Yes, You Can Be an Ethical Tech Consumer. Here’s How.

Yes, You Can Be an Ethical Tech Consumer. Here’s How.

Products that we enjoy continue to create privacy, misinformation and workplace issues. We can do better at getting the industry to do better.

Via NYTimes, By Brian X. Chen


It has never felt worse to be a technology consumer. So what can you do about it?

That’s the question of the year after many of the biggest tech companies were mired in scandal after scandal or exposed as having committed necessary evils to offer the products and services that we have so blissfully enjoyed.

Those instant Amazon deliveries? They sure are convenient, but Amazon warehouse workers in Europe protested the company during Black Friday, describing their working conditions as inhuman.

You might have considered deleting Facebook after the social network confessed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the data of millions of users. If that didn’t convince you, maybe the security breach exposing the data of 30 million Facebook accounts did.

Google also came under fire, from its own employees, for working on a censored version of its search engine for China and for protecting executives who were accused of sexual misconduct.

All of this bad behavior circles back to you. We are the buyers, users and supporters of the products and services that help Big Tech thrive.

So what do we do at this point to become more ethical consumers?

“I think this is an incredibly powerful question to ask,” said Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that focuses on technology’s impact on families. “It’s a very important moment where consumer behavior can have a transformational impact.”

I talked to a broad range of people — ethicists, activists, environmentalists and others — about how to become a more empowered, socially responsible tech consumer. Here’s what they agreed on.

Boycott and Shame

First and foremost, when tech does you wrong, one of the most powerful ways to protest is to take your business elsewhere and ask your friends and family to go along.

Last year, hundreds of thousands of customers abandoned Uber in favor of alternatives like Lyft after the ride-hailing company’s many scandals, including repeated accusations that it turned a blind eye to sexual harassment. That choice became a movement known as #DeleteUber. This year, people frustrated with Facebook took part in a #DeleteFacebook campaign.

The financial impact of these actions may not have been huge. Uber continues to grow (while still losing money) as it marches toward an initial public offering. Facebook has reported increased profits, though its user growth has slowed.

Even so, damage to a brand may have plenty of repercussions because it motivates the company to change its behavior, Mr. Steyer said. Both Uber and Facebook, facing enormous pressure, have modified some of their practices and committed to improvements.

“Sometimes shame is one of the most important arrows in your quiver,” Mr. Steyer said.

Give Up Convenience for Independence

We can also take the path less traveled — that is, take our data and money to products made by more ethical vendors.

Many people have hesitated to delete Facebook because doing so felt futile. Facebook is an all-in-one place for discovering local events, reading news, watching videos and staying connected to friends and family. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the largest photo-sharing and messaging services.

Pulling the plug on Facebook is a hassle, but not impossible. Taking on the challenge of finding alternatives is an example of how people can give up some convenience in exchange for individual empowerment, said Shahid Buttar, a director of grass-roots advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.

There is no direct replacement for something as convenient as Facebook. But if you go piecemeal, Mr. Buttar said, there are options. These include using an RSS reader, a software tool for getting a comprehensive feed of news sources that are self-curated; messaging people with a service like Signal, which is open-source software; and looking up events on organizing services like Meetup.

The same approach can be applied to Google if you take issue with its behavior. While Google offers a comprehensive suite of web services, including news, email and maps, you could switch to an alternative for each of those products.

Slow Down

You can do the world a favor by simply slowing down your consumption.

A chief example: When ordering from Amazon or other online retailers, think twice before you opt for same-day or overnight delivery, even if it’s free. Other than the human toll of fast service, which has included miscarriages by pregnant workers at Verizon warehouses, there is an environmental impact.

A rush shipment could involve multiple vehicles and various facilities before it gets to your door. So pause and ask yourself if you actually need that smartphone or scented candle tomorrow. If you can wait, choose no-rush delivery, which could take about a week.

You can reduce your environmental impact further by delaying how often you upgrade technology. That can be achieved by regular maintenance of devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablets.

Vincent Lai, who works for the Fixers’ Collective, a social club in New York that repairs aging devices, said people could become more empowered by repairing, maintaining and modifying products to escape the upgrade cycle that tech companies impose.

