J.R.McHale

Study Says Self-Driving Cars Would Eliminate Majority Of Traffic Deaths, Congestion: CBS News.

But: Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think: MIT Technology Review.

Smart Robots, Driverless Cars Work – but They Bring Ethical Issues Too: The Guardian.

Previously: Two good reads on the future of driverless (and driver assisting) cars, including the significant advantages Google might possess given its access to the voluminous amount of data critical for the safe and proper functioning of driverless cars:

• Data in the Driver’s Seat by Frédéric Filloux at MondayNote: “Applied to millions of vehicles, traffic and infrastructure management will turn into a gigantic data and communication problem. Again, Google might be the only entity able to write the required software and to deploy the data centers to run it. Its millions of servers will be of great use to handle weather information, road conditions (as cars might be able to monitor their actual friction on the road and transmit the data to following vehicles, or detect humidity and temperature change), parking data and fuel availability (gas or electricity). And we can even think of merging all this with day-to-day life elements such as individual calendars, commuting patterns and geolocating people through their cell phones.”
  

• Why Silicon Valley is Winning the Robocar Race by Virginia Postrel at BloombergView: “One reason for Silicon Valley’s ascendency is the extraordinary quality of today’s cars. Pretty much everybody makes reliable cars that drive well. So the main competitive differences don’t come from mechanical engineering but from software.”
  

California Lawmaker Introduces Personal Data Disclosure Bill: ‘Right to Know Act of 2013’ Would Force Companies to Tell Californians What They Know

The DataPortability Project [is] a registered not-for-profit that exists for the sole purpose of advocating the portability of personal data residing on websites and in networks … [T]he current ToS and EULA model—those hundred page legal documents you are forced to agree to in order to use a service—are often ignored by consumers and hence they are surprised when they get a service enforcing its terms. We believed a simpler way is needed to communicate what a service does with respect to a person’s data and what rights they have over it. Later this month, we will be formally announcing our initiative which we call the “Portability Policy”. This will be a set of questions a company can answer (with no right or wrong answers) that discloses what people can do with their data.