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It's Sunday afternoon and I'm polishing my surfing "pop up" technique under the instructor's watchful gaze. I lie prone, elbows in, chest raised and push off the balls of my feet, jumping into a wobbly high crouch. It's not the most graceful move, but coach Rachel shouts encouragement at my efforts.

I'm on a "retreat" with Soul & Surf, which runs yoga and surfing holidays in Portugal, India and Sri Lanka, but this weekend we're not in an exotic location by the sea. I'm trying out its new Soul & Surf Pause - a two-day "virtual holiday" with the action taking place in my living room via Zoom.

"We wanted to recreate the elements of a retreat with us - and stay connected while we can't travel," said co-founder Ed Templeton. "There's the yoga and surfing, but that sense of community too."

The timetable is a mix of live classes and pre-recorded material, and we join an introductory chat to meet the team and other guests in lockdown around the world. There are three hour-long Zoom yoga classes in different styles, from dynamic vinyasa to grounding yin, designed to counter our more sedentary lives and aid relaxation. We spend a pleasant hour learning shiatsu self-massage with Becca, finding acupressure points to strengthen lungs and release stress.

There are playlists to boost the holiday vibe, suggested menus with short video cookery demonstrations (my Sri Lankan dal tastes great despite missing a few ingredients) and recorded breath work, meditation and yoga nidra (sleep) classes to dip into. A surf and music film (Self Discovery for Social Survival, on Amazon Prime) is suggested for an ocean boost - and to analyse for surfing techniques.

As someone self-isolating alone, I love having days planned and punctuated with regular check-ins with other people. On Saturday evening we meet Sam Bleakley, pro-surfer and filmmaker (we've been sent a link to his Brilliant Corners: Kerala), and talk about the growing surf culture in India. We also hear from marine activist Natalie Fox about eXXpedition, an all-female sailing trip to collect data on ocean microplastics.

The Sunday evening sundowners come around all too quickly. It has been a perfect mix of physical activity, interesting chats and time to chill - a weekend "away", without stepping outside the front door.

* Soul & Surf's next home retreat is on 9-10 May, with others to follow, £80pp. Cost includes contributions to charity partners Surfers Against Sewage and the Sebastian Indian Social Project in Kerala, and some free spots for key workers
Topics

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In lockdown, I went on a surfing and yoga retreat - via Zoom

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It's Sunday afternoon and I'm polishing my surfing "pop up" technique under the instructor's watchful gaze. I lie prone, elbows in, chest raised and push off the balls of my feet, jumping into a wobbly high crouch. It's not the most graceful move, but coach Rachel shouts encouragement at my efforts.

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Coronavirus reveals need to bridge the digital divide

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Coronavirus reveals need to bridge the digital divide

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UNCTAD Unpacks: How the coronavirus reveals the need to bridge the digital divide

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In September, there was the first whiff of a potential sale and just a few months later, Google has announced it's acquiring Fitbit for a reported $2.1 billion (£1.63bn). Google is getting hardware and software teams with wearable-tech expertise, including Pebble smarts, to add to its mixed efforts with Wear OS and the $40 million (£30m) worth of Fossil smartwatch technology it paid for at the start of 2019.

It's also getting data. A whole lot of it; something that is undeniably at the heart of this sizeable acquisition. But what data is Google getting? What can Google do with it? And can GDPR or Labour's Tom Watson make any difference?

Fitbit has 28m active users syncing step counts, heart-rate readings, sleep time, menstrual cycles, location and more from their devices. That could be the most lucrative component of the deal: user data. It will have no doubt been a reason Facebook was also apparently sniffing around to see if it could buy the struggling fitness tracker maker, too. Fitbit sales fell from 22m in 2016 to an estimated 14m in 2018.

Unsurprisingly, both parties have been swift to address the subject of data and privacy in their respective announcements detailing the acquisition. In Fitbit's press release, it stated: "Fitbit will continue to put users in control of their data and will remain transparent about the data it collects and why." It also added: "The company never sells personal information, and Fitbit health wellness data will not be used for Google ads."

There were similar sentiments in a blog post by Google from Rick Osterloh, the company's senior vice president of devices and services. "Similar to our other products, with wearables, we will be transparent about the data we collect and why. We will never sell personal information to anyone." Osterloh repeated what Fitbit had to say about Fitbit health and wellness data: "We will give Fitbit users the choice to review, move or delete their data."

On the surface, both Google and Fitbit are trying to cover their backs and assure users that things won't change in the way their data is treated when the deal is likely completed in 2020. In some cases, Fitbit users will already have given Google access to their stats via Google Fit syncing on Android phones.

"Fitbit users will be asking themselves whether they want sensitive data like this being used and monetised by Google," says Ed Johnson-Williams, a policy officer at Open Rights Group. "Google says they won't use the data for targeting ads. Google must tell Fitbit users and competition authorities what other purposes they will they use it for."

"In the past, Google has abruptly pulled the plug on devices sold to customers by companies they've acquired. Google must also reassure Fitbit users that this won't happen here."

There's an air of uncertainty surrounding how data will be carved up and moved around the business and it's something Leo Gebbie, senior analyst for wearables and VR at CCS Insight, also believes still needs clarity. "How exactly the data will be used is currently unclear, and Fitbit users who are concerned about this should be careful to review the terms of their data use once the deal is complete."

The best fitness trackers for any budget in 2019

Fitbit became HIPAA-compliant [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] in the US in 2015, and so, according to James Moar, research analyst at Juniper Research, "any large-scale data collection that would be similar to Google's ad data platform would jeopardise Fitbit's existing corporate wellness business."

Fitbit states that "health wellness data" will not be used for ads. But what about the other data it collects? As Johnson-Williams explains, Fitbit's platform also collects location data and other non-health personal information, too. There have been no assurances on this front so far, or any mention of the level of anonymisation of this type of data.

Fitbit's privacy policy currently states that if Fitbit is acquired, it will "give affected users notice before transferring any personal information to a new entity". But who's to say that Google's stance will not change? It's happened before after a Silicon Valley acquisition has been completed.

"We've seen promises broken in the past where other digital services were acquired," explains Johnson-Williams. "When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, users were told that WhatsApp data wouldn't be shared with Facebook. Once the dust settled on the acquisition, Facebook started using data about how people used WhatsApp."

If Google or Fitbit do break these kinds of promises, there could be fines lying in wait. Google has already been found to be in breach of EU's data privacy rules. It was fined £44m by French data protection regulator CNIL over data transparency back in January, making it one of the biggest GDPR fines dished out. In September, it was also fined $170m (£131m) for sharing data on children on YouTube without the consent of parents.

Whether those types of fines are really going to hit a company that's valued at over $100bn seems unlikely. To be completely cynical, it could actually make business sense to use the new cache of Fitbit user data widely within Alphabet's companies and simply risk future fines.

Will GDPR regulations in Europe result in different policies for different territories? As fitness data is integral to the service provision to the user, fitness data can be processed by both Fitbit and Google under GDPR, explains Moar. "There needs to be explicit consent for this, but that was already built into the frameworks Fitbit had." Moar expects data portability to the biggest issue under GDPR, such as "being able to take Fitbit data and provide it as part of another device maker's record (such as Garmin)." In that case, the data management would be easier to do on a global basis with one global data privacy policy.

If data is not used for more targeted data-driven ads where Google's main income lies, what else can we expect? "Fitbit already sells their devices to employers to monitor employees and to health insurance providers. Google could be looking to expand into these markets," suggests Jonhson-Williams. "I'd also fully expect Google to have access to all historical data rather than just any new data going forward as well."

On that point, Juniper Research's Moar agrees that there's no reason to expect that historical Fitbit data will not be transferred in the sale. "This would require an update to the existing Terms & Conditions thanks to the change of ownership, which may lose Google some users, but there are no other obstacles to the company accessing all of Fitbit's existing users."

Ramon Llamas, wearable tech analyst at IDC, has an entirely different take on the move by Google to acquire Fitbit and believes it's not really about data here. "Accessing data is not the endgame for Google. This is more about expanding its opportunities in healthcare."

Google parent company Alphabet has already shown its own ambitions to delve deeper into the health-monitoring space through projects in development under its Verily Life Sciences research organisation and the biotech spin-off Calico. Fitbit meanwhile in recent years has ramped up things as far as conducting clinical trials and collaborating with major health researchers and organisations.

In fact, the two already announced a partnership in 2018 to bring health and fitness data to doctors and healthcare services. At the time Fitbit announced its intention to use Google's Cloud Healthcare API to integrate Fitbit data into medical records.

It is more than plausible that Google's intentions for the way user data is used will be both legal and designed to benefit users. That said, we have already seen the tech giant come under scrutiny from regulators, the authorities and most recently Labour's Tom Watson over what a deal like this could mean in terms of letting a company on the scale of Google hold so much (more) personal and health data. It's enough to make Fitbit users understandably wary of what happens next.

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What is Google going to do with your Fitbit data? Anything it likes

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In September, there was the first whiff of a potential sale and just a few months later, Google has announced it's acquiring Fitbit for a reported $2.1 billion (£1.63bn). Google is getting hardware and software teams with wearable-tech expertise, including Pebble smarts, to add to its mixed efforts with Wear OS and the $40 million (£30m) worth of Fossil smartwatch technology it paid for at the start of 2019.

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The eventual goal is to be able to identify a target within five seconds based on their cardiac signal, or 'heartprint.' At the moment, however, the Pentagon's system has a number of limitations: the target needs to be standing still, needs to be wearing light clothing (thick clothing, like a heavy coat, can interfere with the signal), and most importantly there needs to be a clear line of sight between the laser and the target.

Coats, walls, even rocks and rubble are no obstacle for another nascent surveillance technology, however. Researchers are hard at work developing radar-based systems capable of tracking vital signs for a range of purposes, from non-invasive monitoring of patients and aiding in medical diagnoses to finding survivors in search and rescue operations.

Monitoring indoor movements

But why bother installing new radars when we're already bathed in a different sort of radiation pretty much all the time? Wi-Fi can also be used to locate individuals, identify their position in the room and whether they're sitting or standing, and even track vital signs.

Until recently, it was thought a dedicated Wi-Fi network was required, in part because the technique depends on knowing the exact position of the Wi-Fi transmitters. In 2018, however, a group of researchers at the University of California built an app which allowed them to figure out the exact location of existing Wi-Fi transmitters in a building. With that information, they were able to use normal smartphones and existing ambient Wi-Fi networks to detect human presence and movement from outside the room. "With more than two Wi-Fi devices in a regular room, our attack can detect more than 99 per cent of user presence and movement in each room tested," the researchers claim.

Some research groups want to go further than just using Wi-Fi to identify people. Based on movement and vital signs, they claim it is possible to monitor the subject's emotional state and analyse their behavioural patterns. These researchers have formed a company to market a 'touchless sensor and machine learning platform for health analytics', which they claim has been deployed in over 200 homes and is being used by doctors and drug companies.

Beyond the potential benefits for healthcare and emergency responders, however, the technology also has obvious applications for surveillance. Technology which is capable of building up a profile of a person's heartbeat and breathing in order to watch for abnormalities in a health context is readily adaptable to being used to identify one person from another. Radar-based security surveillance systems capable of detecting people are already on the market, It's only a matter of time, and perhaps not even very much time, before the ability to identify individual people is layered on top.