When your smartphone seems to be slowing down, for instance, take steps to speed it back up by purging some photos and apps to clear storage, replacing an aging battery or reinstalling the operating system.

“One of the things you can do to be more responsible is to take greater ownership of your stuff,” Mr. Lai said.

Think About Your Friends

The Cambridge Analytica scandal this year illustrates our responsibility to think about others, not just ourselves, when using technology.

When Cambridge Analytica worked with a researcher who distributed a questionnaire app on Facebook to about 270,000 Americans, people who responded to the questions unwittingly shared data about their Facebook friends. As a result, the personal information of 87 million people was harvested to create voter profiles and to target political messages.

The sharing of friends’ data might have been prevented if Facebook users had been aware of their privacy settings. One now-defunct setting was called Apps Others Use, which controlled the information that your friends shared about you when they used apps, including your birthday or hometown.

In other words, if people had disabled Apps Others Use, Cambridge Analytica most likely couldn’t have collected the data of their friends. More important, if those who took the quiz were aware of the potential of sharing information about their friends, they might have opted not to participate.

But how can you be more conscious of your actions when technology is so confusing in the first place?

Education is key. Mr. Buttar said a network of 85 groups that make up the Electronic Frontier Foundation Alliance hosted workshops across the United States that taught people more about issues like digital privacy and data protection. And many online forums and publications track these issues closely.

The bottom line is that you are not alone. And if a company makes it too difficult for you and your friends to stay safe while staying connected, you can leave.

“If you’re really uncomfortable with the values of a company, don’t use their product,” Mr. Steyer said.

Read more about how to keep yourself safe and be less wasteful with technology.

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about solving tech-related problems.

Trump Prepares to Unveil a Vast Reworking of Clean Water Protections

Trump Prepares to Unveil a Vast Reworking of Clean Water Protections

A bullfrog in a farm pond in Kentucky. The Trump administration plans to lay out changes to clean water rules. Education Images/UIG, via Getty Images


WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to unveil a plan that would weaken federal clean water rules designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams nationwide from pesticide runoff and other pollutants.

Environmentalists say the proposal represents a historic assault on wetlands regulation at a moment when Mr. Trump has repeatedly voiced a commitment to “crystal-clean water.” The proposed new rule would chip away at safeguards put in place a quarter century ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who implemented a policy designed to ensure that no wetlands lost federal protection.

“They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era,” said Blan Holman, who works on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat.

President Trump, who made a pledge of weakening a 2015 Obama-era rule one of his central campaign pledges, is expected to tout his plan as ending a federal land grab that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their property as they see fit.

Under the Obama rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and planting certain crops, and would have been required to apply for permits from the Environmental Protection Agency in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those water bodies. Under the new Trump plan, which lifts federal protections from many of those streams and wetlands, those requirements will also be lifted.

A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, John Konkus, declined to comment on the plan.

The clean water rollback is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to weaken or undo major environmental rules, including proposals to weaken regulations on planet-warming emissions from cars, power plants and oil and gas drilling rigs, a series of moves designed to speed new drilling in the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and efforts to weaken protections under the Endangered Species Act. This week in Katowice, Poland, at an annual United Nations conference on mitigating global warming, Trump administration officials held an event touting the benefits of fossil fuels.

The proposed water rule, scheduled to be announced Tuesday morning at the Environmental Protection Agency, is designed to replace an Obama-era regulation known as Waters of the United States. Tuesday’s unveiling of the proposal is expected to coincide with its publication in the federal register. After that, the administration will take comment on the plan for 60 days, and it could then revise the plan before finalizing it next year.

The Obama rule, developed jointly by the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about a third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands.

But it became a target for rural landowners, an important part of President Trump’s political base, since it could have restricted how much pollution from chemical fertilizers and pesticides could seep into water on their property.

The new Trump water rule will retain federal protections for those larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them, and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water, according to a detailed eight-page fact sheet prepared by the administration ahead of the unveiling of the rule and reviewed by The New York Times.

But it will strip away protections of so-called “ephemeral” streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water, or connected to such bodies of water by a surface channel of water. Those changes represent a victory for farmers and rural landowners, who lobbied the Trump administration aggressively to make them.

