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Hi, I’m Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here’s a look at the week’s tech news:
I do it. You do it. We all do it: Look at screens. The. Whole. Time.
Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, recently issued a battle cry against the potent cocktail of data and algorithms that he said tech companies had designed to hijack human attention. He claimed that they were “downgrading” our attention spans, relationships, civility and more.
There’s growing moral panic about our reliance on screens and the content, in particular social media, they display. My colleague Kevin Roose felt it, and forced himself to detox. (Spoiler: He liked it.)
But while researchers I’ve spoken with said the way we used devices could be troubling, they also said we didn’t fully understand the problems or how to solve them.
Dr. Henrietta Bowden-Jones, the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ spokeswoman on behavioral addictions, pointed out that not all screen time was equal.
“You can do all kinds of things on a phone,” she said. “The addiction is to the activity — gambling, gaming, watching porn.” Much of our time with screens can be a healthy, she added, analogous to, say, reading a book.
A problem is that we lack granular insight about how people use their devices, making it hard to understand how damaging our relationships with them are.
As we’ve conducted more of our lives online, “the amount of human behavior we can directly observe has been shrinking,” said Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist and director of research at the Oxford internet Institute. “As time has gone on, the ability to formulate meaningful questions and then ask them of good data has diminished.”
Except, some people do have access to such data: They work at companies like Facebook, Google and Apple. These companies all collect troves of information — all locked away — about how we use technology.
Inspired by our panic, Google and Apple have introduced tools to help users manage their digital activity. But should we trust tech companies to help curb tech use?
My colleague Jack Nicas reported that, since launching such tools for iPhones, Apple had purged other smartphone addiction apps from its App Store. Apple said it was over privacy violations; app makers said it was because their software could hurt Apple’s business.
If the app makers are right, Apple is cornering the market on access to iPhone use data.
That would be troubling. If other companies and researchers had access to such data — along with Facebook’s likes, Netflix’s streaming figures, Google’s browsing histories and more — they could study it to more accurately understand what is genuinely problematic about relationships with our devices, and develop meaningful interventions to overcome problems.
There are problems with this idea. Getting tech companies to give up data is hard, probably requiring regulatory intervention. Use of the data would obviously need to be closely policed. And it’s slower than an intervene-first-think-later approach.
But if we’re going to stop using screens, let’s do it based on sound evidence.
Facebook’s new certainty: Uncertainty
“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” Mark Zuckerberg told the crowd at Facebook’s annual developer conference on Tuesday, a smile on his face. He paused, perhaps expecting laughter.
There was virtual silence.
He pushed on, describing a new, more private Facebook — a bid to overcome the privacy and data scandals that have dogged his company. My colleague Mike Isaac explained what this would look like: more sharing in private groups, ephemeral content and encryption by default on messaging services.
Sounds promising! So why the silence? One reason, excepting Mr. Zuckerberg’s delivery, was panic.
Facebook is entering uncharted territory, and Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t sure what the future looks like, according to an interview he gave to The Washington Post. Here are some takeaways:
■ His business plan is hazy. “I don’t know how good of a business it will be, but I am confident it will be good,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
■ He can’t say how long the pivot will take. “The next five years at least, maybe even the next 10 years, is building out the private platforms with the richness that the public platforms have had to date,” he said.
■ And impending regulation from all corners, perhaps the biggest threat to Facebook’s future, is largely beyond its control.
The developers listening to Mr. Zuckerberg were aware of this, and the upheaval that the shift could cause them. Excuse them for not laughing.
What keeps Uber up at night?
Uber spent the week on a roadshow, trying to persuade investors to buy its shares ahead of its initial public offering. As Mike Isaac reported, Uber’s pitch draws parallels to Amazon: a do-anything juggernaut that will aggressively invest and diversify.
Investors have reportedly been asking hard questions about the rid-hailing company’s growth, competition and market share. Which is reasonable, given that Uber dedicated 35,000 words in its I.P.O. prospectus to what could go wrong.
Here are some of its biggest nightmares:
Employees. Uber labels its drivers contractors, not employees, to avoid paying a minimum wage. More than 60,000 drivers have filed or plan to file for arbitration to change that, a shift that could cost it billions of dollars. (It will be heartened by the Labor Department’s recent decision to exempt an unspecified gig-economy company from that fate.)
Competitors’ autonomous cars. Robo-cars are essential to Uber’s profitability: They’ll allow vehicles to offer rides 24-7 without human drivers, who currently share the takings. But if competitors like Waymo crack the technology first, Uber could be ruined.
Regulation. It’s 2019, and the authorities are after tech companies — whether through outright blocks to Uber’s taxi service or privacy regulations that crimp its ability to innovate.
Itself. For years, Uber was perhaps tech’s biggest villain. It worries that its cultural and leadership fixes might not be enough to solve its lingering P.R. problems.
And, um, restaurants and delivery companies? Uber’s aggressive diversification means competitors are everywhere: Restaurants steal customers from its food delivery service, and companies like DHL compete with its freight service.
And some stories you shouldn’t miss
■ Huawei has a culture problem. It seeks acceptance in the West, but its structure and value system — shaped after the Communist Party’s — could stand in the way.
■ Tech giants reported sliding financial results. Slumping iPhone sales shrank Apple’s profit, and growth is faltering at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
■ Border officials have designs on your devices. The American Civil Liberties Union found that two agencies — Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — have “near-unfettered authority to search and seize travelers’ devices at the border.”
■ Sri Lanka’s president lifted the nation’s ban on social media. It was supposed to prevent the spread of misinformation after bombings on Easter.
■ Drones: now delivering organs. One of the unmanned vehicles delivered a kidney last month to a Maryland woman who had waited eight years for a lifesaving transplant.
■ I.P.O.s keep coming. Slack and WeWork are the latest tech unicorns to file paperwork for impending initial public offerings.
■ Robots rule the roost at Amazon. The company dismissed the idea that robots would soon replace its warehouse workers, but machines are hiring and firing those employees.
■ Qualcomm is getting at least $4.5 billion from Apple. That’s the settlement from their lengthy patent battle.
Jamie Condliffe is editor of the DealBook newsletter. He also writes the weekly Bits newsletter. Follow him on Twitter here: @jme_c.
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