoolhouse, where he and his sister would dog-ear the books bought as prizes for the best students. Still, “Le Grand Meaulnes”, which was published the following autumn, has Yvonne firmly at its heart.

In the novel, 17-year-old Augustin Meaulnes is sent to board at a country school. There he befriends François Seurel—the bookish son of the local schoolmaster and the novel’s narrator—and earns the admiration of his schoolmates, who bestow on him the title le grand. Months later Meaulnes stumbles upon a tumbledown chateau where a bizarre wedding party has assembled, its guests in lavish historical costume. There he encounters a beautiful young woman, but afterwards he finds it impossible to locate the strange estate, and the mysterious girl. Before his search comes to an end, a bungled suicide will leave one character disfigured; a brief affair in Paris will lead a young woman to the streets.

The story mixes fantasy and reality. Fournier’s childhood home among the moors and marshes of north-central France, to which he felt a morbid attachment almost equal to his longing for Yvonne, provides a nostalgic setting. The book features events and observations first chronicled in letters; a few passages quote directly from his correspondence. But its imagined elements, such as a circus troupe that vanishes overnight, recall the novels of Britain’s renowned adventure writers—Kipling, Stevenson, Wells and Defoe. An early chapter cites “Robinson Crusoe”.

Drawing the real and fantastical together is the meeting between Meaulnes and the elusive heroine, also called Yvonne. It is a faithful re-enactment of the encounter of 1905 that Fournier had recorded in his notebook. The novel sways between celebrating and condemning the obsessive and destructive search that follows; but Fournier was at least able to give his characters a concluding reunion—part wish-fulfilment, part tragedy—that his own story still lacked.

By 1913 he had reason to rid himself of his preoccupation, one way or another. In May he began an affair with Simone Casimir-Périer, a well-known actress and the wife of his employer. (Their relationship started in secret the night Fournier returned excitedly from the now-famous near-riot at the premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”.) The letter he had drafted for Yvonne, still unsent, was intended to provoke a denouement. “I beseech you to take quite seriously these dreadful words,” he wrote. “I have no desire to live far from wherever you may be.”

As unlikely as it must have seemed to Fournier, it was mutual acquaintances, not tear-stained missives, that eventually connected them. Encouraged by her sister—who had heard, through friends, of Fournier’s infatuation—Yvonne herself arranged a meeting in Rochefort, on France’s west coast, in July 1913. The girl from the Grand Palais remembered many small details of their previous conversation. She admitted she had thought of it often.

Scribbled in his notebook are snippets of an exchange that must have saddened as much as delighted him. “If you had come three years ago,” she said to him, “everything might have been possible.” He gave her his love letter, but she promptly returned it, taking pains to show him that his imagined future was now inconceivable. She introduced him to her mother and her two small children. She invited him to visit them at home in Brest: “My husband will take you out into the country.”

From Rochefort to Verdun

Both parties hoped that the meeting in Rochefort would cure Fournier’s fixation. Back in Paris he admitted the clandestine trip to his lover Simone, prompting a bitter fight and passionate reconciliation that saw Fournier vow to forsake his adolescent obsession. Yet Yvonne continued to write to him. Fournier sent her copies of La Nouvelle Revue Française, in which “Le Grand Meaulnes” was then being serialised. She sent them back with annotations, which he assimilated into the final draft. In September 1913 she sent—and then swiftly retracted, through an intermediary—a more personal letter, the content of which is now lost.

That autumn Fournier bounced between two married women. Simone proclaimed her love for him but refused to leave her husband; Yvonne declared herself unobtainable but affected the reverse. A dilemma that would once have paralysed Fournier now made him decisive. In October he sent Yvonne an advance copy of the final, complete version of “Le Grand Meaulnes” (and a second for her husband). The dedication he scribbled inside—dated June 1st 1905 to October 25th 1913—was a celebration of his long infatuation with her, and also its memorial.

When war came the following summer, Simone agreed to divorce her husband and marry Fournier once the conflict was over. But privately Fournier did not expect to return from the battlefield. The deaths of many friends had already convinced him that his own life might be short. In 1912 a former schoolmate had overdosed on morphine. Another, refused permission to marry his fiancée, shot himself in the face at the age of 24.

Marching to the front, Fournier started to clean up his past. He asked Marguerite Audoux, a novelist and friend, to burn the two long letters he had written to her about his trip to Rochefort. He wrote to his sister to ask her to destroy his papers if he died, except for those concerning Simone. To her, he penned a more reassuring note: “Here’s to the happiness that awaits us and the children we shall have!”