Tracking your microbial cells

Every person emits around 36 million microbial cells per hour, and human microbiomes are unique for a certain period of time (a 2015 study found that around 80 per cent of people could be re-identified using their microbiome up to a year later). This means that the constant trail of microbial traces we leave behind us, as well as those we pick up from our surroundings, can be used to help reconstruct a picture of a person's activities and movements, like where they walked, what objects they touched and what environments they have been in.

Monitoring your scent

Identifying people by smell is actually one of the oldest police tricks in the book, but doing it with computers instead of bloodhounds is still in its infancy in comparison with facial and fingerprint recognition. The field of odor biometrics may be useful for individual authentication but is not well suited to mass surveillance - separating exactly who smells like that in a crowd can be tricky, as anyone who has been stuck in public transport on a hot day probably knows.

Bum detection

Then there are the identification techniques designed for very specific use cases. One pioneering suggestion from a team of Japanese researchers for an anti-theft system for cars was based on using 360 sensors to measure the unique shape of the driver's rear end. Despite achieving a 98 per cent accuracy rate in trials, tragically this important security innovation does not seem to have gone any further than lab testing.

The regulation problem

Trying to regulate surveillance technologies one by one is likely to be futile. The surveillance industry is simply developing too fast, and it is too easy to switch from one kind of surveillance to another. The difference between a facial recognition system and one based on behavioural biometrics may simply be a matter of swapping the software on an existing camera network, for example.

Increasing cooperation between government agencies and the private sector also means that regulations like San Francisco's, which limits only government use of certain types of surveillance, are insufficient according to Katina Michael, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University.

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New surveillance tech means you'll never be anonymous again

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The eventual goal is to be able to identify a target within five seconds based on their cardiac signal, or 'heartprint.' At the moment, however, the Pentagon's system has a number of limitations: the target needs to be standing still, needs to be wearing light clothing (thick clothing, like a heavy coat, can interfere with the signal), and most importantly there needs to be a clear line of sight between the laser and the target.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

The Interface is a daily column and newsletter about the intersection of social media and democracy. Subscribe here.

As of Friday, I'll have been self-isolating at home for 30 days. Thanks to quick action on the part of city officials to lock the city down, San Francisco is seeing great success in containing the spread of COVID-19. Within weeks, talk will turn to how we go about re-opening cities to public life - and what role, if any, technology companies should play in the response.

Today - and also tomorrow; this column ends on a cliffhanger! - let's talk about some of the proposals for using tech to reopen cities.

First, you're probably wondering when your city will reopen, and how. This talk is a bit premature, particularly outside of California and Washington. But if you're wondering how public health officials will make that decision, start with this piece in the New York Times by Aaron E. Carroll. He lays out four crucial milestones that each jurisdiction will have to reach:

Hospitals must be able to safely accommodate all COVID-19 patients. Supply has to catch up with demand.

The country must be able to test everyone who needs testing - which will probably amount to around 750,000 tests a week.

The state must be able to monitor confirmed cases and trace the contacts of the people that they may have exposed. This is where tech companies are being asked to play a role.

The number of cases needs to fall every day for 14 days.

So imagine the glorious day, hopefully not too many weeks in the future, when all of that is true in the place that you live. What happens next?

The answer is much more complicated than the current state of affairs, which can be summarized in three words (stay at home). Who gets to work outside the home, how and where we test people and monitor new outbreaks, where we send people who may have been exposed, and what technologies we use to make all that happen - it's all very sketchy.

In Politico, Adam Cancryn outlines one possible Trump Administration response: working with multiple health companies to build a "national coronavirus surveillance system." Cancryn describes it this way:

The project - based on interviews with seven tech executives, government officials and other people familiar with its contours - would draw on detailed information collected from multiple private-sector databases. It would allow federal officials to continuously track elements like hospitals' bed availability and the flow of patients into specific emergency rooms across the country - thereby enabling the government to rush resources to parts of the country before they're hit by a surge of coronavirus cases.

Note that this system could help us determine the first of the four milestones listed above, and not much else. Maybe the project would go further than what's described here, but a Trump spokesman denied any of it was happening at all. So ... we'll see, I guess.

Over in the European Union, authorities have been working on milestone three: a capacity for monitoring new outbreaks as lockdown restrictions lift. As Stephanie Bodoni and Natalia Drozdiak write in Bloomberg, this may prove challenging for a continent that prides itself on high standards for personal privacy. But the European Commission on Wednesday still issued guidelines for building apps that citizens can use on a voluntary basis to aid in the response. The fact that they are voluntary seems likely to limit their effectiveness, Bloomberg reports:

Virus-tracking apps could help authorities find people who have been exposed to Covid-19 so they can be isolated and may ultimately lead to a way out of the restrictive social-isolation measures that are keeping schools, shops and restaurants closed.

While apps may be more precise than aggregated data in pin-pointing potential contagions, they are being released on a voluntary basis to meet strict EU privacy rules. Researchers say they need to be adopted widely in order for an app to be helpful in tracking the virus, which may prove a challenge if people are wary of providing location information to governments or other organizations running the apps.

But the place you really want to look, if you want to think about how the government and the tech industry could collaborate, is China. Dan Grover, a product designer and entrepreneur who formerly lived in Guangzhou, has an outstanding blog post up that documents how Chinese technology companies responded to the coronavirus crisis and argues that Silicon Valley can do more to help. I strive not to describe too many links in this newsletter as must-reads, but I truly believe that anyone who subscribes would get a lot of of reading Grover's post.

As someone who knows very little about Chinese government and industry, I had assumed that China's technological response to COVID-19 was a top-down mandate from Communist Party officials. In fact, as Grover tells it, there was a bottom-up effort from local municipalities and tech companies to devise response efforts that eventually got cobbled together into a national response. He writes:

With waning numbers of new cases outside of heavily-locked-down Hubei, there was mounting desire to return to work in many cities. The Hangzhou munincipal government issued guidelines to companies on how to gradually re-open, with different zones of the city on a schedule.

Unlike other cities passing similar policies at the time, they also established a digital platform for reporting workers' health and gradually whitelisting more enterprises to re-open. Naturally, the system could only be accessed via Alipay and Dingtalk (Alibaba is based in Hangzhou). Central to the system was the notion of a personal health QR code.

The QR code is scanned before admission into buildings and returns one of three color codes: green for admission, yellow for ordering people to quarantine for seven days, and red for ordering people to quarantine for 14 days. The codes are issued by an algorithm that appears to take into account a person's self-reported answer on a health questionnaire and the public health conditions of areas they travel to.

It seems unlikely that one of our tech giants would volunteer to whip up an app to display personal health QR codes. Among other things, it's not clear that the federal government is interested in - or capable of administering - such a system. But as Grover points out, Chinese tech companies have been eager to participate in other ways, placing statistics about new diagnoses in prominent places and emblazoning apps with patriotic messages encouraging national unity. Among other things, he notes, this has probably been good for business. ("Every growth-thirsty product manager in China eager to meet their KPIs, I'm sure, was dying to find a way to shoehorn these stats into their feature to boost engagement.")

But if you've read to this point, you know that messaging can only go so far in helping a given jurisdiction hit those four milestones. What worked for China is a system of quarantine enforcement that may not work in the United States. (It hasn't always worked in China, either.)

Which brings us back to the question of how we monitor people when cities are ready to begin reopening, and what role tech companies could play in that.

We'll talk about that here tomorrow.

Pushback

In yesterday's column I praised WhatsApp for putting additional limits on the forwarding of messages in an effort to curb the spread of misinformation, and I got a couple emails criticizing me for being too easily impressed. Reader Derek Giroulle points out that any individual message can be forwarded to a WhatsApp group, which can contain up to 256 people. The app also has an ephemeral stories feature, called Status, that can also serve as a conduit for misinformation, Giroulle notes.

Elsewhere, misinformation researcher Aviv Ovadya points me to his clever post on how WhatsApp could fight hoaxes on the client side. Ovadya told me he would like to see WhatsApp introduce an intermediate step before forwarding a message, asking something to the effect of: "are you sure that this is true?"

I appreciate the thoughtful criticism. Keep it coming!

The Ratio
Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.
⬆️ Trending up: Snapchat launched a new augmented reality donation experience to encourage users to contribute to the World Health Organization's COVID-19 relief efforts. It also rolled out three COVID-19 lenses, with tips for staying safe amid the outbreak. The lenses have reached almost 130 million people around the world.

⬆️ Trending up: Zoom now hides Meeting ID numbers from the title bar, meaning if you screenshot your meeting, your ID code won't be in the shot. It's a small but important step to stopping unwanted strangers from joining your call.

⬇️ Trending down: Twitter removed a privacy feature that allowed users to stop sharing some private information with advertisers. For most users, that information will now be shared by default and can't be turned off.

⬇️ Trending down: Almost 60 percent of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic that has been debunked by fact checkers remains on Twitter without any warning label. The record puts the company far behind its competitors.

⬇️ Trending down: Thousands of Instagram accounts are hawking medical face masks that could pose a safety risk. The news comes about a month after Facebook banned ads that sell medical face masks.

Pandemic

Google banned Zoom from employees devices. In an email, it cited Zoom's "security vulnerabilities" and warned that the app would stop working on employees' laptops starting this week.

The German foreign ministry also asked employees to stop using Zoom, saying that security and data protection weaknesses made it too risky to use. (Reuters)

Zoom formed a security advisory board, with Facebook's former head of security Alex Stamos as an outside advisor, to assist with a comprehensive security review of the platform. (Zoom)

Here's how to look your best on a video call, from Verge legend Becca Farsace.

Governing officials in the US and UK sent out a list of malicious COVID-19-related websites. They also warned about attacks on remote workers, including dangers to those using Zoom and Microsoft Teams. (Thomas Brewster / Forbes)

Google's video chat service Google Meet has been adding 2 million users a day amid the coronavirus pandemic. The uptick underscores how crucial video chatting has become for a world stuck in physical isolation. (Richard Nieva / CNET)

YouTube is struggling to regulate a flood of medical advice from doctors with varying degrees of expertise in the field of infectious disease. The site has to decide how to handle videos from experts on contested medical topics or posts that are popular and useful but also contain seemingly honest mistakes. (Mark Bergen / Bloomberg)

The $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill makes gig workers, including Uber and Lyft drivers, eligible for unemployment insurance. But the process for actually getting the money isn't easy. In some cases, drivers will have to apply to state programs, get rejected, and then apply again for the federally funded pandemic assistance. (Aarian Marshall / Wired)

Tech workers in Europe have been largely spared from layoffs hitting many tech companies. International employment laws and the potential for government assistance are likely contributing factors. (Cory Weinberg / The Information)

Pro video game streaming might be one of the most pandemic-proof jobs on the market. Streamers are used to spending their days in isolation. Now they have a massive audience to watch them play. (David Segal / The New York Times)

Virus tracker

Total cases in the US: At least 418,185

Total deaths in the US: At least 14,000

Reported cases in California: 17,605

Reported cases in New York: 149,401

Reported cases in New Jersey: 47,437

Reported cases in Michigan: 18,852

Reported cases in Louisiana: 17,030

Data from The New York Times.

Governing

⭐ Despite Facebook and Google's attempts to track political ads, dark money groups can still exploit loopholes in online ad regulations. A new report tracks one group running attack ads against Bernie Sanders. Here's Issie Lapowsky from Protocol:

"Whatever Facebook and Google do only applies to Facebook and Google," Fischer said. "It doesn't do anything to strengthen transparency on a platform like Hulu or Pandora, which both host a significant number of political ads."