“The Obama administration led with the premise that all water is connected, all water runs downhill, and the federal government could control all water,” said Don Parrish, director of regulatory relations with the American Farm Bureau Federation, who met with White House officials over the summer to press the case for those changes.

“If they can control the water that falls out of the sky, they control the land that it falls on,” he said.

Mr. Parrish also said the Obama rule chafed its detractors because of the perception it was written by bureaucrats who did not understand the daily reality of farmers’ livelihoods. “The last administration called our concerns silly and ludicrous, and this administration took us seriously. They listened to us,” he said.

In particular, he cited a social media campaign run by the Obama administration, “Ditch the myth,” which challenged the claim that the rule would have regulated water in ditches. “With that campaign, they were laughing at us,” he said.

Mr. Trump won cheers from rural audiences on the presidential campaign trail when he vowed to roll back the Obama rule. Real estate developers and golf course owners (industries in which Mr. Trump worked for decades) were also among the chief opponents of the earlier rule. One of Mr. Trump’s first actions in office was to sign an executive order directing his E.P.A. chief to repeal and replace the rule.

To environmentalists, however, the proposed rule change “upends the core mission of the E.P.A., which is to protect human health and the environment,” said Bart Johnsen-Harris, who works on water policy at the Environment America, an advocacy group.

While the Obama rule would have applied federal protections to wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water, or do not directly drain into them via a surface water channel, the new rule will strip away that protection. That potentially opens millions of acres of pristine wetlands to more pollution, according to Mr. Holman of the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“For wetlands, this is an absolute disaster, compared to the Obama plan,” he said. While such wetlands may not be physically next to major bodies of water, they can still drain into such larger bodies through underground networks, Mr. Holman said.

Stripping away those protections would still allow pollution to seep into the nation’s broader waterways, he said. It would also make it easier for developers to pave over such wetlands.

Federal courts had already halted the implementation of the 2015 Obama-era rules in 28 states after opponents sued to block them. However, in recent months the rules had taken effect in the other 22 states.

The wetland protection policies put in place decades ago by the first President Bush, an avid fisherman, followed on his own campaign pledge to save wetlands, saying, “all wetlands, no matter how small, should be preserved,” and proposing a “no net loss” policy. That initial policy was later weakened by Mr. Bush’s own E.P.A., but environmentalists have credited him for elevating the issue.

Fifteen years later, the second President Bush gave regulatory teeth to his father’s proposal, implementing an E.P.A. rule requiring stronger wetlands protection that his father had once envisioned.

How to Foster Empathy in Children

This is a very serious problem that is surely underestimated in its negative societal impacts. Children lacking empathy grow into adults lacking it. Once in adulthood, empathy is much harder to teach and appreciate. More focus needs to be placed on this with children, teenagers, and really, all of us. Its a tremendous part of humanity.


New York Times

Research shows that we are each born with a given number of neurons that participate in an empathetic response. But early life experience shapes how we act on it.

 

As the year’s end approaches, most Americans get bombarded by emailed and snail-mailed requests for donations to all manner of charities, A to Z.

I’m an easy target, a softy readily seduced by impassioned pleas to help improve the well-being of people, animals and the environment, and I often respond to more appeals than my earnings warrant.

This year will be different, thanks to advice from one of the leading experts on empathy, Dr. Helen Riess, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of a new book, “The Empathy Effect,” that explores the neuroscience behind concern for others and offers advice on how to nurture and implement it most effectively.

Instead of a scattershot of small gifts to a dozen or more charities, Dr. Riess suggested in an interview that I “pick one or two where a more substantial contribution can really make a difference.” She told me to use “cognitive empathy,” a more rational, less emotional approach. Empathy doesn’t mean saying “yes” to every request, she emphasized. “Recognize that you can’t save the world, and give to organizations that are most important to you.”

Let something from your own life experience determine which issues are closest to your heart and most deserve your money, she suggests in her book. For me, that would be education and food security; I’ll leave it to others to save abandoned pets and the planet this year.