(DiCaprio as Gatsby: the latest descendant of Meaulnes)

During the early weeks of the first world war, before the trenches were dug, army lines were fluid and skirmishes frequent. On September 22nd 1914 Lieutenant Fournier led his company into woods south of Verdun. French soldiers patrolling nearby came upon a German field hospital; Fournier’s men joined the firefight that followed.

The few who escaped the battle could not say what had happened to the lieutenant. French authorities declared him dead, but his body was not recovered. For a month his mother, sister and lover sent increasingly desperate letters to the front. In 1918 they waited vainly for him to emerge, scrawny but alive, from some German camp. Later attempts to determine his fate returned grisly results. A German report—compiled in the 1920s but discovered decades afterwards—alleged that French survivors of the action had immediately been executed for attacking medical auxiliaries.

In 1991 researchers found his body, and those of his men, buried where they fell. The final photo of Henri Fournier is gruesome. Twenty-one skeletons lie in a shallow grave: two rows of ten, with one flung across the top. Fournier’s is in a corner, identifiable by its uniform. His skull has fallen to one side, his jaw is agape. He had been shot in the chest, suggesting he died in battle.

Missing in action

In the last year of his life Fournier had shaken off his daydreams. In death they defined him. In 1913 “Le Grand Meaulnes” had narrowly missed out on the Prix Goncourt—France’s most prestigious literary award—but the war propelled the novel to far greater fame. Many of those who had seen and survived the savagery appreciated Fournier’s elegy to innocence.

Most of his English-speaking readers come across the book at school, but he has become less well-known as languages, French in particular, have fallen out of fashion. Degree courses skip over the novel, perhaps because it doesn’t fit into any movement or genre. “It comes from nowhere and leads nowhere,” says Patrick McGuinness of Oxford University. “It is its own monument.”

Its ever-changing English titles do not help: “Big Meaulnes”, “The Great Meaulnes” and “The Magnificent Meaulnes” have all come and gone. Editions that omit the hero’s vowel-heavy name, such as “The Wanderer” and “The Lost Estate”, have had more success, though many publishers simply retain the French title. The author’s unusual pen name is another disadvantage. Alain-Fournier—an oddly hyphenated semi-pseudonym adopted to avoid confusion with a racing driver—was misspelled by an editor the first time Fournier used it, and is still often mangled.

Some think this creeping obscurity deserved, finding “Le Grand Meaulnes” mawkish and melodramatic, its plot contrived. Publishers play up the sentimentality with covers depicting pastoral scenes and teenage boys. That is a fair summary of the story’s first part, but a poor illustration of the oddness of the rest.

Fowles, who called the book “the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature”, suggested that its detractors dislike being reminded of “qualities and emotions they have tried to eradicate from their own lives”. Fitzgerald camouflaged Fournier’s themes with a more sophisticated setting: Gatsby is no less juvenile than Meaulnes, but age and wealth make him seem more worldly. Happily, a small group of contemporary novelists still wear Fournier’s influence proudly. The young hero of “The Way I Found Her”, by Rose Tremain, acquires a copy of “Le Grand Meaulnes” from a Paris bouquiniste, who “looked quite miserable to part with it”. A mental patient in David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green” relives the novel each day.

Critics have now puzzled out most of the book’s mysteries. The bleak final photo of Fournier solved his disappearance. The true identity of Yvonne de Quiévrecourt was revealed after her death. All the same, little is really known about the girl at the Grand Palais, who was both worshipped and artistically exploited by Fournier. She remained silent about her role in one of France’s most famous novels; by the end of her life she could not remember it herself. It fell to her husband to tell their children the story, as its fame grew around them.

In 1939 she apologised for not visiting Fournier’s sister, then guardian of his estate. “Far better for me to remain within the aura in which your brother enclosed me,” she wrote. Perhaps she was wise to stay as untouchable as the heroine she inspired. Probably no mere mortal could embody all the fascination and yearning that Fournier captures in “Le Grand Meaulnes”.

Many firms help businesses crunch data on their customers. Until recently, few have offered those services to the consumers themselves. Now a number of start-ups are offering “data lockers”, secure online locations where people can gather information on themselves, including their consumption patterns—utility bills, loyalty-card statements, telephone records and so on.