Even the disclosures that do appear on Facebook and Google don't always tell the full story. In their research, Fischer and Christ stumbled across another group called United We Succeed, which describes itself as "a campaign in partnership with the Big Tent Project Fund." That group also purchased nearly $72,000 in anti-Sanders ads on Facebook, bearing similar messages about Sanders pushing for nuclear waste dumps. But the disclaimers on the ads, which read "Paid for by United We Succeed," give no indication of a connection to Big Tent Project Fund.

Former Hillary Clinton staffers received an invite to a Zoom call titled "Bye, Bye Bernard" to celebrate Bernie Sanders dropping out of the presidential race. The event was then canceled. Our first national Zoom invitation scandal! (Ruby Cramer / BuzzFeeed)

Industry

Things to do
Stuff to occupy you online during the quarantine.
Do a puzzle, just like everyone on Instagram is doing.

Marvel at The Verge's best and worst homemade coronavirus masks.

Watch a free live Radiohead concert at 2PM PT on Thursday on YouTube. The band says it's the first in a planned series of weekly live shows.

Attend a virtual dinner at the Armenian restaurant Apricot Stone in Philly, where owner Ara Ishkhanian is offering himself as a virtual host, server, and sommelier. The experience can take place over FaceTime, Duo, or Skype. This is beautiful.

Listen to Ts&Zzz, a podcast from reader Scott Elchison that promises to "help you fall asleep by reading the most boring text on the internet; terms of service agreements, terms and conditions and privacy policies." Goodnight!

Those good tweets ...

My downstairs neighbor lives alone so he is borrowing our dog whenever he needs to. She's down there right now. They're eating dinner together.
- ErinEph (@ErinEph) April 3, 2020

My 3-year-old nephew is the friendliest toddler you'd ever wish to meet, and always says hello to all the people he walks past.

On his daily walk today, though, he had to pretend...

Hope this brightens up your day! pic.twitter.com/C4lSyYU2eb
- Toby Marriott (@tobymarriott) April 3, 2020

Talk to us

Send us tips, comments, questions, and Chinese tech responses to COVID-19: casey@theverge.com and zoe@theverge.com.

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There's no consensus on technology's role in the COVID-19 response

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The Interface is a daily column and newsletter about the intersection of social media and democracy. Subscribe here. As of Friday, I'll have been self-isolating at home for 30 days. Thanks to quick action on the part of city officials to lock the city down, San Francisco is seeing great success in containing the spread of COVID-19.

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How the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has triggered an unprecedented demand for digital health technology

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How the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has triggered an unprecedented demand for digital health technology

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WHO has received overwhelming pro-bono support from technology companies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. On 2 April, 30 of the world's leading digital technology experts gathered in a virtual roundtable to help advance WHO's collaborative response to COVID-19.

This pandemic has triggered an unprecedented demand for digital health technology solutions and has revealed successful solutions such as for population screening, tracking the infection, prioritizing the use and allocation of resources, and designing targeted responses.

"We need your commitment, so we can turn those ideas into reality and work with public health agencies and frontline health workers to put this pandemic to rest," said WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in his welcoming remark. "We can only tackle this global threat - and get our economy back on track - by working together."

The meeting was co-facilitated by Steve Davis and Precious Malebona Matsoso, co-chairs of WHO Digital Health Technical Advisory Group.

The goals of the meeting were as follows:

1. Introduce WHO's Digital Health & Innovation efforts for COVID-19 and seek support from interested technology companies in the design and execution of those initiatives.

2. Build on WHO's COVID-19 efforts through new collaboration and knowledge sharing, to deliver targeted solutions through a coordinated effort to support countries facing stages of this epidemic in different ways and different times.

3. Share and explore known gaps and areas that lack focus. Topics include user-focused solutions, combating misinformation, supply chain management, applications supporting health workers, community engagement platforms, support knowledge management capacities, research and development support, recovery planning work.

4. Secure volunteer and pro-bono resources from global tech companies to design and execute response initiatives with WHO.

Bernardo Mariano Junior, director of WHO's Department of Digital Health and Innovation, called for unity in response efforts, "The world needs to be well prepared and united in the spirit of shared responsibility, to digitally detect, protect, respond, and prepare the recovery for COVID 19. No single entity or single country initiative will be sufficient. We need everyone."

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Digital technology for COVID-19 response

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WHO has received overwhelming pro-bono support from technology companies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. On 2 April, 30 of the world's leading digital technology experts gathered in a virtual roundtable to help advance WHO's collaborative response to COVID-19.

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A s long as people have had access to the World Wide Web, we've been using it for sex. By 1991, soon after the launch of the modern internet, the Oxford English Dictionary had recorded the first use of the term cybersex. AOL chat rooms, where strangers often logged on to partake in libidinous conversations, went public not long after, and sex.com, one of the first porn websites, launched in the mid-1990s. These developments soon prompted a moral panic. Time and Maclean's covers warned about the dangers of children accessing inappropriate content, while major television stations ran PSAs about online sexual predators. Looking at popular media of the early 1990s, one would be forgiven for assuming the digital world was populated with hackers, sex offenders, and no one else.

Flash forward a few decades-and a great many incarnations of search engines, video-streaming platforms, and social-media celebrities-and it's widely acknowledged that all kinds of people go online to find sexual gratification, research answers to sexual questions, and even meet their soulmates. Tinder, the mobile dating app frequently used for hooking up, is available in 196 countries, has an estimated 50 million monthly users, and has been called "the free-market economy come to sex." Discussion-forum titan Reddit is the eighteenth most popular website in the world, according to Amazon, with thousands of subforums dedicated to sex, relationships, and every conceivable kink. Online-only sex-education sites and sex stores have also sprung up so that shoppers can comfortably browse sex toys and learn how to use them without leaving their homes.

The old panics of the early web have also coalesced into broader anxieties; headlines today tell us that the internet has ruined our sex lives. A whole new host of misconducts has arisen, from catfishing to revenge porn. The consumption of internet pornography has been likened to an epidemic, and countless commentators have posited that online hookups result in less-satisfying sex and that couples ignore each other in bed in favour of scrolling through their phones. The tyranny of choice brought forth by the internet has caused a new generation to be increasingly picky and less satisfied with their partners.

And yet so much of this narrative romanticizes our preplugged in lives, imagining a mythical era when every relationship was meaningful and everyone was having exactly the type of sex they wanted. I was born in 1990, making me almost exactly as old as our modern conception of the internet. My early sexual experiences were awkward and fumbling, as I imagine they are for people of every era. I spent those first encounters stuck in my own head, too concerned that I was doing something wrong instead of focusing on having a good time. In my midtwenties, I started to use the internet as a tool to actively seek out better sex: visiting increasingly niche dating websites to find people with whom I could connect, sharing porn clips with my lovers to better vocalize my desires, researching different sex toys late at night. I am pleased to report, to the chagrin of my mother reading this now, that my sex life did get markedly more awesome.

Gone are the days when many kids had only their parents or their classrooms to depend on for sex education. In our tech-saturated age, questions that were once at the mercy of being answered by other kids on the playground-How does a person get pregnant? What is the G spot? How does anal sex even work?-are now being asked en masse on Google, on Tumblr, in Reddit forums, or on whatever new platform may have popped up this week. Misinformation is still rampant-the phrase "pee is stored in the balls" has become a satirical meme with nearly 700,000 search results-and the most common adult videos prioritize straight male desires. But, while the internet is not a substitute for comprehensive sex education, it's precisely because digital spaces are so accessible and unfiltered that they have become an indispensable sexual resource. Communities have formed around marginalized identities online, where people can speak openly about their intimate experiences or ask questions without shame. The internet has given people the freedom to understand their sexualities on a scale that simply wasn't possible before. This goes against the conventional wisdom: What if, instead of being a dangerous tool, the internet is a gateway to pleasure?

W hen Elly Smallwood started attending a private, girls-only high school in Ottawa, in 2002, all the students were required to purchase laptops-still a relatively new technology at the time. "It was freedom," Smallwood says. Inevitably, she happened upon porn. Smallwood was attracted to other girls at school, but she identified as straight, and she never talked about her sexuality. "I thought there was something really shameful about it," she says. The books she read and the movies she watched were filled with heterosexual relationships-and the rare gay characters were often relegated to stereotypes or punchlines, which didn't fit with how she saw herself. "I only ever slept with women until I was eighteen," she says. "But I never saw myself as gay."

The early internet porn she watched with her new computer did nothing to help with her confusion. Yes, there was an abundance of videos of women having sex with other women, but it was porn made for straight men: all the women were toned, their bodies hairless and bleached, and the way they approached sex was completely different from the way Smallwood was interacting with her female partners. "These bodies don't look like mine, they don't look like they're enjoying themselves, and"-here she leans in close-" they had really long nails! That's not practical." But Smallwood began to mimic what she saw in porn, because she thought that's what sex was supposed to be. "That was the sex I ended up having-sex that looked good, for someone else's enjoyment."

After graduating, Smallwood moved to Toronto to study painting at OCAD, and she made an account on Tumblr, the popular microblogging platform, to share photos of her creative inspirations and find film stills, fashion editorials, and amateur photography from other users. She soon learned the website could serve another function as well: "There was porn everywhere!" But the content she saw on Tumblr, where users can roam freely to discover new content, was different from what she found through search engines in high school. "It was mostly soft-core porn, made by women." The people Smallwood followed in her new scene were sharing erotic images they found to be genuinely arousing, frequently uploading pictures of themselves in real-life sexual situations. There were gay women and trans women, women with different body types, and women with disabilities. Body hair was visible, and fingernails were trimmed. Most importantly, the women seemed to be truly enjoying themselves. For the first time, Smallwood learned it was possible to have sex that prioritized pleasure over aesthetics.

Today, Smallwood is a well-known artist, and she incorporates sex into the pictures she posts to her nearly half a million followers on Instagram. She's equally open about identifying as queer. A 1.8 metre by 1.2 metre oil painting of her girlfriend masturbating has received tens of thousands of likes; Smallwood frequently puts her own naked self in her art, and she sometimes posts reference photos of nudes that inspire her artwork on Tumblr.

"I feel like my relationship to porn has been so different because it was very detrimental to how I came to see sexuality," she says. "And then, later, it completely liberated me from that view." The pockets of the internet that many find isolating are so often just around the corner from swathes of the internet that bring communities together. It's something that Smallwood found on her own but that researchers and activists have also been studying for decades. The internet has a reputation for exposing people to too much before they're ready, but it has also enabled those who might previously have been marginalized to find a means of self-expression and acceptance. It has allowed for a wide variety of preferences not found or supported in mainstream culture to flourish.

"Queer sexuality happens in ways that have a very complicated relationship to the dominant culture, sometimes allowed but only in certain kinds of spaces," says Patrick Keilty, a professor at the University of Toronto who researches different facets of online porn. Heterosexual relationships have long had the support of mainstream media, institutions such as marriage, and legal structures, he says. But LGBTQ relationships have been stigmatized and even criminalized. In the past, private spaces such as public toilets, bathhouses, and designated bars doubled as spaces of intimacy for those groups. Today, Keilty says, much of that function has expanded to the internet and its dating apps, forums, and other websites.

"Sexuality's such a personal thing, and it varies from person to person," says Angie Fazekas, a PhD student who has worked with Keilty. "In order to genuinely figure out what you are and what you desire, that's something you have to explore." Her research encompasses the intersection of gender and media studies, specifically focusing on fanfiction, the phenomenon when fans of a movie, book, or TV series write new original fiction based on existing characters, in the vein of potential deleted scenes from The Avengers or unofficial Harry Potter sequels. It might go without saying that fanfiction is frequently sexual; writers can go wild with expanding on scenes that could only be hinted at in CW shows.

