“Time well spent” is shaping up to be tech’s next big debate


In 2016, Tristan Harris, whose job title at Google was “design ethicist,” left the company to focus on a new nonprofit he called Time Well Spent. The goal of Time Well Spent is to reverse what it cals “the digital attention crisis” — the brilliants minds at Google, Apple, Facebook, and elsewhere who “hijack our minds” through ever-more sophisticated manipulation techniques delivered through our smartphones. Harris has emerged as a vocal critic of Facebook, appearing on NBC this week to call the company “a living, breathing crime scene.”

You might expect that Facebook, which derives its profits from the amount of time people spend interacting with the advertisements in its apps, would reject the Time Well Spent thesis. Instead, the...

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via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2DL4UKL"

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