By helping them to retrieve those data in the first place, locker firms hope to give privacy-conscious consumers more control over what information organisations hold about them. They also aim to help people to reuse it for their own benefit.Consumers might give details of their past energy bills to price-comparison engines, to find them better deals. They could let retailers peek at their spending patterns in return for discounts. Shane Green of Personal, one such locker provider, thinks individuals who make full use of their personal data might one day earn $1,000 a year in benefits and savings.

These firms, and the technology underpinning them, are young, and their business models unproven. Furthermore, consumers may regard their personal-data trail as something rather sinister that they would prefer to see erased, not an asset that is worth managing like cash in a bank. Mr Green hopes to win them over with some of his simple data-handling tools, such as one that automatically fills in consumers’ personal details on web forms when they are shopping online.

A bigger obstacle to widespread use of lockers is that they will thrive only if users can claw back personal data from the utilities, banks and shops that are collecting them. Britain’s government may soon force some firms to give customers digital copies of information held about them; a proposed European Union law may enshrine similar rights across Europe. Elsewhere, data-locker firms will need to convince firms that they have more to gain from sharing data than hoarding them.

Maarten Louman of Qiy, a Dutch foundation that promotes smarter use of personal data, argues that it may indeed be worth companies’ while to do so. By helping consumers compile comprehensive profiles of their habits and preferences, they may in return be granted much richer data than they could collect without their customers’ co-operation. Mr Louman says some large businesses already pay locker firms to deliver to their employees digital copies of their pay slips and pension statements. That saves the firms money, and keeps the locker service free to consumers.

By making it easier for consumers to provide information, as well as receive it, personal lockers also could help companies keep their data up to date, says William Heath of Mydex, another locker provider. For instance, people moving house could simply update their address in their data locker, and then let their bank, utilities and other service providers retrieve it.

There is a risk that if data lockers prove as useful as the start-ups claim, it could encourage bigger cloud-storage firms such as Google and Dropbox to barge in and grab their customers. Another danger is that locker users are tricked by disreputable companies or data thieves into exposing the masses of personal information in them, triggering a public backlash.

In the longer run, insurers and other potential traders of personal data may require ever more intrusive volumes of information before giving price quotes. Indeed, if the trading of personal consumption data becomes common, a time may come when shoppers will have to reveal all about themselves or be charged top whack for everything they buy.

This article first appeared in The Economist on December 8th 2012

Job-seekers fear that recruiters trawling social-media sites will find reasons not to hire them (why do friends always bring cameras to “50-Shades”-themed parties?). But firms should also worry that their secrets will be revealed online: some job sites ask staff to dish the dirt on their employers.

Glassdoor, for example, boasts employee-penned reviews of around 130,000 workplaces. (“Intellectually stimulating,” writes a staffer at The Economist Group. “Worst job ever,” gripes another.) Indeed, which claims to be the world’s most popular job site, started collecting reviews last year. Its users have scribbled over 1m in 2012 and are adding 200,000 each month.

Careers sites have traditionally shunned employer reviews, for fear of upsetting advertisers. But newer ones act more like search engines than job boards, aggregating vacancies already listed elsewhere. That makes them thirsty for unique content to set them apart from competitors, says Mike Larsen, who runs an Australian job site called InsideTrak.

Though they make less cash than their older rivals, these aggregators look sprightlier. Indeed claims 85m monthly visitors; the Japanese firm that bought it in September is said to have paid almost $1 billion. Glassdoor has 14m registered users, and in October raised $20m to expand.

Glassdoor requires all reviewers to make positive comments as well as snarky ones. About two-thirds of users report that they are satisfied with their jobs, says Samantha Zupan, an executive there. Those happy vibes please recruiters. Glassdoor lets firms sponsor their own pages on the site, or promote vacancies on those of poorly reviewed competitors.

Keren Mitchell, founder of TheJobCrowd, which focuses on graduate careers, says warts-and-all reviews help companies by weeding out ill-fitting candidates. They also make for better rankings of graduate-recruitment schemes: the researchers of these rankings often interview students about their preferences, rather than interrogating those who have actually started a new job. This rewards companies that spend a lot on marketing, not those that give new hires interesting work.

If review sites are holding employers to account, they may one day spell trouble for shirking staff. KarmaFile, a site based in Pittsburgh, lets workers rate their colleagues online. Mitch Turck, its founder, promises users the power to reject unfair assessments, provided they explain why.

This will make his site tamer than Honestly, a franker peer-review platform which critics said helped disgruntled workers bad-mouth bosses without their knowledge. It closed in May, having already once changed its name, from Unvarnished. As social media drag office life online, mismanaged firms and disagreeable co-workers may need a rebrand, too.