When Fazekas was a teen, she would venture to fanfiction websites to find people who shared her obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Today, fandoms also convene on Tumblr, under Twitter and Instagram hashtags, and on thousands of Reddit subforums. Erotic fanfiction is a creative medium favoured by many teenagers, especially girls, which means it's often met with backlash. (In 2007, LiveJournal notoriously suspended several major fanfiction accounts-a decision that many commentators blamed on pressure from religious conservatives.) But, despite its reputation for smuttiness, it maintains a wholesome quality. A recent fanfic entry on the popular website Archive of Our Own for the show Riverdale, for example, features lesbian couple Cheryl Blossom and Toni Topaz at a strip club, but the typo-ridden prose focuses on Topaz's shy blushes and awkward banter. It reads like an inexperienced person's vision of what a sexual relationship looks like, written for the rest of the world to enjoy.

Keilty's and Fazekas's research both cover major communities that have thrived on the internet, which can offer an outlet for people at wildly different stages of their sexual development: those who are simply curious can find erotica or porn to satiate their burgeoning tastes, while those with more experience can use the internet as a networking or professional tool.

Andrew Gurza, thirty-four, identifies as a "crippled content creator" and hosts DisabilityAfterDark, a weekly podcast that focuses on the sex lives of people with disabilities. Gurza says he knew queer people "tangentially" growing up, but he didn't feel part of any community. He started having sex at nineteen but says he had been experiencing sexual desire since his early teens with few people to talk to about it. In university, though Gurza studied law, he was more interested in "stuff around social justice-the queer stuff and the disability stuff-but everybody told me it wasn't a real job." So he started blogging, podcasting, and building his online disability consultant business after "sitting at home kind of depressed, looking for something to do."

"There's a big misconception that disability and sex can't go together," Gurza says. "No one's really asking, 'How does sex feel? How do you as a disabled person receive pleasure?'" Episodes of DisabilityAfterDark include titles such as "Wheelchairs, Slings & Other Things: Can My Mobility Device Be Sexy?" and "Gimps on Grindr." His online work has connected him to other disability activists, whom he frequently features as guests to talk about their own experiences, and he is currently crowdfunding to create the first line of sex toys specifically for people with physical disabilities.

Gurza believes the internet can "change the world of sexuality"-just as it did for him. "It's where I've met people for sex," he says. "It's where I talk about sex, where I write about sex, it's how I get my podcast out about sex....It really creates a community for people who can't get out, who can't go to bars, who can't do all this stuff. It allows for us to build friendship and community."

I n many ways, online porn has become the epitome of sex's rocky relationship with the internet-full of blurred lines and the potential to either help or harm, depending on the user and the platform. Explicit videos of sexual acts have long been contentious, uniting the religious right and certain radical feminist communities long before anyone knew what a URL was. Still today, there is little room for nuance in our conversations.

Of course, the ease with which information is disseminated online comes with downsides. Nearly 10 million Americans have been victims of nonconsensual image sharing, or "revenge porn," a problem to which the legal system is just starting to adapt-and that is still omitted from most sex-ed courses in Canada. And access to misinformation has become more widespread: even reputable-seeming sites can post content that confuses more than it helps. A quick Google search for "how to have sex," for example, leads to a piece from the Times of India warning about "biting before your partner's ready," a BuzzFeed listicle featuring libido-boosting foods, and a Youtube video with tips on "how to bring a girl home" on the first date. For a young person who is curious about sex and encountering the freedom of the internet for the first time, it can be overwhelming to distinguish legitimate results from those that will further confuse or harm. (In a contentious move just this week, Tumblr announced a permanent ban on "adult content"; Apple recently removed the Tumblr app from its app store after the platform's filters mistakenly allowed child pornography to appear on the site.)

Because of growing fear that mainstream content has affected young people's understanding of sex-exposing them to the most extreme of sexual acts before they've had the chance to learn the basics themselves-select high schools in America have started to offer porn-literacy programs. The courses offer students an opportunity to express their anxieties around sex: they discuss lubrication and clitoral stimulation, STIs, and negotiating consent-crucial aspects of sex that, according to researchers, are often relegated to behind the scenes of porn.

These lessons are helpful tools against harmful online influence. But there still doesn't seem to be a way to address the risks of porn consumption without also acknowledging that the content isn't necessarily negative. Many researchers assume that less conventional sexual desires among young people (such as anal sex or BDSM) are informed by the videos they're consuming online, but they should also consider that young people could be driven by an earnest desire to try certain acts. In fact, even in classrooms where porn literacy is taught, sexual orientation is not necessarily discussed comprehensively.

Caitlin Roberts, a Victoria-based sex educator, is skeptical that porn is responsible for shaping people's sexual desires. But she agrees that using mainstream porn as an educational tool without context can be harmful. "You don't teach someone to drive by showing them The Fast and the Furious," she says. Like Smallwood, Roberts identifies as queer, and she remembers being nine years old when she first watched the teen sex comedy American Pie, which features the angsty first experiences of a crew of high-schoolers-and, in one scene, masturbation with a literal pie. "That movie was a truckload of information," she recalls. "I was so curious [about sex] and wanted to know more but was really feeling so separated from it."

As an adult, Roberts realized she still wasn't seeing enough of the sex she liked to have being represented in mainstream porn, so she cofounded Spit, a subscription-based queer porn company that centres on ethically produced, diverse content, in 2012. Roberts leads college workshops on porn literacy, emphasizing the difference between viewing porn as entertainment and translating those desires to real-life situations. "With young people who are developing pretty consistent porn habits, there's the struggle to figure out how to bring that pleasure into an intimate interaction with another human," she says.

Roberts's workshops acknowledge the enjoyable aspects of sex, explaining the importance of "tapping in and paying attention to the pleasurable experiences and sensations in your body." She is far from the only person who turned from consumer of porn to creator. Jiz Lee, thirty-eight, is a nonbinary performer who uses they/them pronouns. They work behind and in front of the camera at Pink & White Productions, a queer porn production company in San Francisco that was founded by Shine Louise Houston in 2005. Although Lee occasionally caught scrambled Skinemax screenings on late-night TV in high school, they were much more interested in the porn they watched online during college. In 2000, the Roxie Theater in San Francisco screened the double feature Hard Love & How to Fuck in High Heels by lesbian porn pioneers SIR Productions. "This was on a big screen," Lee recalls. "It was celebrated. There was a community there, going, 'This is the hottest shit ever!'" That experience inspired them to enter the industry.

Lee's story is a reminder of how wildly personal porn consumption (and sexual tastes) can be: what is offensive for one person can be empowering for another. Assuming straight men are the only viewers allows for an oversimplified criticism of porn that isn't always accurate. Acknowledging diversity of experience and preference complicates any conversation, but it also leads to better understanding-and, in the end, more productive conclusions. When it comes to porn, that approach means acknowledging that, when consumed responsibly, it can exist as a relatively safe way for someone to explore their tastes and fantasies.

Roberts and Lee stress that teaching people to look at online content with a critical eye is especially important and that all sex education should incorporate some version of porn literacy. Some of this would look a lot like the courses in some American high schools, which analyze how scenes are shot, discuss what takes place behind the scenes, and mention how often performers are tested for STIs. Internet-savvy sex education would also honestly incorporate LGBTQ identities in curricula rather than giving them a shout-out. It would not ignore the lived experiences of people with disabilities. It would recognize that students will find other ways to seek out answers to questions they can't ask in class, and that they will run the risk of running into misinformation online. It would equip students with the language to express their desires and their boundaries so that the people who partake in BDSM and anal sex do so because they want to, not because they feel pressured.

"Someone asked me recently if I thought porn was inherently good or bad for culture at large," Roberts says. "The answer I gave them is, well, is food good or bad? I think it's how you choose to interact with it that will ultimately decide whether or not it can be a positive or negative influence in your life." The analogy can be applied to the internet as a whole. Our ability to log on with the click of a mouse is intertwined with the rest of our lives, from how we work to how we entertain ourselves to, yes, how we have sex. For many people, this has been a source of liberation, sometimes the only difference between having a healthy sex life and not having sex at all. For others, especially the newly initiated, it can be an overwhelming tool. The consensus among many academics, educators, and porn producers, or as close as we can get to one, is that we need comprehensive sex education now more than ever-the kind that wasn't put in place before the internet even existed.

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How the Internet Changed Sex | The Walrus

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A s long as people have had access to the World Wide Web, we've been using it for sex. By 1991, soon after the launch of the modern internet, the Oxford English Dictionary had recorded the first use of the term cybersex.

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Canadian blog examines what it means to live at a time when we’ve suddenly had to change many of our everyday behaviours.

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excerpt

COVID-19 has transformed our world. The Walrus explores these changes and asks what comes next

With the global spread of the new coronavirus, we are facing challenges on a scale unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. In addition to the losses of life, health care shortages, and economic disaster, the pandemic has also had dramatic repercussions for the structure of our daily lives.

In our ongoing coverage of the outbreak, The Walrus examines what it means to live at a time when we've suddenly had to change many of our everyday behaviours. From the challenges of co-parenting and home-schooling to the power of community aid and digital collectives, we will continue to track these rapid transformations and unpack what they mean for Canadians. We'll also turn an eye to the future, toward disruptions we may continue to experience in our finances, governance, technologies, food systems, and relationships.

Anatomy of a Pandemic

BY KEVIN PATTERSON

Like major contagions throughout history, the new coronavirus causes fear as well as illness. The remedy for both, it turns out, is the same

We are committed to curbing the spread of misinformation. Learn more about The Walrus Lab's fact-checking initiative focusing on media coverage of COVID-19.

Learn More

Fact-based journalism is our passion and your right.

We're asking readers like you to support The Walrus so we can continue to lead the Canadian conversation. This past year has seen some serious changes in Canada, from the mainstreaming of cannabis to the fallout of the SNC-Lavalin affair to our response to COVID-19.

We feature Canadian voices and expertise on stories that travel beyond our shores, and we firmly believe that this reporting can change the world around us. The Walrus covers it all with originality, depth, and thoughtfulness, bringing diverse perspectives to bear on essential conversations while setting the highest bar for fact-checking and rigour.

None of this would be possible without you.

As a nonprofit, we work hard to keep our costs low and our team lean, but this is a model that requires individual support to pay our contributors fairly and maintain the strength of our independent coverage.
Donations of $20 or more will receive a charitable tax receipt.

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Support The Walrus from as little as $2. Thank you.

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excerpt With the global spread of the new coronavirus, we are facing challenges on a scale unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. In addition to the losses of life, health care shortages, and economic disaster, the pandemic has also had dramatic repercussions for the structure of our daily lives.

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Mega-corporations and their control over our digital remains

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Mega-corporations and their control over our digital remains

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I f Facebook still exists in fifty years, dead users on the platform will likely outnumber the living ones. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found that, based on global 2018 estimates, the number of deceased people on the world's largest social site could reach 4.9 billion by the end of the century. Considering this reality, the study's authors added, sociologists, and anthropologists are increasingly interested in examining the "para-social relationships" we form with the "online dead." More than that, they're asking some tough questions, namely: What do we lose, in terms of both privacy and connection, when we give mega corporations control over our digital remains? With that in mind, we turn to the death policies of five of today's popular social-media platforms.

Facebook

If a Facebook user dies, the platform will memorialize an account if "a family member or close friend lets [Facebook] know." In such a case, Facebook will not provide log-in information, but it will add a "remembering" badge on the profile. Content stays visible, but the profile won't appear in public places or pop up as a suggested "person you may know."