Perhaps no one knows the importance of balancing feelings with thoughts better than Dr. Judith Orloff, a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist and the author of “The Empath’s Survival Guide.” Her book can help highly sensitive people avoid taking on everyone else’s needs and problems, which Dr. Riess says can lead to “compassion fatigue” and burnout.

“There’s healthy giving and there’s unhealthy, codependent giving that can ultimately make you feel worse,” Dr. Orloff said in an interview. “It’s important to be empathetic but also to set healthy limits and boundaries rather than being a doormat. If you’re a highly sensitive person, you have to learn how to channel your energy. Healthy empathy is when you give from your heart, but not martyr yourself.”

She added, “You have to practice self-care. ‘No’ is a complete sentence — no explanation needed.” If that seems too abrupt, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t do that’ is a reasonable add-on.

While overly empathetic individuals can be their own worst enemy, more distressing to me, at least, are people who seem deficient, even devoid, of empathy. They are self-focused, narcissistic, always thinking about what’s in it for them and never recognizing and responding to the needs of others, a deficit that can undermine human survival, which depends on community support.

Research by Dr. Riess and her collaborators has shown that we are each born with a given number of neurons that participate in an empathetic response. But whether this potential to care appropriately for one’s fellow beings is realized or undermined is largely molded by early life experiences, starting at birth and continuing throughout childhood.

How, then, can a healthy degree of empathy be instilled in a child? “Empathy is a mutable trait, it can be taught,” Dr. Riess told me. “We’re all born with a certain endowment, but it can be dramatically up-regulated or down-regulated depending upon environmental factors,” especially, she said, by the examples set by a child’s caregivers.

Dr. Riess urges parents to be role models who show respect and caring for others: “Billy scraped his knee. Let’s go get a Band-Aid for him,” or “Mrs. Jones just came home from the hospital. Let’s take her some soup.”

Teachers and caregivers in child care and pre-K settings can foster empathy by acknowledging rather than dismissing a child’s distress or by bringing a toy or doll to comfort a child who is upset or injured. Libraries and bookstores are replete with stories in print and video that demonstrate the giving and receiving of empathy for children at different age levels. Among the many choices: “I Am Human,” “What’s Wrong with Timmy?” and a personal favorite, “Wonder,” which was also made into a popular movie last year.

Dr. Riess has vivid memories of how her parents demonstrated empathy, by bringing turkeys before Thanksgiving to the homes of people who had almost nothing. “Kids tend to focus on what they don’t have — this exposes them to people who have so much less and gives them the gift of being a giver.”

She told me of a program called Cradles to Crayons, in which volunteers package up donated items for children in need. The program, currently operating in Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, provides essential items for needy children from birth through age 12.

With older children, parents might take them to help out in a soup kitchen or visit a nursing home, Dr. Riess suggested. “It’s never too late to guide a child toward greater appreciation of others’ feelings,” she wrote.

Equally important is for parents to demonstrate empathy with their own children by acknowledging their concerns and feelings and recognizing their need for security. For example, she said, “When a child is fearful of a dog, instead of saying ‘Don’t be afraid, he won’t bite you,’ say ‘Are you scared of the dog? What scares you?’ This validates the child’s fears rather than negating them.”

At the same time, Dr. Riess said, parents should not overreact by being intolerant of “a single second of unhappiness in their child’s life” lest such misguided empathy deprive the child of developing the grit, perseverance and resilience that is essential to a successful life.

Parents can talk to their children about other people’s feelings. If a child breaks another child’s toy, Dr. Riess suggests that instead of saying “‘Why did you do that? That was bad,’ say ‘Sara is sad because you broke her toy. What can we do to make up for that?’ which leaves the door open for an apology.”

Also helpful is to “validate your child’s difficult emotions instead of being judgmental,” she said. “If the child says ‘I hate Tommy,’ rather than say it’s wrong to hate, ask what makes the child feel that way. Explore what’s behind the feelings, the back story.”

For very young children, stuffed animals or puppets can be used to help them act out different stories, Dr. Riess suggested.