This article first appeared in The Economist on December 1st 2012

THE rules of the internet decide its speed, safety, accessibility, flexibility and unity. They therefore matter not just to computer enthusiasts, but to everyone with a stake in the modern world. On December 3rd officials from more than 150 countries, plus do-gooders, geeks and other interested parties, will meet in Dubai to argue about how to run the network—and fight over who should control it.

Since the internet’s creation, a ragtag bunch of academics, engineers, firms and non-profit outfits have been in charge. That delights innovators but has been a nightmare for the tidy-minded, and especially for authoritarian governments. They would like the net to be run like the world’s telephone system, with tight standards and clearly set charges. The Dubai meeting brings the chance to write new rules, with a review of an elderly treaty: the International Telecommunication Regulations.

America, the European Union and other Western countries are trying to defend the chaotic status quo. Against them are Russia, China and many African and Arab states which claim that the internet undermines national laws while enriching American firms. The meeting’s host is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a sluggish UN affiliate founded in 1865 to regulate telegrams, but which now deals with satellite flight-paths and radio frequencies. Its influence has waned since telecoms liberalisation.

Some think it obsolete. Certainly its opaque and bureaucratic style dismays those steeped in the internet’s open culture. Larry Downes, a commentator who blogs for Forbes, says the ITU’s press releases read like “weird dispatches from Dickensian England”. It has published only a few draft documents for Dubai and has yet to vote on whether the public can attend any of the discussions.

Though the ITU’s president, Hamadoun Touré, dismisses the notion of a takeover of the internet as ridiculous, some governments, including Russia, would like the body to play a bigger role. In particular, they would like it to run the internet’s address system, in place of ICANN, an unusual charity registered in California and supervised from a distance by America’s commerce department. Critics think this gives the American authorities unjustified powers, for example to boot undesirable websites off the internet. Mr Touré says such matters are outside the Dubai meeting’s scope, but he has little power to stop delegates raising them.

America wants to shield the net from the treaty, but its diplomats fear that a broad coalition is taking shape against them. They hope to fend off most of the 450 or so proposed amendments. Many seem innocuous, or even worthwhile: for example, calling for international co-operation against fraud, child abuse or spam. But Terry Kramer, the head of America’s 122-strong delegation, says that some of these hide attempts to facilitate or legitimise censorship of political speech. America decries any wording, however mealy-mouthed, that could increase governments’ control over content.

A fiercer row is brewing about the rules for online businesses. High charges for international phone calls once helped funnel cash from rich countries to state-owned networks in developing ones. Much of that traffic is now on the internet, hitting national operators’ profits—and governments’ foreign-exchange reserves. An alliance of poor countries and network operators wants businesses that depend on broadband networks, such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, to pay towards their construction and upkeep.

Not joining the dots

One proposal is that the most popular websites, such as YouTube or Facebook, should be billed for the data they send, as if they were making phone calls. At the moment an American web firm pays no more to serve data to customers in Dhaka than in Detroit. But if the cost of serving users varied by location, web firms might start to shun far-flung customers, says Karen Mulberry of the Internet Society, which represents the network’s engineers.

Meanwhile a group of Europe’s big telecoms firms, the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), is demanding that governments outlaw the introduction of “network neutrality” rules, which are already in force in countries such as the Netherlands and Chile. These rules require operators to grant equal priority to all internet traffic, and prevent them from charging higher prices for “fast lanes” and other premium services. Luigi Gambardella, ETNO’s chairman, says operators cannot continue to invest in broadband infrastructure without a fairer share of the revenues it generates.

Advocates of network neutrality worry that this is an attempt to erect tollbooths on the internet. They say network-neutrality rules are needed to ensure that the internet provides a level playing field for innovative start-ups, and is not simply run in a way that maximises profits for incumbent network operators. Geoff Huston, a network scientist, thinks former telephone monopolies exaggerate their importance to the web. “They are dinosaurs fighting over the last water in the swamp,” he says.

Fears of an anti-Western putsch in Dubai, handing control of the internet to authoritarian governments, are overblown. Though in theory the ITU works by majority vote, in practice agreements are almost always reached by consensus. Moreover, the ITU has no power to foist rules on governments that refuse to bargain. A bigger danger is therefore deadlock. That might encourage a large pack of nations to set up their own internet regime, making communication with the rest of the world more costly and more complicated.