Nobody can log into a memorialized account, but if a person has chosen a "legacy contact" before their death, the account can be changed. A legacy contact can, for example, accept friend requests, pin a tribute post, and change a profile picture.

Before they die, Facebook users can also choose to have their account deleted upon death rather than memorialized. Other users can also request that a deceased person's account be deleted, providing they have a birth certificate, death certificate, or proof that the person making the request is the deceased person's lawful representative.

Instagram

Like its parent company, Facebook, Instagram offers a memorialization option. Anybody can request that an Instagram account be memorialized. The platform does require proof of death, but in this case it can be a simple link to an obituary or news article. It doesn't specify how it ensures the obituary or article is accurate or from a verified publication.

If a person's account is memorialized, it won't appear different from an account of a living user, and no comments or posts will be deleted. Privacy settings also cannot be changed. Essentially, it becomes frozen in time. Instagram does assure users that the profile won't appear in public spaces, however, and that it tries to "prevent references to memorialized accounts from appearing on Instagram in ways that may be upsetting to the person's friends and family."

Another option is to delete the account entirely. In such cases, Instagram requires more official documentation, not all of it easy to access: the deceased's birth or death certificate or proof that the person making the request is the deceased's lawful representative.

Snapchat

The popular, ephemeral social-media platform does not offer an extensive death policy. In a multioption "contact us" menu, Snapchat offers this: "We are so sorry for your loss. We would like to assist you in any way possible." The site offers only one option, however, in the case of a user's death and that is to delete the account. To do so, Snapchat needs a death certificate. If you want someone to access your account after you die, you will need to provide a designated person with your log-in information.

Twitter

As with other social-media platforms, Twitter will deactivate an account upon request if a user dies. An immediate family member or someone authorized to act on behalf of the deceased must send in their own ID and information about the deceased, including a copy of the death certificate, if they wish to close the account. Twitter also has to contend with images or tweets published before or after a person's death. In some cases, Twitter will remove an image that shows a critical injury, for example. In other cases, it will refuse. "When reviewing such media removal requests," the company warns, "Twitter considers public interest factors such as the newsworthiness of the content and may not be able to honor every request."

YouTube

Most YouTube accounts need to be associated with an account on Google, the platform's parent company. Before their death, any Google user can use the "inactive account manager" tool to determine what should happen to their accounts after a specified period of inactivity. Options include sending certain data to predetermined contacts or simply shutting down the accounts. If nothing is designated ahead of time, immediate family members or an authorized representative can send a request to deactivate an account or to obtain data from it. To do this, they have to verify their identity and provide a scan of the user's death certificate.

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What Happens to Your Social Media Accounts after You Die | The Walrus

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I f Facebook still exists in fifty years, dead users on the platform will likely outnumber the living ones. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found that, based on global 2018 estimates, the number of deceased people on the world's largest social site could reach 4.9 billion by the end of the century.

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"Self-knowledge through numbers" seems like a genderless goal, yet the actual products out there are anything but.

Stefan Wermuth / Reuters

On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll of the party, the Apple Watch, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give some more details about Apple Health, an app that had been announced back in June and will eventually integrate with the Apple Watch. In that June announcement, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users "monitor all of your metrics that you're most interested in."

As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there's a notable exception. Apple Health doesn't track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked "is it really too much to ask that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they've treated humanity's sodium intake?" How could Apple release a health-tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?

Women have tracked their cycles for thousands of years. St. Augustine spoke against timing sexual activity to coincide with periods of infertility (a method that would require period-tracking) as far back as 388. "Is it not you who used to counsel us to observe as much as possible the time when a woman, after her purification, is most likely to conceive, and to abstain from cohabitation at that time, lest the soul should be entangled in flesh?" he said, according to one translation, before going on to condemn the method. Despite there being little written documentation of these records, women have long kept notes on their own cycles. Before apps, they used spreadsheets and online calendars. And before that, they used plain old paper. Today, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps available in the iTunes store. And yet, in a health app Apple describes as "comprehensive," there is no way to simply tick on the calendar that your period has started, and when it has stopped.

This, of course, isn't the first time a tech product has prioritized men over women. The vast majority of tech companies are staffed by men, especially on the development side. Phones are too big for many women's hands. The newest artificial hearts are designed to fit 80 percent of men but only 20 percent of women. Drop-down menus show "male" over "female" even when the rest of the menus are alphabetical. But when it comes to data-tracking, there's a perceived element of democratization. How could an app or tool that simply lets you track things be biased? Let us count the ways.

* * *

When Amelia Greenhall moved to San Francisco from Seattle, she looked for a Quantified Self meet-up. She had been active in the Seattle QS community, and quickly found the corresponding group in San Francisco. Soon, she was organizing the Bay Area meetings herself. But while she enjoyed the community there, something was missing.

"After each one, women would come up to me and say, 'I wish we could talk about periods or fertility or dating or anything that wasn't getting talked about.' It just felt like there was a lot getting left out," she said. And the meetings, set in the belly of the Silicon Valley beast, felt like tech meetings. "It was just kind of like a microcosm of the tech world where dudes are willing to speak about the most boring trivial stuff as if it's the best invention ever, and these women would have these really cool things and they're like, 'Oh I don't know if anybody would be interested.'" So Greenhall started the first ever QSXX meet up-a space for women to showcase their QS projects, talk about what worked for them, and find a smaller community within the larger group.

Soon, QSXX groups popped up in Boston and New York City. "The conversations seemed more real and more interesting and we were talking about the problems with devices and apps and it turned out much as I was hoping," said Greenhall. Maggie Delano started one in Boston, after having a conversation with another woman about the differences in what some women want to track. "We were talking about how the kinds of things that women need to track are really different, and things can change a lot more throughout the month than they might for other people," she said. The women who attend these meet-ups discuss what they want to track, present their projects, and form bonds within the smaller community that some say they couldn't quite forge at the bigger meet-ups.

Whitney Erin Boesel, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and active QS member, said it took her a few years of being involved in the QS community before she realized that there was little-to-no emphasis on women's issues. Which is weird, she pointed out, because outside the QS world one might think women would be more likely to track personal data than men are, whether that's calories or menstruation. "So many regular facets of being a woman in a western culture are highly likely to make one track," Boesel said, "and yet those were things I wasn't seeing in the QS context."

I spoke with Boesel, Greenhall, Delano, and others about what it's like to be women interested in the quantified-self movement. Their experiences were similar: They really enjoyed the work, the problem-solving, the personalization. But they also echoed that when it comes to forward-facing technology-apps and devices marketed for the masses-there was a clear bias toward men's interests. Even apps developed for women are often designed by men, and it's not hard to tell. Apple Health, they said, and its mysterious omission of parameters relevant to women, isn't the exception, it's the rule.

Before we go on, a definitional point that many I spoke with asked me to make clear: There is a difference between the quantified-self community and movement, and what Boesel calls the "tracking industrial complex," by which she means the suite of apps and gadgets available in the commercial world. Quantified Self or QS, capitalized, is a collective of people interested in tracking elements of their lives in some way. They have a loose organization, and organize conferences in Europe and the United States each year. Some of them use apps and devices, but some of them don't. "Lots of people within QS don't use apps or anything digital," Boesel said. So QS is the community, and tracking products are the apps and hardware designed for commercial use. Great, let's continue.

* * *

There's no better place to look for evidence of quantified self apps designed by men for men than the sex-tracking apps on the market. On principle, sex is something that one might guess an equal number of men and women are interested in. And yet looking at the apps out there for tracking bedroom activity is like looking at a caricature of bad porn. Many of them base quality of sex on things like the amount of thrusting that goes on and how loud the partner is. Apps with names like iThrust and Sex Stamina Tester and Sex Counter Tease ask users to place their phones on the bed so that the built in accelerometer can measure "strokes" and offer men a ranking among other users. One app encourages people to share their stamina and determine whether the user is "good enough to compete with the Don Juans in the Top 10."

None of this is malicious, said Deborah Lupton, a researcher at the University of Canberra, who recently wrote a paper documenting many of these sex-tracking apps titled "Quantified Sex." Sara Watson, another fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out that many of these strange measurements come from what the phone is capable of measuring: movement and sound. "That just has to do with the reductive nature of tracking something with an accelerometer," she said. But the apps do reflect a certain kind of bias. "I think the designers, who are mostly men are, they're just taking up norms and assumptions that are embedded in our society about women's fertility and sexuality, and reproducing them," Lupton said. So sex is judged by thrusting, success is judged by endurance, and pleasure is measured in moans. "Regardless of the type of app, we should view it as a cultural product rather than something that's just popped up out of the blue."

If sex-tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think sex is, then fertility-tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think about periods. These apps are still designed largely by men, but now instead of sexual prowess and a Don Juan ranking, the goal is pregnancy.

Many of these invite women to give their partners access to the information. The app Glow sends a little note when a user's partner is entering her fertile period, along with helpful seduction advice like bring her a bouquet. The vast majority of these period-tracking apps are pink. Many of them are covered in flowers. The fact that menstrual-tracking and fertility-tracking are almost always lumped together is, in itself, indicative of how developers think about women, said Lupton. "When you look at those types of apps they're completely about the surveillance of pregnant women and making them ever more responsible and vigilant about their bodies for the sake of their fetus," Lupton said.

Yet the appetite for period trackers is huge. And it has been huge for a long time. Seven years ago, long before apps like Clue or Glow hit the market, Heather Rivers was in college and was tracking her period using an excel spreadsheet. She thought there must be a better way, but when she Googled for period trackers she couldn't find one. "When I didn't find anything I decided to just make a simple weekend project version," she told me. "Thus was born Monthly Info." The site was simple-users record the start and end to their period and the system extrapolates from their history to guess when their next cycle will start. Trackers could set up customizable reminders, so when it was almost that time they'd get a little email with whatever message they chose.

Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people. "It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users," she said. "There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn't take much energy to make or grow." Now, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it's fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it's not hard to spot a fertility-tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. "It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you," said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. "'We men don't like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you're a parking meter.'"

Not all these apps are made by men, of course. In fact, one of the most popular versions, called Clue, was developed by Ida Tin, fueled by a similar problem that Rivers faced. "I was using condoms for contraceptives and I was starting to wonder why there were no better options for me to keep track of my cycle," Tin said. Much of the design of Clue, which is decidedly non-floral, was natural to Tin. "I just took it totally for granted," she said, "like of course it's not going to be pink. That seemed very natural. I didn't want it to be your secret diary... I wanted it to be a very straight, natural part of life."

It took two years for Tin and her team to build the app into something they were ready to release. By the time they finished, they had competition. Glow, a Clue competitor headed by Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal and a chairman at Yelp, launched just a month before Clue. "We were very lucky because about a month before we launched Max announced he was launching Glow," Tin said. "That was lucky for us because he kind of validated this category of apps, and he could do that because he's a celebrity and he's a nerdy guy who knows about data. I think that was a great help for us."

Had Tin launched the app herself, without Levchin's male validation, would people have taken her seriously? She's not sure. "I've had investors, really, very good, experienced, high-profile investors who will say, 'I'm not a woman, I don't understand your product,'" she said. Tin said she'll sometimes hear investors say thing like, "I don't invest in products I can't try myself," which rules out any female health-tracking products for male investors. "I've never been treated badly," she said, "but I think it just takes more to have them write the check for a female entrepreneur tackling a female health problem."

