Uber’s Collision, Facebook’s Disgrace

It has been a wretched week for the American technology industry.

There is the big story: the double revelation that Cambridge Analytica, ostensibly a voter-profiling company, used data from 49.5 million Facebook accounts without securing users’ permission; and that thousands of third-party developers who once built seemingly innocuous apps on Facebook’s platform may have their own caches of private information.

This debacle also exposed Cambridge Analytica’s CEO as a pedigreed creep: Alexander Nix promised to bribe and blackmail politicians and used the N-word in company emails. Though Nix has now been suspended, he kept the confidence of some of President Trump’s most important supporters for years, including Steve Bannon and Rebekah Mercer, a co-owner of Breitbart News and a Cambridge Analytica board member.

But this was not the only—or even the most awful—nightmare to befall a tech company this week. On Sunday night, one of Uber’s self-driving cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona.

Elaine Herzberg, a 49-year-old woman, was walking her bicycle across a road when a Volvo SUV, outfitted with Uber’s radar technology and in fully autonomous mode, collided with her. The car was traveling at 38 miles per hour in a 35-mile-per-hour zone, and it.