This article first appeared in The Economist on October 27th 2012

Bertie Ahern, Ireland’s former prime minister, once lamented that his countrymen still cast ballots with “stupid old pencils”. Now his enthusiasm for electronic voting looks premature. Ireland has just scrapped 7,500 devices, bought for €51m ($66m) in 2002-3, but never used amid worries about reliability. A recycling firm bought the lot for €70,000: about €9 each.

Electronic voting machines are popular in emerging economies. But they are falling out of fashion in the rich world, where internet voting is a growing trend. Nine European states have tested electronic machines, yet only Belgium uses them widely. America invested heavily in digital devices after faults in mechanical ones plagued its presidential election in 2000, but its ardour is cooling too. In 2006 38% of American voters used electronic machines; only a third will do so in November’s poll. Authorities now prefer optical scanners that tally paper ballots.

Doubts about security are causing the retreat. Observers cannot easily check for faults, or verify electronic tallies if machines produce no paper trail. “The best you can do is press the button again and hope you get the same number,” says Anne-Marie Oostveen at Oxford University. Nor are voting machines immune to clever frauds. In 2006 Dutch campaigners rigged a device to miscount votes (and then taught it to play chess).

Yet electronic machines do help in poorer places, where paper elections are trickiest to organise. Of the 18 states that are using or testing electronic voting machines, according to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), 12 are in South America or Asia. Brazil deployed them nationwide in 2000, in part to help illiterate citizens. India followed four years later. Its machines register no more than five votes per minute, to hinder ballot stuffers. Venezuela’s are the most advanced. To prevent fraud, citizens voting in the country’s presidential elections on October 7th identified themselves with a fingerprint. Their machines also produced paper receipts to enable audits. Jimmy Carter, the former American president and an election observer, called Venezuela’s electoral process “the best in the world”.

Amid patchy enthusiasm for machines, interest in internet voting is soaring. Australia and Canada are among the 11 countries that have used online voting in a real election, says Ben Goldsmith, an expert at IFES. In November 23 American states will allow voters overseas to receive or return their ballots via e-mail. Ballots cast online made up 24% of the votes in Estonia’s 2011 parliamentary election (up from 5.5% in 2007). Norway may allow internet voting in its general election next year.

To reduce the impact of technical failures or cyber-attacks, Estonia allows citizens several weeks to vote online. To discourage vote-buying or voter intimidation, electors may cast their ballot multiple times during the election period, though only the final vote counts. But those who wait until election day must vote on paper at a traditional polling station: this ensures that last-minute system crashes cannot disenfranchise voters.

Some hope internet voting could help to encourage more people to vote. Since the 1950s turnout in British elections, for example, has fallen by over 20%; in 2010, less than half of all 18-24-year-olds voted. But optimists have little evidence to cite. High turnouts during early tests in Switzerland fell back as curiosity in the new system dwindled; abstainers rarely mention the inconvenience of voting when asked why they stay away.

The internet may make postal votes work better. Almost a fifth of American ballots are now cast by mail, a threefold increase over 30 years. But postal voters are twice as likely to mark paper ballots incorrectly. They also depend on increasingly erratic snail-mail services. Countries keen to retain links with emigrants hope easy online voting will keep diasporas engaged: in June French expatriates used the internet to elect parliamentary representatives.

A tall order in Tallinn

But few countries will easily emulate Estonian success. Countries such as America and Britain that shun national ID cards find it hard to identify their citizens online. Estonia is renowned for cybersecurity. Elsewhere, worries about hackers abound. In 2010 computer scientists at the University of Michigan infiltrated a test poll in the District of Columbia, reprogramming the software to play a well-known ditty whenever a vote was cast. They also hacked into security cameras to watch election administrators grapple with their attack.

A deeper question is how online voting affects the choices citizens make. Remote voters have more time to make informed decisions than those herded through busy voting booths, says Michael Alvarez at the California Institute of Technology, especially if many races run simultaneously. Yet people who vote while lounging in their underwear may do so less solemnly. A small study in Finland found that voters who cast ballots from home tended to take extreme positions; going to polling stations made people less selfish. Technology can help citizens vote, but politicians must make them care. No app exists for that.

This article first appeared in The Economist on October 6th 2012

The arrest of a senior executive rarely brings helpful headlines. But when Brazilian authorities briefly detained Google’s country boss on September 26th—for refusing to remove videos from its YouTube subsidiary that appeared to breach electoral laws—they helped the firm repair its image as a defender of free speech.