* * *

The promise of Quantified Self, the community, is "self-knowledge through numbers." It's a broad aim, and one that, in theory, overlaps with the apps and devices in the market. Collecting data can help people better understand themselves, their lives, their needs. But who are those people?

Boesel points to one example of how many even within the QS community assume their users are men: passive tracking apps. These apps run in the background of your phone, and using your movement, theoretically determine things like whether you're depressed or active or inside too much. This works based on the assumption that your phone is always in your pocket. "Inevitably some dude gets up at a conference and said something how your phone is always on you," Boesel said. "And every time I'll stand up, and I'll be like, 'Hi, about this phone that is always on you. This is my phone. And there are my pants.'" Passive tracking apps would think that I stay at my desk from morning to night without once getting up to go to the bathroom. Many apps operate under the assumption that your phone is always connected to you, in pockets that women don't really have.

Let's go back to Apple's Health tracker. They don't quite say it, but Apple's premise seems to be that Health will one day be the place for everything. "The Health app lets you keep all your health and fitness information in one place on your device and under your control." All your information. This is one of the streams that quantified-self apps are traveling down-the road to universal data collection. The idea that there is a list of variables that everyone can, and should track.

The thing is, there isn't such a list. How could there be?

There is no universal set of variables that would be meaningful or even possible for everyone to track. The idea that some comprehensive self-tracking app could at some point boil down the universal essentials neglects the fact that humans are different-not just in biology, but in needs and habits and interests. Right now, as these apps are developed largely by men for men, the data they collect might seem to men to be pretty comprehensive.

"There is no universal," Boesel said. "QS is such a radical individual culture overall that you are the ultimate expert."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Rose Eveleth is a writer, producer, and designer based in New York.

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"Self-knowledge through numbers" seems like a genderless goal, yet the actual products out there are anything but. On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage.

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Self-Tracking Apps To Help You 'Quantify' Yourself

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Technology has made it easier than ever to track your activity levels, your sleep cycles, how you spend your time, and more. The self-trackers who near-obsessively capture and analyze their own data are part of a growing " Quantified Self" movement. Interested in giving self-tracking a try?

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The issues with Ginger-io mental health tracking

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The issues with Ginger-io mental health tracking

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This article raises a few interesting points in discussing the inaccessibility of a paid app for  "45 million impoverished Americans". Stating that Ginger-io are trying to overcome this barrier by working with insurance companies - raising vital questions to consider the power imbalances this would create.

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More than 40 million people in the US alone suffer from depression and anxiety. Less than 15 percent of those will receive treatment. To call this an epidemic would be an understatement. One company, Ginger.io, is hoping to make a difference through its app, which brings professional mental healthcare to anyone with a smartphone.

Ginger.io is a licensed healthcare practice with a nationwide medical practice. It's app allows people to get immediate access to mental health professionals that range from coaches who use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) guidelines, to practicing doctors who can write prescriptions.

With the app, users can chat with their coaches anytime and schedule a video chat with a licensed therapist. The therapist, if they see an urgent need, can at any time escalate a patient to the care of a doctor - also through video chat.

One of the driving forces behind Ginger.io is machine learning. In a testament to the power of machines to augment human interactions, the company uses AI to "identify symptoms, direct people to the right type of care, personalize the experience, and map outcomes and progress."

It accomplishes this through using CBT guidelines as a data set and having its own proprietary algorithms do the heavy research and recommendations - thus freeing up your coaches to focus on you. It's a clever system that appears to truly provide access to professional mental healthcare anywhere at any time, at least in the US.

There are, however, some challenges still to overcome. Ginger.io isn't free, which means that some of the people who could most benefit from the app - like 45 million impoverished Americans - don't really have access.

The company has tried to mitigate this issue by working with insurers and offering employer services.

In the argument for companies to provide a system like Ginger.io as a benefit, there's a lot of research indicating it's cost-effective to provide mental healthcare access to employees. Just sayin'.

But perhaps largest obstacle for therapy seekers is the stigma surrounding mental healthcare. Every expert we've spoken to - from Woebot's mom to the creators of Ginger.io - agree that society is suffering from a negative view towards seeking help.

With an app like Ginger.io the process becomes much simpler. You don't have to get a referral or talk to anyone else about your mental healthcare. You don't have to leave your home, which is huge for people who have difficulty traveling.

Users also have access to their care team no matter where they go in the US, which means you don't have to wait until after the holidays to talk to your coach, even if you're traveling. It also means that if you have a major life change and end up moving away you won't have to get a new therapy team.

Ginger is important, perhaps even necessary, because everyone has mental health. I highly recommend trying it out if you're looking for an emotional support system. The app is free to download, but you'll have to subscribe to use it beyond the initial trial.

The subscription plans for Ginger.io cost $129, $249, and $349, depending on how much access you want to licensed therapists and psychiatrists.

If you're seeing a bit of sticker shock (most apps on our phones have subscription fees like 20 bucks a month) that's understandable, but consider this: most therapists in the US charge between $75 and $150 per visit. Those of us who live in rural areas or other places without immediate access to providers can add travel expenses to those costs.

There's never a bad time to start fighting depression and anxiety (especially now that the holidays have arrived).

You can check out Ginger.io here, it's available on both iOS and Android.

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This app gives you 24/7 access to mental health care professionals

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More than 40 million people in the US alone suffer from depression and anxiety. Less than 15 percent of those will receive treatment. To call this an epidemic would be an understatement. One company, Ginger.io, is hoping to make a difference through its app, which brings professional mental healthcare to anyone with a smartphone.

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A couple walks through the campus of the University of Virginia. (Photo by J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post)

"Catfishing" is suddenly in the news again, with reports that the University of Virginia gang rape scandal may have been rooted in a romantic scam. At the heart of the scandal, according to documents filed in a lawsuit against Rolling Stone magazine, was a troubled young woman who fell for a guy who failed to return her affections. Instead of moving on, the woman invented a fictitious upperclassman who claimed to be enamored with her - presumably with the hope of showing her real crush what he was missing. From there, reputations were ruined, a campus was roiled and national outrage ensued.

This phenomenon known as catfishing is a uniquely modern one: a single lie, enabled by the cloak of technology, that stretches, morphs and multiplies until whole personas are fabricated, emotions are manipulated and hearts are broken. So, why do they call it that again?

'Catfishing' over love interest might have spurred U-Va. gang-rape debacle

Let's go back. Way back to 2010, when the term first entered the lexicon. It began with a documentary about a New York City man lured into an Internet relationship with an attractive 19-year-old woman in the Midwest. Or so he thought. When inconsistencies began to arise in the woman's story, Nev Schulman, along with his brother and a filmmaker friend, traveled to Michigan to meet the woman, ultimately discovering that he'd been corresponding with a 40-year-old housewife all along.

It was that woman's husband who inadvertently coined the phrase "catfish." Sitting outside with his elbow perched on the back of a bench, he tells the filmmakers about live cod being transported from Alaska to China. During the journey the fish would become lethargic; by the time they arrived, he says, "their flesh was mush and tasteless." But someone discovered that if catfish were put in the tanks, the cod would remain active. The man said he thanks God for people who play a similar role in life - those "who keep you on your toes, keep you thinking, keep you guessing."

The victims of catfishing might not agree. The 2010 film spawned a popular MTV series that revealed how widespread the deceptions had become. The rise of the Internet, with its dating sites, chat rooms and virtual-reality simulators, enabled people to become whoever they wanted to be - at least for a while. Don't like the way you look? Download a headshot of a fashion model and make that your profile pic. Have a crappy job? Not anymore. You're now an esteemed artist (whose works you pilfered from an online gallery.) Whatever you dreamed, you could become (or at least pretend to be). And you could convince others it was the truth.

Lies told in the name of romance are nothing new. (See the 1969 film " The Honeymoon Killers," based on an infamous series of true-life romantic scams from the 1940s.) But the modern need for human connection, even at the cost of honesty, is especially sad. Many of the perpetrators of catfishing don't believe they can be loved as they truly are. It is only through lies that they can have the relationships they so deeply desire.

In one of the most famous instances of catfishing, former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o publicly mourned the death of his girlfriend throughout the fall of 2012. Until, that is, he found out she never existed. "This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about," he said at the time. "But over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating."

Behind Manti Te'o hoax lies a deep desire to delieve

Catfishing frequently involves a story about a tragic disease or a long-distance deployment or a stint in rehab, anything to prevent the person on the other end of the deception from insisting on a face-to-face meeting. Because then it all blows up.

But it almost always blows up anyway.

With the U-Va. case, the only difference is that it came with a kind of mushroom cloud of devastation rarely seen before. This unrequited freshman crush ultimately resulted in the duping of a professional journalist and waves of public outrage as the young woman's story was told - and then peeled back to a pit of deceit.

Surely she didn't know how big and ruinous her lie would become. But then, one never does.

AD

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What is catfishing? A brief (and sordid) history.

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"Catfishing" is suddenly in the news again, with reports that the University of Virginia gang rape scandal may have been rooted in a romantic scam. At the heart of the scandal, according to documents filed in a lawsuit against Rolling Stone magazine, was a troubled young woman who fell for a guy who failed to return her affections.

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In Real Life: Love, Lies and Identity in the Digital Age by Nev Schulman 

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In Real Life: Love, Lies and Identity in the Digital Age by Nev Schulman 

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Catfishing and a new digital platform of dating

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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

If you are a romantic, you are probably not on Tinder, the latest big addition to the online dating world. Tinder is the aptly named heterosexual version of Grindr, an older hook-up app that identifies available gay, bisexual, or "curious" partners in the vicinity.

It is also the modern blend of hot-or-not, in that users are required to judge pictures from fellow Tinderers by simply swiping right if they like them or left if they don't, and 1980s telephone bars, in that phone flirting precedes face-to-face interaction.

Thus Tinder is hardly original, yet it has taken the mobile dating market by storm: despite launching only last year, an estimated 450 million profiles are rated every day and membership is growing by 15% each week. More importantly, and in stark contrast with the overwhelmingly negative media reception, Tinder has managed to overcome the two big hurdles to online dating. First, Tinder is cool, at least to its users.

Indeed, whereas it is still somewhat embarrassing to confess to using EHarmony or Match.com, Tinderers are proud to demo the app at a dinner party, perhaps because the alternative - logging off and talking to others guests - is less appealing.

Second, through eliminating time lags and distance, Tinder bridges the gap between digital and physical dating, enabling users to experience instant gratification and making Tinder almost as addictive as Facebook (the average user is on it 11-minutes per day).

But the bigger lessons from the Tinder effect are psychological. Let me offer a few here:
* Hook-up apps are more arousing than actual hook-ups:
In our technosexual era, the process of dating has not only been gamified, but also sexualised, by technology. Mobile dating is much more than a means to an end, it is an end in itself. With Tinder, the pretext is to hook-up, but the real pleasure is derived from the Tindering process. Tinder is just the latest example for the sexualisation of urban gadgets: it is nomophobia, Facebook-porn and Candy Crush Saga all in one.

* Digital eligibility exceeds physical eligibility:

Although Tinder has gained trustworthiness vis-à-vis traditional dating sites by importing users' pictures and basic background info from Facebook, that hardly makes Tinder profiles realistic. What it does, however, is to increase average levels of attractiveness compared to the real world. Given that most people spend a great deal of time curating their Facebook profiles - uploading selfies from Instagram and reporting well calculated and sophisticated food, music, and film interest - one is left wondering how on earth Tinder users are single in the first place ... but only until you meet them.

