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"he outlines three sources of dysfunction - 'deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment'; 'system design' which has created 'perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait'; and the 'viral spread of misinformation'. he also calls attention to the 'unintended negative consequences' of the web, which he said had led to 'the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse'."

""Before anyone meets a new person these days they Google them," Tomlinson said. He added that many people engaged in misdeeds when they were young and if the misdeeds were constantly brought to the attention of others then they would permanently have a negative effect."

"Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan calls Zoom a "privacy disaster," filled with "creepy" features that send tracking data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and tell meeting hosts if attendees aren't paying attention. Zoom's privacy policy allows it to use what it calls "customer content" for advertising purposes."

"The app, which scraped billions of photos from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other online platforms, drew the world's attention last weekend following a detailed report in the New York Times. The app's supposed capability to identify practically anyone from even low-quality photos frightened privacy advocates and officials. And today, one of the latter - New Jersey's attorney general Gurbir Grewal - actually did something about it."

"At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It's a world of broken links and missing files-often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for "the inconvenience." Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine's most unnerving or charming or "iconic" six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down. It doesn't help that the internet has no attention span and no loyalty: What isn't erased or deleted can still be quickly forgotten, buried under a pile of new platforms, new subcultures, and new joke formats. The feed refreshes, and so does the entire topography of the web."

"Qoves founder Shafee Hassan claimed to MIT Technology Review that beauty scoring is widespread; social media platforms use it to identify attractive faces and give them more attention."

"Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. "The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful," said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. "It's not only that Signal doesn't have these policies in place. But they've been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.""

"Having mastered facial recognition for humans to an alarmingly precise degree, even picking out wanted criminals from huge crowds, Chinese tech whizzes are turning their attention to furrier faces. "We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace Tech, a company developing software for the agriculture industry."

"Instagram turned our phones into adult pacifiers. At first, this was a tranquillising reel of pretty pictures, pumped in a steady stream with each thumb-swipe. Like a warm milky drink, but of sunsets and puppies and toes in the sand. Later, and more insidiously, the dopamine hit shifted to refreshing your feed to see how many likes your own pictures had. Either way, we had got ourselves in a feedback loop of attention-seeking in which our emotions were channelled from our brains to our phones and back again. Twitter is about your tribe, Facebook is about home and family, but Instagram is a romance between just you and your phone."

"The role of so-called social media "bots" - automated accounts capable of posting content or interacting with other users with no direct human involvement - has been the subject of much scrutiny and attention in recent years. "

"Some ideas include building mechanisms into devices or platforms that cause them to shut down automatically after two hours, or nudges that make it more difficult to keep spending money in an app. The problem is that tech companies are ruled by a profit model built on capturing more of our attention to sell to advertisers. Designing platforms so they limit the amount of time we spend on social media runs counter to this model."

"A major data breach at Phetchabun Hospital last week served as a loud wake-up call to state and private organisations to pay attention to their cybersecurity measures, as experts warned cybercrimes could become more commonplace in the years to come. The breach involved the data of 10,095 patients, including their names and dates of admission and discharge."

"Lizzo's comments came just a week after Instagram unveiled a new feature that allows users to limit comments and DM requests during "spikes of increased attention". The feature, which users can opt in or out of, automatically hides comments from accounts that don't follow the user or only recently followed the user."

"This is the longest I've spent on Facebook in about four years. Finally, I've decided to delete it. In my 30s, it's started to stress me out that my profile still exists. Drunk pictures of me on display for people I haven't thought about in a decade. Whatever teenage me saw worthy of a status update just out there, searchable, findable, obscured only by privacy settings that I don't fully understand."

"Growth, then, is the animating ideal behind the platforms these companies build, and 'persuasive technology' is the means of achieving this. The research this technology is built on draws on everything from dopamine studies to behavioural psychology and addiction analysis. Features galore have emerged to keep our attention, from the endless scroll to dark patterns, but one is more important than all others, according to Fisher: recommendation algorithms."

""With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable," says Finlay Shakespeare. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. With streaming, he says: "If I didn't gel with an album or an artist's work at first, I tended not to go back to it." But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. "Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music." Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention."

"After I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2022, I started following Instagram accounts that could help me understand the condition. Reels and memes about being neurodivergent started to fill my feed, along with tips on how to manage ADHD in a relationship and other helpful advice. But within days, something else happened: my phone found out about my diagnosis. All of a sudden, I was being served with ads for apps that claimed they could help me to manage my symptoms. There were quizzes to determine what type of ADHD I had: was I predominantly inattentive or impulsive, one asked. Did I definitely have it? Find out by taking this diagnostic test, another promised."

"The company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI. Independent publisher Canongate said "these dingbats … don't care about writing or books", in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging "hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft". "These aren't people who care about books or reading or anything remotely related," said author Suyi Davies Okungbowa, whose most recent book is Lost Ark Dreaming, in a post on Bluesky. "These are opportunists and extractive capitalists.""

"Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now, your web browser has its own affliction: slop. "Slop" is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view. Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to actually answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Instead, it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content, benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards other sites."

"A new AI-infused classroom management tool with facial recognition capabilities has garnered attention recently with promises to take attendance, assess the emotional states of students, and monitor classes for distraction, boredom and confusion. But the technology and similar developments have raised numerous legal, ethical, and civil liberties questions similar to those surrounding campus safety surveillance programs and test proctoring programs widely adopted during the COVID pandemic."