Two weeks earlier those credentials looked tarnished. Google blocked net users in eight countries from viewing a film trailer that had incensed Muslims. In six states, including India and Saudi Arabia, local courts banned the footage. In Egypt and Libya, where protesters attacked American embassies and killed several people, Google took the video down of its own accord.

The row sparked concern about how internet firms manage public debate and how companies based in countries that cherish free speech should respond to states that want to constrain it. (Freedom House, a campaigning think-tank, reckons that restrictions on the internet are increasing in 20 of the 47 states it surveys.)

In June Google revealed that 45 countries had asked it to block content in the last six months of 2011. Some requests were easily rejected. Officials in the Canadian passport office asked it to block a video advocating independence for Quebec, in which a citizen urinated on his passport and flushed it down the toilet.

Most firms do accept that they must follow the laws of countries in which they operate (Nazi content is banned in Germany, for example). Big internet firms can prevent users accessing content their governments consider illegal, while leaving it available to visitors from countries where no prohibition applies. Some pledge to be transparent about their actions—Twitter, like Google, releases six-monthly reports of government requests to block information. It also alerts citizens when it has censored content in their country.

Tell us what you did
Legislators in America want more firms to follow suit. In March a congressional subcommittee approved the latest revision of the Global Online Freedom Act, first drafted in 2004. This would require technology firms operating in a designated group of restrictive countries to publish annual reports showing how they deal with human-rights issues. It would waive this for firms that sign up to non-governmental associations that provide similar oversight, such as the Global Network Initiative. Founded in 2008 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and a coalition of human-rights groups, it has since stalled. Facebook joined in May but only as an observer. Twitter is absent, too.

Managing free speech in home markets is hard too. American websites enjoy broad freedom but most users support policies that forbid hate speech or obscenity, even when these are not illegal. Well-drafted community guidelines give platforms personality (and reassure nervous parents). But overzealous moderation can have “absurd and censorious” results, says Kevin Bankston at the Centre for Democracy and Technology, a think-tank. Citing rules that prohibit sexually loaded content, Facebook last month removed a New Yorker cartoon that depicted a bare-chested Eve in the Garden of Eden. It also routinely removes its users’ photos of breast-feeding if they show the mother’s nipples, however unsalacious the picture may be.

Commercial concerns can trump consistency. In July Twitter briefly suspended the account of a journalist who had published the e-mail address of a manager at NBC while criticising it for lacklustre coverage of the London Olympics. Twitter admitted it had monitored tweets that criticised the firm (a business partner) and vowed not to do so again. Automated systems can also be too zealous. Citing a copyright violation, YouTube’s robots briefly blocked a video of Michelle Obama speaking at the Democratic Party convention on September 4th (perhaps because of background music). In August official footage of NASA’s Mars landing suffered the same fate. Jillian York at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech group, thinks some services refuse to host any images of nudes, however innocent or artistic, because they can trigger anti-porn software.

Aware of the problem, web firms are trying to improve their systems. Facebook’s reporting tool now helps users resolve simple grievances among themselves. Tim Wu at Columbia Law School speculates that video-hosting services may one day ask committees of users to decide whether to allow sensitive footage to be shown in their countries. Europeans unvexed by nudity might then escape American advertisers’ prudish standards. But it would be hard to enforce on social networks that prize their cross-border ties.

Simpler remedies might make users happier. Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on internet freedom, says web firms act as “legislature, police, judge, jury and executioner” in enforcing moderation policies and should offer their members more opportunity to appeal. Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician helping to formulate European digital policy, thinks web users wanting to challenge egregious judgments need more help from the law.

Changing the law in some countries could help platforms avoid bad decisions. Some governments menace web firms with antiquated media laws that consider them publishers, not just hosts, of their users’ content. In 2010 an Italian court handed down suspended jail sentences to three Google executives after a video showing the bullying of a disabled boy appeared on YouTube—even though the firm removed it when notified. Sites in countries with fierce or costly libel laws often censor content the moment they receive a complaint, regardless of its merit. England (Scotland’s legal system is different) is changing the law to grant greater immunity to internet platforms that give complainants easy access to content originators.

Some users value avoiding offence more highly than the risk of censorship. The majority see things the other way round. So internet firms will never please everyone. But good laws at least point them in the right direction.

The whizziest new feature of Apple’s iPhone 5, which went on sale on September 21st, is a fourth-generation (4G) data connection that speedily downloads movies, music and web pages. So far that has been little use in Britain, where legal battles have long delayed the auction of 4G frequencies. But on October 3rd Everything Everywhere—the painfully named parent company of Orange and T-Mobile—said it will launch Britain’s first “superfast” mobile service in ten cities by the end of the month.