What These Medical Journals Don’t Reveal: Top Doctors’ Ties to Industry

The Sarah Cannon Research Institute, based in Nashville, received nearly $8 million in payments from drug companies on behalf of its president for clinical operations, Dr. Howard Burris, largely for research work. Dozens of his articles published in prestigious medical journals did not include the required disclosures of those payments and relationships. – William DeShazer for The New York Times


“Calls for transparency stem from concerns that researchers’ ties to the health and drug industries increase the odds they will, consciously or not, skew results to favor the companies with whom they do business.”

At this point in the medical news stream, this is a big Duh, to anyone with eyes open, who has read about this subject in the last oh, I dunno, twenty years, It is why the onus of responsibility, and making an intelligently calculated risk decision of whether to take (especially newly marketed) medication, or agree to any procedure, or have surgery, is on us, the patient.
Trust your doctor, if you can, but, if you don’t know the bigger reality in the business of healthcare, you could suffer needlessly.


By Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas, Via NYTimes
Dec. 8, 2018

This article was reported and written in collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit journalism organization.

One is dean of Yale’s medical school. Another is the director of a cancer center in Texas. A third is the next president of the most prominent society of cancer doctors.

These leading medical figures are among dozens of doctors who have failed in recent years to report their financial relationships with pharmaceutical and health care companies when their studies are published in medical journals, according to a review by The New York Times and ProPublica and data from other recent research.

Dr. Howard A. “Skip” Burris III, the president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for instance, declared that he had no conflicts of interest in more than 50 journal articles in recent years, including in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

However, drug companies have paid his employer nearly $114,000 for consulting and speaking, and nearly $8 million for his research during the period for which disclosure was required. His omissions extended to the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which is published by the group he will lead.

In addition to the widespread lapses by doctors, the review by The Times and ProPublica found that journals themselves often gave confusing advice and did not routinely vet disclosures by researchers, although many relationships could have been easily detected on a federal database.

Medical journals, which are the main conduit for communicating the latest scientific discoveries to the public, often have an interdependent relationship with the researchers who publish in their pages. Reporting a study in a leading journal can heighten their profile — not to mention that of the drug or other product being tested. And journals enhance their cachet by publishing exclusive, breakthrough studies by acclaimed researchers.

In all, the reporting system still appears to have many of the same flaws that the Institute of Medicine identified nearly a decade ago when it recommended fundamental changes in how conflicts of interest are reported. Those have yet to happen.

“The system is broken,” said Dr. Mehraneh Dorna Jafari, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. She and her colleagues published a study in August that found that, of the 100 doctors who received the most compensation from device makers in 2015, conflicts were disclosed in only 37 percent of the articles published in the next year. “The journals aren’t checking and the rules are different for every single thing.”

Calls for transparency stem from concerns that researchers’ ties to the health and drug industries increase the odds they will, consciously or not, skew results to favor the companies with whom they do business. Studies have found that industry-sponsored research tends to be more positive than research financed by other sources. And that in turn can sway which treatments become available to patients. There is no indication that the research done by Dr. Burris and the other doctors with incomplete disclosures was manipulated or falsified.

Journal editors say they are introducing changes that will better standardize disclosures and reduce errors. But some have also argued that since most researchers follow the rules, stringent new requirements would be costly and unnecessary.

The issue has gained traction since September, when Dr. José Baselga, who was the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, resigned after The Times and ProPublica reported that he had not revealed his industry ties in dozens of journal articles.

[Read more about doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and their financial relationships with companies.]
Dr. Burris, president of clinical operations and chief medical officer at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, referred questions about the payments to his employer. It defended him, saying the payments were made to the institution, although The New England Journal of Medicine requires disclosure of all such payments.

Other prominent researchers who have submitted erroneous disclosures include Dr. Robert J. Alpern, the dean of the Yale School of Medicine, who failed to disclose in a 2017 journal article about an experimental treatment developed by Tricida that he served on that company’s board of directors and owned its stock. Tricida, which is developing therapies for chronic kidney disease, had financed the clinical trial that was the subject of the article.

Dr. Alpern said in an email that he initially believed that his disclosure — that he had been a consultant for Tricida — was adequate. However, “because of concerns recently raised about disclosures,” he said he notified the publication, The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, in October that he also served on Tricida’s board and had stock holdings in the company.

