Competitive Enterprise Institute против прайвесистов

When we set privacy policy, the rules should not be dominated by the concerns of the most fearful among us, or technology will be forced into rigid, conservative molds. The American approach to privacy has been that freedom of information is the rule in everyday life, business, and journalism. Privacy is the carefully crafted exception for special areas like medicine. There is no reason to abandon this approach because our information-gathering tools are new.

Human beings should be free to learn about one another and share that knowledge with others, unless it would do real harm. We should not base technology policy on the attitudes of the most fearful among us.

the United States, cost savings from information sharing in financial services alone have been estimated at $17 billion per year for the customers of just one group of companies. (The savings would be larger still for the entire financial services industry.)

Privacy, known in Europe as "data protection," looms as a serious trade issue between the United States and Europe. If the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) represents an international statement in favor of global free trade, the European nations' data protection laws represent a threat to that regime. Currently at issue are countries' regulations governing financial privacy. Consumers and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic will benefit if the United States maintains a strong stand in trade negotiations to protect the free flow of information across borders and within the United States.

In many cases, safety can be improved without the use of red-light cameras. In Mesa, when three-second yellow lights were extended to four seconds, violations dropped 80 percent. At two intersections in Fairfax, Va., increasing the time of yellow lights from 4 seconds to 5.5 seconds decreased the number of red-light violations by 96 percent.