Ofcom, the media and telecoms regulator, said in August that the company could use spectrum it already owned to build a data network five times nippier than existing services (which it has branded EE). The decision gave the firm a year’s head start over its main competitors, O2 and Vodafone, who cannot run 4G networks without buying new bandwidth in Ofcom’s auction, scheduled for early 2013. Legal action from either threatened to halt EE’s launch. But Ofcom has now promised to help both companies get to market sooner by more swiftly relocating television and military communications which are currently camped on the frequencies earmarked for 4G. That compromise will make competing services possible by May next year, cutting EE’s advantage in half. O2 and Vodafone seem content.

Efforts to upgrade Britain’s mobile infrastructure have been repeatedly delayed. Ofcom first planned to auction 4G bandwidth in 2008, but litigation and threats from operators—who quibbled with complex rules intended to ensure each firm had an equal chance of securing valuable parts of the spectrum—have held up the sale ever since. A change of government slowed the process, as did the merger between Orange and T-Mobile.

As a result, Britain has fallen behind its neighbours. It was one of the first places to auction frequencies for third-generation mobile services, in 2000. But more than 40 countries moved faster in preparing for 4G, says Matthew Howett of Ovum, a research firm—among them Angola, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. German operators started offering 4G modems for laptops in early 2011; American ones in 2010.

Ofcom’s speedy new schedule will help Britain claw back lost ground. That is good news for the coalition government, which in 2010 promised snappier mobiles as part of its commitment to make Britain Europe’s best-connected country. MPs hope 4G will help deliver better web connections to far-flung communities. (Some high-speed traffic will be carried in low-frequency spectrum which reaches farther into the countryside than existing mobile signals.) They are already quarrelling over how to spend spoils from the 4G spectrum auction, expected to raise between £2 billion ($3.2 billion) and £4 billion.

Olaf Swantee, Everything Everywhere’s boss, says demand for mobile data in Britain is multiplying several times each year. He may have exaggerated when he quipped that comparing 4G connections with 3G ones is like comparing “jet engines with steam”. But it is about time Britain’s superfast mobile networks took off.

Mobile operators know who you call; banks know what you buy; supermarkets know what you eat. Transactional data helps businesses make money, and the government thinks consumers should profit from it too. Last year the business department encouraged companies to give people digital copies of information held about them through a voluntary scheme called midata. It now wants to force firms to cough up the files.

Existing laws require companies to reply to requests for personal data, but only on paper. Some take 40 days to respond. The government thinks that consumers and the economy would benefit if they did so immediately. Price comparison engines that suck in itemised telephone bills could find people better deals. Personal finance sites empowered to ingest financial statements could help spendthrifts reform. In the long term the government hopes entrepreneurs will dream up more inventive data-driven services. Start-ups able to track a user’s purchases might offer to store receipts and warranties in a central location, for a fee. Digital wardrobes might catalogue a shopper’s new clothes, then recommend accessories.

Britain’s energy companies are championing the scheme. Finance, telecoms and retail firms are less enthused. More demanding data rules will create additional costs, they argue. Companies do not want competitors using data they have paid to collect. Martin Hoskins, a data-protection consultant, worries that intermediaries will encourage consumers to hand over large volumes of personal information without clear limits on its use. A government consultation ends on September 10th.

Britain is already “streets ahead” of most countries in liberating consumer data, says Liz Brandt of Ctrl-Shift, a marketing consultancy. But other places are catching up. The websites of some American health-care providers now feature a blue button that lets patients download details of their treatment. Energy companies there are trialling a green button that works the same way. A draft EU law, which could come into force by 2015, gives all citizens the right to move their data between suppliers.

Far-sighted optimists spy a broader technological revolution, with Britain in the vanguard. If a clutch of firms that understand how to manage and crunch personal data emerge, Britain will be able to export its know-how across the world. That, of course, depends on persuading domestic consumers that personal data are something they can use—and sell to others. In May a report from the World Economic Forum declared that data locked in servers are like “money hidden under a mattress”. Yet many people still think personal data are more like personal odour—involuntary, embarrassing, and best not shared at all.

This article first appeared in The Economist on August 11th 2012

The change is modest, but this being Italy it amounts to a revolution. For decades the country’s 5,000 notaries have grown rich from laws that limit their number. To cut waiting times the government is lifting the caps. It promises to mint 500 new notaries by December and 500 more next year.