The journal initially told Dr. Alpern that his disclosure was sufficient. But after The Times and ProPublica contacted the publication in November, it said it would correct the article.

Dr. Howard A. Burris III

“The failure to disclose this information at the time of peer review is a violation of our policy,” Dr. Rajnish Mehrotra, the journal’s editor in chief, said in an email.

He later said that an additional inquiry had revealed that all 12 of the article’s authors had submitted incomplete disclosures, and that the journal planned to refer the matter to the ethics committee of the American Society of Nephrology. Dr. Mehrotra also said that the journal had decided to conduct an audit of some recent articles to evaluate the broader issue.

Dr. Carlos L. Arteaga, the director of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas, said he had “nothing to disclose” as an author of a 2016 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine of the breast cancer drug Kisqali, made by Novartis. But Dr. Arteaga had received more than $50,000 from drug companies in the three-year disclosure period, including more than $14,000 from Novartis.

In an email, Dr. Arteaga described the omission as an “inexcusable oversight and error on my part,” and subsequently submitted a correction.

Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, an associate vice president for research at the University of Utah, recently argued in JAMA, a leading medical journal, that researchers should face misconduct charges when they do not disclose their relationships with interested companies. “They really are falsifying the information that others rely on to assess that research,” he said. “Money is a very powerful influencer, and people’s opinions become subtly biased by that financial relationship.”

But Dr. Howard C. Bauchner, the editor in chief of JAMA, said that verifying each author’s disclosures would not be worth the time or effort. “The vast majority of authors are honest and do want to fulfill their obligations to tell readers and editors what their conflicts of interest could be,” he said in an interview.

As the debate continues, an influential group, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, is considering a policy that would refer researchers who commit major disclosure errors to their institutions for possible charges of research misconduct.

Concerns about the influence of drug companies on medical research have persisted for decades. Senator Estes Kefauver held hearings on the issue in 1959, and there was another surge of concern in the 2000s after a series of scandals in which prominent doctors failed to reveal their industry relationships.

Medical journals and professional societies strengthened their requirements. The drug industry restricted how it compensates doctors, prohibiting gifts like tickets to sporting events or luxury trips — although evidence of kickbacks and corruption continues to surface in criminal prosecutions. And a 2010 federal law required pharmaceutical and device makers to publicly report their payments to physicians.

Questioned about omissions on his disclosure forms accompanying research articles, Dr. Burris submitted new disclosures to the New England Journal of Medicine showing his ties to many drug and health care companies.

Despite these changes, the system for disclosing conflicts remains fragmented and weakly enforced. Medical journals and professional societies have a variety of guidelines about what types of relationships must be reported, often leaving it up to the researcher to decide what is relevant. There are few repercussions — beyond a correction — for those who fail to follow the rules.

For example, the American Association for Cancer Research has warned authors that they face a three-year ban if they are found to have omitted a potential conflict. But the group’s policy on conflicts of interest contains no mention of such a penalty, and it said no author had ever been barred. Dr. Baselga’s failure to disclose his industry relationships extended to the association’s journal, Cancer Discovery, for which he serves as one of two editors in chief. The association said it is investigating Dr. Baselga’s actions.

Most authors do seem to disclose their ties to corporate interests. About two-thirds of the authors on the Kisqali study, for example, reported relationships with companies, including Novartis. But the researchers who did not included Dr. Arteaga, Dr. Burris and Dr. Denise A. Yardley, a senior investigator who works with Dr. Burris at Sarah Cannon.

The Tennessee-based research center received more than $105,000 in fees for consulting, speaking and other services on Dr. Yardley’s behalf in the three-year period in which she declared no conflicts.

The Sarah Cannon institute said it switched over a year ago to a “universal disclosure” practice promoted by ASCO, the cancer group that Dr. Burris will lead. That requires doctors to disclose all payments, including those made to their institutions.

“We believe we adhere to the highest ethical standards in the industry by not allowing personal compensation to be paid to our leadership physicians,” the center said.

ASCO said it would post corrections to Dr. Burris’s disclosures in The Journal of Clinical Oncology for the past four years. The group said that in the fall of 2017 — as Dr. Burris was seeking a leadership role in the organization — it began working with him to disclose all his company relationships, including indirect payments. Dr. Burris will become president in June 2019.