* Evolutionary and social needs:

Like any successful internet service, Tinder enables people to fulfil some basic evolutionary and social needs. This is an important point: we tend to overestimate the impact of technology on human behaviour; more often than not, it is human behaviour that drives technological changes and explains their success or failures. Just like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, Tinder enables people to get along, albeit in a somewhat infantile, sexual and superficial way. It also enables us to get ahead, nourishing our competitive instincts by testing and maximising our dating potential. And lastly, Tinder enables users to satisfy their intellectual curiosity: finding out not only about other people's interests and personality, but what they think of ours'.
* Tinder does emulate the real dating world:
As much as critics (who are beginning to resemble puritans or conservatives) don't want to hear it, Tinder is an extension of mainstream real-world dating habits, especially compared to traditional online dating sites. This has been an important lesson for data enthusiasts who have tried to sterilise the game of love by injecting rigorous decision-making and psychometric algorithms into the process. Well, it turns out that people are a lot more superficial than psychologists thought. They would rather judge 50 pictures in two minutes than spend 50 minutes assessing one potential partner.

This reminds me of a TV show we created a couple of years ago; we profiled over 3,000 singletons using state-of-the-art psychological tests and created 500 couples based on psychological compatibility... but ignored looks and race. When the couples finally met - even though they trusted the science of the matching process - they were 90% focused on looks and only decided to date a second time if they were deemed equally attractive or worthy of each other's looks.

So, just like the social dynamics at a bar, Tindering comprises a series of simple and intuitive steps: you first assess the picture, then you gauge interest and only then you decide to start a (rudimentary) conversation. Clearly, psychologists have a lot of work to do before they can convince daters that their algorithms are more effective.

* Romanticism is dead, except in retail: This is not a cynical statement. Let's face it, if it weren't for Valentine's Day and the engagement industry, we would have officially moved beyond romanticism by now. The realities of the dating world could not be more different. People are time-deprived, careers have priority over relationships, not least because they are often a prerequisite to them, and the idea of a unique perfect match or soul-mate is a statistical impossibility.

Yes, some people still embrace a certain degree of serendipity, but the abundance of tools - admittedly, most still under construction - to reduce the huge gap between demand and supply is bound to make the dating market more efficient and rational, even if it doesn't translate into long-term relationship success.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at University College London and vice-president of research and innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com and author of Get more articles like this sent direct to your inbox by signing up for free membership to the Guardian Media Network - brought to you by Guardian Professional. Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt Topics

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The Tinder effect: psychology of dating in the technosexual era

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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic If you are a romantic, you are probably not on Tinder, the latest big addition to the online dating world. Tinder is the aptly named heterosexual version of Grindr, an older hook-up app that identifies available gay, bisexual, or "curious" partners in the vicinity.

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2005 - 2015 sexual opinions and behaviour change

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2005 - 2015 sexual opinions and behaviour change

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How sexual opinions and behavior have changed from 2005 to 2015.

Before there were dating apps, there were dating sites. The kind where people who couldn't find love in real life experimented with posting romance dissertations and low-res photos.

It was a dark time in those early aughts. The term 'online dating' made people squirm as much as words like "moist" and "spam." Now, online dating has become ubiquitous, and about 40,000 couples will have their first date tonight thanks to OkCupid.

Obviously, OkCupid isn't alone in the market. But we are unique in that we've been collecting data from personal match questions since we launched. So, ten years later in a dating terrain that's more digital than ever, how are people behaving? How have views on sex, gender and dating changed? To find out, we surveyed roughly one million users who responded to match questions in 2015, then compared those answers to results from 2010 and 2005.

Casually conservative

Sex is a common thread in the dating game. Well, it's more of a large, unbreakable rope. The point is: dating apps and sex are inherently linked, so naturally that piqued our interest. We looked at responses to questions about sex to see what's changed.

People are 19 percent less likely to consider sleeping with someone on the first date compared to ten years ago, with significant drops in every gender and orientation. Only one in four straight women said "yes" compared to almost 50 percent in 2005, and we see the biggest drop in gay men (-26 percent).

Whoa. Let's surmise for a second that casual sex is, generally, more accessible than it was in 2005. Maybe that's rash to say, but look at where we are - casual sex permeates the media to a point where it feels more normal than not. What's more, smartphones are ever-present, always-on portals to finding someone to hook up with. Yet ten years later, we're much less hasty to jump the gun.

Since people aren't leaning toward sex on date one, we tried a different angle.

Not only are people less likely to sleep with someone on the first date - dating someone only for sex is also less appealing. Perhaps that means that sex alone isn't enough anymore, and people are becoming more discerning about their sexual behavior and relationship desires. In fact, people are more concerned with love than sex by almost a 50 percent margin - with no change from 2005 to 2015.

At this point, we're wondering how in a culture where casual sex is commonplace, online daters are less interested in it. During our head-scratching, however, we did find that we're more progressive when it comes to number of partners.

Good news, sexually active folks. If you were concerned about being judged on your number, take heart. People don't care as much as they used to (but they still care).

Zoom in on straight women. Their results show a healthy drop, but their 2015 views are still pretty reserved. The topic of 'numbers' is still a conversation to be had, even today. Why are straight women so concerned?

Here's a little insight. For a 2005 slice of life, take a look at this article, and enjoy that perfectly topical reference to low slung jeans. Also, this quote:

"I know a lot of people who will go home with the same guy they have before just because it's not going to raise their number."
- a 26-year-old publicist, 2005

According to this post Sex and the City exposé, your number of partners really was a topic of judgment for reasons that manifested from, according to this story, the past. Or the Bush administration.

So far we've found that in 2015, people are more conservative when it comes to sex just for sex, but less so when it comes to number of partners. Call it casually conservative or conservatively casual, we're refining ourselves. Guess you could say...Mission accomplished.

Gender differences

After staring at this data for a while, we discovered an outlying group: straight women. Almost exclusively, they're the most modest in their answers. These next few questions go a little deeper into how straight women feel about themselves and gender norms.

Collectively, people are 15 percent less critical about women talking about their sex lives. That's a pretty significant achievement, and it makes sense. For decades, the conversation about women's sexuality and gender has gained momentum in media and politics. Thanks to the plight of outspoken organizations and feminists, people are realizing that it is something that's perfectly okay (and really important) to talk about, even if they're not discussing it correctly. Keep trying, boys.

Though, take a look at how different groups answer this.

Turns out that straight women are the harshest critics of themselves. 22 percent of straight women still don't think it's okay to openly talk about sexual exploits, while gay women are the most accepting. For men, they're all more open to women talking about sex, regardless of their orientation.

Speaking of gender differences, both straight men and women still exhibit some stereotypical views on friends with benefits.

Time to throw in your hats, guys. Since 2010, more males are interested in this kind of relationship, while females rose a measly three percent. At least now you know what most women aren't looking for.

Another norm that's gained popularity in 2015? Gender roles in the bedroom.

People who answered "I take control"

Straight men's numbers rose 25 percent, while straight women, again, stayed relatively the same with pretty low percentages. Interestingly, there was a notable rise in lesbians wanting to take control. Are straight people really settling into a sexual dynamic?

How important is sex?

The short answer: very. One thing people agree on, regardless of their gender and orientation, is that as people become more selective about who they date, sex becomes more important.

Remember how we found out that people are less likely to sleep with someone on the first date? Here's when people actually prefer to have sex.

The three-date rule stands strong. We see an increase in both 1-2 dates as well as 3-5, and a drop in 6 or more dates and after the wedding. Basically, we're less likely to rush into sex on the first date, but when we like someone, we're less likely to wait. When you know, you know, right?

When we bring marriage into the equation, we see that premarital relations are more than welcome.

Everyone agrees: sex matters. What's more - not only do people need to sleep with someone first, but it's got to be the most sexually satisfying relationship they've ever had. No pressure.

While we saw the biggest jump in straight men's responses, women overall are more likely to want their forever-relationship to be the most sexually satisfying. As conservative as straight women have been in this entire report, they're actually the most concerned. So in the long run, no matter your gender or orientation, you better bring your A-game.

Dating in the 21st century

Our attitudes toward sex and dating have changed alongside the advent of the dating app boom. And while casual sex is more available via dating apps, and arguably more apparent in popular culture than it was a decade ago, that doesn't mean people don't want depth in their relationships.

Dating culture is evolving. It could even be maturing. Have dating apps directly affected our behavior? We can't say for certain. But we can say that we're more thoughtful in our sexual behavior, and more progressive when it comes to attitudes. That's not a bad place to be.

Want to be a part of this report, and future ones? Sign up for OkCupid.

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A Digital Decade: Sex - The OkCupid Blog

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How sexual opinions and behavior have changed from 2005 to 2015. Before there were dating apps, there were dating sites. The kind where people who couldn't find love in real life experimented with posting romance dissertations and low-res photos. It was a dark time in those early aughts.

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Concerns about the effects of pornography on adolescents have become part of mainstream conversation now that 80% of the worldwide youth population are online.

Because so much freely accessible adult content features hypermasculinity and prioritizes male pleasure, a major worry is that young people who watch porn could develop harmful attitudes about sex or abusive behaviors towards women.

Most research stops short of suggesting causal links between pornography and specific sexual attitudes and behaviors. But young people themselves say that it can affect them - whether they stumble on pornographic images accidentally or search for it themselves.

Emily Rothman is a Professor of Community Health Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health. She has been researching the connections between pornography and sexual violence for nearly a decade. In 2016, she led a study of 72 teens aged 15-17 and found that pornography was their number one source of information about sex.

Rothman wanted to understand how and why pornography played such an important role in their lives, but also felt the insights could be used to help address the risks.

She teamed up with the Boston Public Health Commission's Start Strong peer leadership program to design an elective "porn literacy" course for high school students in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States.

The complete title of the course is "The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence" and it provides space for critical discussion about how gender, sexuality, consent, race, relationships and body image are portrayed (or not) in pornography.

Lessons range from defining terms used in online porn to helping students avoid clicking on things they don't want to see. Students are also guided through sensitive discussions about whether porn contributes to violence against women.

"We actually want to talk to kids about dating and sexual violence," Rothman says. "We discovered that kids find it fun and funny to talk about pornography. So we use it as a vehicle to talk about things we think are really critical, like negotiating consent and establishing healthy boundaries in a relationship."

Rothman believes that the best way to defend young people against negative impacts of pornography is to equip them with comprehensive, factual and sex-positive education. "In the absence of any other kind of education or information, of course it's more likely that kids will get their information from things made for profit or entertainment," she says.

"If they were flush with knowledge when they first encounter pornogaphy, they would be inoculated against some of the worst potential influences," says Rothman.

Further reading

10 years on: why we still need better sex education for the digital world, Jessica Ringrose, Amelia Jenkinson, Sophie Whitehead, IOE London Blog, UCL Institute of Education, 2019

What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn, New York Times, 2018

Porn and sex education, porn as sex education, Kath Albury, UNSW Sydney, 2014

Adolescent Pornography Use and Dating Violence among a Sample of Primarily Black and Hispanic, Urban-Residing, Underage Youth, Emily Rothman and Avanti Adhia, Behavioral Sciences, 2016

The internet can also play a positive role in providing safe spaces for young people to learn. For example, 70% of LGBTQ American college students said they researched their sexual orientation online. And many studies show that the internet helps LGBTQ youth connect with supportive peers, which in turn can increase their knowledge and self-confidence.

Positive outcomes like these is part of what free speech advocates say must be defended against censorship and why the right to anonymity matters so much. At least 16 countries censor online pornography though it's still possible to seek content from abroad. Proposals to enforce age limits on pornographic content have been opposed by digital rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation who say it would infringe on the privacy of internet users.