Life is changing for notaries all over the world. Whereas they are losing their privileges in Europe, their authority is growing in Asia. Even America now sees the beginnings of a debate about their role. More is at stake than the fate of an obscure and little-loved profession. Notaries are important gatekeepers in many economies, in particular when it comes to establishing property rights—the bedrock of markets. At best, notaries are facilitators who, for instance, verify the identity of the signatories of contracts and the veracity of their statements. At worst, they are overpaid bureaucrats who delay the passage of simple transactions and bloat their cost.

Notaries are most powerful in continental Europe, where legal systems are based on civil law. By overseeing the creation of many common kinds of contracts, notaries there aim to reduce the likelihood of future costly legal battles. France’s 9,000 notaires enjoy a monopoly over property conveyancing. Entrepreneurs in Germany must seek a seal from a Notar to set up a company. Dutch notarissen are responsible for 80 types of documents, like prenuptial agreements and wills. Rules commonly limit their total number, as in Italy. Most notaries are licensed to practise only in their local area. Governments generally fix their fees.

By contrast, notaries are unknown in many common-law countries, such as Britain and its former empire, which take a more freewheeling approach to contracts. America is the odd country out: although its legal system is based on common law, it boasts 4.8m notaries, many part-time. Yet these exist mainly to satisfy America’s maddening appetite for stamps and seals, and have little in common with their highly qualified European namesakes. “They are butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers,” scoffs a European notary.

Both traditions have their drawbacks. In Europe notaries’ highly regulated work has made them the most prosperous of lawyers. Tax returns suggest that Italian notaries are paid better than any other professionals (though perhaps they are most honest about their earnings). A report in 2004 found that notaries made up 22 of Slovenia’s 100 highest earners. French ones are the most privileged of all, says Gisela Shaw, an expert on the profession. They can compete with solicitors to provide legal services. They may sell their practice when they retire.

The perks are jarring but inefficiency does more harm. The World Bank has warned that poorly organised notariats can hinder growth. It takes 59 days to register property in France, longer than in Liberia, Cambodia and Congo. Until 2006 Italians needed a notary to buy a used car. A study carried out for the European Commission in 2007 found that house-buyers in countries with highly regulated notarial systems paid much higher legal fees than house-buyers abroad (see chart). They were also less satisfied with the service they received.

Despite these concerns, American authorities are considering whether aspects of the European model might help reduce property fraud. In 2008 a journalist stole the deeds to the Empire State Building with the help of a fake notary stamp. Peter Murray of Harvard Law School believes a European-style notariat that issued impartial advice would have tempered America’s subprime crash. And squabbles over inheritance are more frequent in common-law countries, where wills are more casually drawn up, says Leon Verstappen of the University of Groningen.

With all that in mind, governments are trying to strike a better balance between caution and carelessness. Since 2007 South Korea, South Africa and nine other nations have cut the role notaries play in property or business registration. Portuguese once waited several months to see a notary—reforms there have helped shorten the time it takes to start a business from 11 weeks to seven days. In 2011 France gave common-or-garden lawyers the right to create binding documents similar to those endorsed by notaries. Holland’s deregulated system is a popular model—in 1999 the government stopped capping the size of the notariat and abolished fixed fees. Price-comparison sites guide consumers to the cheapest deals.

Notaries of the world unite

The European Commission is also urging change. Notaries have commonly escaped EU rules liberalising other professions on the grounds that they are government officials. But in May 2011 the European Court of Justice ruled that notaries need not hold the nationality of the country where they practise. Mr Verstappen thinks laws that prevent notaries competing outside their local area could be next to fall.

Are the days of this venerable profession numbered? Don’t bet on it. As domestic monopolies wither, notaries are looking abroad. Attempts to ease the movement of contracts and certificates across borders—a tiresome paper-chase—are hotly debated. European notaries would like the acts that they produce to enjoy greater recognition across the continent, but that could disadvantage citizens in Britain and nine other EU countries where the legal system can create no equivalent document.

Despite improvements in Italy and other European countries, the financial crisis has also slowed reform. Notaries’ role in conveyancing makes them reliable tax collectors, so change is risky while money is tight. Some countries hold “Anglo-Saxon” deregulation responsible for the crisis; Russia’s new civil code, which comes into force in September, grants its weak notariat greater authority. And Gulf states, now attracting many of the West’s jobless graduates, consume limitless volumes of paperwork. Notaries’ authority may be fading, but their fate is not yet sealed.