“Disclosure systems and processes in medicine are not perfect yet, and neither are ASCO’s,” the group said in an email.

Dr. Burris, Dr. Yardley and Dr. Arteaga submitted updated disclosures to The New England Journal of Medicine, which posted them on Thursday.

Dr. Burris’s new corrections to his disclosure forms that were posted by the New England Journal of Medicine show payments to his employer from Novartis, among other companies, for his work.

Dr. Burris’s updated disclosure listed relationships with 30 companies, including that he provided expert testimony for Novartis.

Other studies recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine also omitted disclosures, including one on a 2018 study on a treatment for sickle cell disease and another on the recently approved cancer drug Vitravki, to be sold by Bayer and Loxo Oncology.

Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for the journal, said that it was contacting those studies’ authors, and that it now asked researchers to certify that they had checked their disclosures against the federal database.

Some institutions have pushed back, arguing that the journals’ inconsistent rules make it difficult for even well-meaning researchers to do the right thing.

In a letter last month To the New England Journal of Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering objected to the treatment of one of its top researchers, Dr. Jedd Wolchok. When he tried to correct his disclosures, the journal shifted its position, from saying its editors were satisfied with his disclosures to saying he had failed to comply with the rules, the center said in citing communications with the journal.

Dr. Wolchok, a pioneer in cancer immunotherapy, ultimately corrected 13 articles and letters to the editor.

To clarify reporting requirements, several publications are attempting only now to do what the Institute of Medicine recommended in 2009. The New England Journal is testing a new system in partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges that would act as a central repository for reporting financial relationships.

This year, JAMA began requiring authors to confirm multiple times that they had nothing to disclose. ASCO has a centralized system for reporting conflicts to all of its journals and speaker presentations.

Dr. Bernard Lo, the chairman of the 2009 Institute of Medicine panel, said journals have only begun to confront some of the systemic flaws. “They’re certainly not out in front trying to be trailblazers, let me just say it that way,” he said. “The fact that it hasn’t been done means that nobody has it on their priority list.”

Charles Ornstein is a senior editor at ProPublica.

Arrest Shakes Huawei as Global Skepticism of Its Business Grows

A shopping mall in Shanghai on Thursday. China sees Huawei as a main driver of its ambitions for technological leadership. But much of the world sees it as a potential conduit for espionage and sabotage.

Via NYTIMES

This is a complicated situation that warrants intense scrutiny. Not only for the sanctions violations, but increasingly, the security issues. Technology is (about to be) everything in today’s world economies, political an social structures. In other words, everything about everything. Whether it’s this situation with China, or others with Russia, or the U.S., the way this cookie crumbles will foretell things to come. Do I have confidence this administration will get ahead of it, intelligently, responsibly, and make the right moves to protect what’s left to protect? Ask me something else.


It is one of China’s proudest corporate success stories, a colossus in cutting-edge technology that elbowed out Western rivals to become the biggest supplier of the hardware that connects our modern world.

Now, all around the globe, the walls are going up for Huawei.

The United States, which for years has considered the Chinese telecommunications giant a security threat, aimed a straight shot at the company’s leadership when it secured the arrest, in Canada, of Huawei’s chief financial officer.

But lately, Huawei’s setbacks have come on multiple fronts, from New Zealand and Australia to Britain and Canada. China sees the company as a pivotal driver of its ambitions for global technological leadership. Increasingly, much of the rest of the world sees it as a potential conduit for espionage and sabotage.

Huawei said Thursday that it was not aware of any wrongdoing by its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is a daughter of the company’s founder, and that it complied with the law wherever it operated. The company has long denied that it spies on behalf of Beijing.

For many years, the fog of distrust surrounding Huawei was a problem largely confined to the United States. Large American mobile carriers such as AT&T have avoided using Huawei’s equipment in their networks ever since a 2012 congressional report highlighted the security risks.

In response, Huawei focused its business efforts elsewhere. Its success in wealthy places such as Europe has helped it become the planet’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, as well as its No. 2 smartphone brand. Of the more than $90 billion in revenue it earned last year, more than a quarter came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Now, a wider patch of the world appears to be siding with Washington against Chinese technology. A turn en masse against the company, led by governments in many of its most important markets, would have grave implications for its business.

Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and a daughter of its founder, was arrested on Saturday in Canada at the request of the United States.

Australia barred Huawei this year from supplying technology for the country’s fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile networks. New Zealand last week blocked one of its leading mobile carriers from buying Huawei’s 5G gear. Britain’s intelligence chief, in a rare public appearance this week, said that the country had a difficult decision to make on whether to allow Huawei to build its 5G infrastructure.

And Canada’s top spy echoed those concerns, without naming Huawei or China, in a speech on Tuesday. Huawei has tested 5G equipment with major mobile carriers in both Canada and Britain.

Behind the tariff fight that has engulfed Washington and Beijing lies a deeper contest for leadership in future technologies such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence and 5G mobile internet. For many people in China, the contest feels not merely commercial, but civilizational. At stake is the country’s ability to claim its rightful place as a superpower.

“The Chinese government and Chinese companies must face these new circumstances, take up new countermeasures and get through this stage of crisis,” Fang Xingdong, the founder of ChinaLabs, a technology think tank in Beijing, said on Thursday. “This is a necessary rite of passage for China’s global technological rise.”

Huawei has tried to avoid being pulled into this fight. In an internal memo from January that was reviewed by The New York Times, Ren Zhengfei, the company’s founder, outlined a strategy for navigating these uncertain times.

The key, he wrote: Keep adapting. But do so quietly.

“Sometimes, it’s better to find a safe place and wait for stormy weather to pass,” Mr. Ren wrote.

Europe was one such place, Mr. Ren said. Huawei has cultivated political friendships and invested heavily in places like Britain. “Eventually, through years of effort, our goal is for Europeans to perceive Huawei as a European company,” Mr. Ren wrote.

Canada seemed to be another safe harbor. “The Canadian government is very sensible and open, giving us enormous confidence in our investments in this country,” Mr. Ren wrote.

This was all before Washington nearly put out of business Huawei’s main Chinese rival, ZTE.

In April, the Commerce Department barred ZTE from using components made in the United States after saying the company had failed to punish employees who violated American sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The move was effectively a death sentence because ZTE relied heavily on American microchips and other technology.
Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, has sought to avoid conflicts by quietly adapting the company’s approach overseas. “Eventually, through years of effort, our goal is for Europeans to perceive Huawei as a European company,” he wrote at one point.

In building its case against ZTE, the United States government began investigating Huawei as well.

When the Commerce Department first announced its findings against ZTE in 2016, it released an internal ZTE document illustrating best practices for evading American sanctions.

In describing the approach, the document cited a company it nicknamed F7 as a model for how to pull it off. The description of F7 in the document matched Huawei.

A few months later, the Commerce Department subpoenaed Huawei and requested all information about its export or re-export of American technology to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, according to a copy of the subpoena seen by The Times.

The inquiry widened this year when the Treasury and Commerce Departments asked the Justice Department to investigate Huawei for possible sanctions violations. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York took on the case.

Eventually, the Trump administration decided to ease its punishment of ZTE, in an effort to cool tensions with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ahead of a historic North Korea meeting. But the power that Washington wielded over the fates of Chinese tech companies had been made very clear to people on both sides of the Pacific. In October, the Commerce Department imposed export controls on Fujian Jinhua, a state-backed semiconductor company that has been accused of stealing American chip designs.

Should Huawei be subjected to a ban on using American technology, the consequences would be significant, though perhaps not as life-threatening as they were for ZTE.

One crucial difference is that Huawei, unlike ZTE, does not depend extensively on outside vendors such as Qualcomm for the main chips in its smartphones. Around two-thirds of the handsets that Huawei sells contain chips made in-house, said Sean Kao, a hardware analyst at the research firm IDC.

Still, American firms supply other kinds of chips in Huawei’s gear as well as optical equipment for its fiber cable networks and other specialized parts.

“I don’t know exactly how many suppliers are affected,” said Stéphane Téral, senior research director at the data provider IHS Markit. But one thing is certain, he said: “They won’t be easily substitutable.”