In 2018, microblogging platform Tumblr banned adult content on their platform, sparking controversy about the loss of a "safe space" online for LGBTQ+ communities and sex workers. Bans on nudity and sexually explicit content are common on most platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, which now leaves thousands with no alternative place to go.

In this complex and changing digital landscape, what remains constant is the important role that supportive parents and educators can play in equipping young people with the knowledge and awareness to have positive understandings of sexuality and of healthy relationships. For young people on their own discovery journeys, the internet offers a wealth of resources - publications and communities of support - that can be a better starting point than porn for understanding sexuality and health, including websites like Amaze.org, Scarleteen.com and Ahwaa.org.

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Sex education in the digital age - The Internet Health Report 2019

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The internet didn't invent pornography, but it's no secret that adult content is more accessible today than ever before - including to younger audiences. How parents and teachers approach what for many is a taboo subject will be key to adapting sexual education to the digital age.

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Better sex education is needed for the digital world

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Better sex education is needed for the digital world

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The UK government has recently updated its sex education guidelines. However they still fail to address important digital topics, such as sexting and online sexual harassment, in enough depth. In this post Jessica Ringrose, Amelia Jenkinson and Sophie Whitehead discuss how their policy on Technologically Facilitated Sexual Violence and Digital Defence lessons, aim to help address this gap. Jessica is a Professor of the Sociology of Gender and Education at University College London Institute of Education. Amelia is a Director and Co-Founder and Sophie is a facilitator at Sexplain, an organisation which supports schools to provide age-appropriate, up-to-date & inclusive sex and relationships education programmes. [Header image credit: CC0 Photo by Kaboompics.com from Pexels]

Earlier this year new guidance for Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education for England was put out for consultation by the Department for Education. This draft statutory guidance is intended to upgrade the nearly 20-year-old previous advice from the year 2000.

It highlights the current challenges of the digital context and the essential fact that "for many young people the distinction between the online world and other aspects of life is less marked than for some adults" (page 9). This is referenced throughout, in the context of healthy relationships, respectful behaviour and consent. The importance of digital literacy skills is emphasised for both primary and secondary (see paragraphs 58, 62 and 'Online and Media' section of secondary table, p28).

While I (Jessica Ringrose) told the New York Times earlier in the year that the guidelines looked promising and, "It will be really great if they will be able to tackle all these issues" we, the three authors of this blog post, remain concerned that there are serious omissions and that the guidelines fail to address important digital topics in enough depth or detail.

Take pornography, for instance, which is often one of young people's main sex educators. This topic is inadequately covered due to discomfort, lack of training and safeguarding concerns which end up ignoring children's sexual health and sexual rights to knowledge and information about their bodies and relationships. Other issues that are not tackled properly include image-based online abuse (such as ugly comments on appearance), technology facilitated sexual harassment and digital flashing. These are all being raised increasingly by young people as everyday matters they must navigate. Also concerning is the fact that problematic sexting resources and films ('Tagged' and 'Exposed') that have been critiqued internationally as sexist, victim-blaming and slut shaming are still listed as key recommended resources in the sexting guidance.

It is essential to tackle these matters, as digital spaces are a formative part of young people's relationships, sexuality and understanding of sexual health and consent. Yet despite over a decade of research on youth sexting in the UK, we do not seem to have made much progress in developing appropriate resources for schools.

Looking back, the first UK sexting study was conducted in 2009 by Andy Phippen - a survey of 535 young people aged 11-18 - that found:

56% of respondents were aware of instances where images and videos were distributed further than the intended recipient but only 23% believe this distribution is intended to cause upset.

30% of young people knew people who had been adversely affected by sexting.

In 2011, Jessica Ringrose and colleagues released a report for the NSPCC drawing on in-depth qualitative data on sexting scenarios which found overwhelming evidence of sexual double standards, victim blaming and slut shaming facing girls in particular. There was little to no awareness amongst young people about how issues of sexual consent extend to the digital sphere, and minimal understanding of laws that criminalise sexually explicit image exchange for under 18s.

In 2019 the first study looking at UK young people's needs around sexting education has shown a total mismatch between parent and teacher understandings and efforts at education around sexting and young people's actual needs. The report shows that existing UK resources and strategies for addressing sexting, such as holding assemblies, are judged completely ineffective by young people at offering useful help and support around the complexity of issues of sexting and particularly the problems of lack of consent in the digital sphere.

So although 10 years have passed since Phippen's initial research into youth sexting in the UK, we are still in the worrying state reported in the 2016 House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee's inquiry into sexual harassment and violence in schools that found schools' policies, curriculum, training, practice and delivery are failing to support young people's safety and well-being around digital sexual health and well-being.

Given this gap, Jessica Ringrose and Kaity Mendes (University of Leicester) have teamed up with the charity Sexplain to develop a policy on Technologically Facilitated Sexual Violence, the first of its kind for schools. It aims to support schools to identify and understand how sexual violence can operate in online spaces, highlight relevant laws and related policies, and to suggest how to create a whole-school approach to tackling this problem. We are also designing a series of 'digital defence' lessons, which help young people to manage issues they are facing online: this ranges from targeted advertising and cyberbullying to self-care strategies for teen digital feminist activists.

Moving forward, we are also working with a larger group of academics and charities to delve into the current realities of youth digital intimacies and uses of social media and image circulation through a new research project, 'Sexting 10 Years On'. Findings are to be released in 2020. There will be a new focus on masculinity and issues of digital consent, in response to international research which has found a significant rise in the production and circulation of 'dick pics' while girls face more harmful consequences from non-consensual image sharing whether that be images of girls' body parts passed without consent or receiving non-consensual pictures of male body parts.

This redirection into masculinity and image sharing and issues of consent and the law is important to shift the focus away from girls as main producers and victims of sexting and to consider in depth how boys are participating in online image sharing.
Notes This text was originally published on the IOE London blog and has been re-posted here with permission. This post gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the LSE Parenting for a Digital Future blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
About the author

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10 years on: why we still need better sex education for the digital world

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The UK government has recently updated its sex education guidelines. However they still fail to address important digital topics, such as sexting and online sexual harassment, in enough depth. In this post Jessica Ringrose, Amelia Jenkinson and Sophie Whitehead discuss how their policy on Technologically Facilitated Sexual Violence and Digital Defence lessons, aim to help address this gap.

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Disinfecting robots, smart helmets, thermal camera-equipped drones and advanced facial recognition software are all being deployed in the fight against Covid-19 at the heart of the outbreak in China.

President Xi Jinping has called on the country's tech sector to help battle the epidemic.

Healthcare tech is also being used to identify coronavirus symptoms, find new treatments and monitor the spread of the disease, which has so far infected more than 90,000 people worldwide.

But is it up to the job?

Robots to the rescue

Several Chinese firms have developed automated technologies for contactless delivery, spraying disinfectants and performing basic diagnostic functions, in order to minimise the risk of cross-infection.

Shenzhen-based Pudu Technology, which usually makes robots for the catering industry, has reportedly installed its machines in more than 40 hospitals around the country to help medical staff.

MicroMultiCopter, also in Shenzhen, is deploying drones to transport medical samples and conduct thermal imaging.

Meanwhile, advanced AI has been used to help diagnose the disease and accelerate the development of a vaccine.

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, claims its new AI-powered diagnosis system can identify coronavirus infections with 96% accuracy.

Its founder Jack Ma has just announced that his charity, the Jack Ma Foundation, will donate $2.15m (£1.6m) towards the development of a vaccine.

"In the battle against Covid-19, emerging technologies have stood out by making immense contributions in an unexpected, creative and amazingly responsive way," said Lu Chuanying, a senior official at Shanghai-based Global Cyberspace Governance.

They have helped "arrest or contain the spread of the deadly virus, thus becoming one of the most reliable and trustworthy means of combating Covid-19," he wrote in an article for state-run China Daily newspaper.

But is all this just for show?

"The state media apparatus, even under normal circumstances, takes every opportunity to send a message about China's technological sophistication, even if a story has little substance to it," notes Elliott Zaagman, who covers China's technology industry and co-hosts the China Tech-Investor podcast.

"I suspect that most of the stories we see about disinfecting robots, drones, etc, are mostly just performative gimmicks. However, tech's 'less-sexy' role in controlling this outbreak should not be dismissed," he told the BBC.

'Era of big data and internet'

Beyond robots and drones, China has also mobilised its sophisticated surveillance system to keep a tab on infected individuals and enforce quarantines.

Facial recognition cameras are commonplace across China, and now companies are upgrading their technology to scan crowds for fever and identify individuals not wearing masks.

SenseTime, a leading AI firm, says its contactless temperature detection software has been deployed at underground stations, schools and community centres in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The company also claims to have a tool that can recognise faces, even if they are wearing masks, with a "relatively high degree of accuracy".

Another Chinese AI firm, Megvii, boasts a similar temperature detection product, which has been deployed in Beijing.

"During this challenging time, we see this not as an opportunity, but our responsibility to do our part to tackle Covid-19 using our technology," a SenseTime spokesperson told the BBC.

Chinese newspaper Global Times reports that officials in Chengdu city, Sichuan province, have been issued with smart helmets that can measure the temperature of anyone within a 5m radius, sounding an alarm if they are found to have a fever.

As Chinese citizens slowly return to work despite the virus outbreak, mobile phones have also emerged as a key tool to track the spread of the coronavirus.

An app called Alipay Health Code assigns individuals the colour green, yellow or red, depending on whether they should be allowed into public spaces or quarantined at home.

It uses big data to identify potential virus carriers, according to its developer Ant Financial. It has already been adopted in more than 200 Chinese cities.

Tencent, the company behind popular messaging app WeChat, has launched a similar QR-code-based tracking feature.

The "close contact detector" app notifies the user if they have been in close contact with a virus carrier.

"In the era of big data and internet, the movements of each person can be clearly seen. So we are different from the Sars time now," Li Lanjuan, an adviser to the National Health Commission, said in an interview with Chinese state TV.

"With such new technologies, we should make full use of them to find and contain the source of infection."

Privacy issues

While these new surveillance tools may be considered efficient - and perhaps necessary during a health crisis - they have prompted concerns about privacy.

Many of these health apps require users to register with their name, national identification number and phone number. Authorities have also sourced data from phone carriers, health and transport agencies and state-owned firms.

There is little transparency on how the government plans to cross-check the data, and there have been reports about personal health data being leaked on the internet.

A report by the New York Times, for example, said that Alipay Health Code also appears to share information with the police.

As the apps become more popular, there's the added fear that it could exacerbate paranoia and lead to discrimination against coronavirus patients.

Critics say China could use the health crisis as a justification to expand its already vast surveillance system, which human rights bodies have described as dystopian.

"If there's one lesson that Chinese authorities are learning here, it's where the 'weak spots' are in their surveillance apparatus," notes Mr Zaagman.

"Privacy was already becoming a thing of the past in China. An outbreak like this will only expedite that process".

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Disinfecting robots, smart helmets, thermal camera-equipped drones and advanced facial recognition software are all being deployed in the fight against Covid-19 at the heart of the outbreak in China. President Xi Jinping has called on the country's tech sector to help battle the epidemic.

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The Facebook newsfeed and 'ambient awareness'

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The Facebook newsfeed and 'ambient awareness'

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"Everyone was freaking out," Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn't any way to opt out of News Feed, to "go private" and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options. "Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move," a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in, "Frankly, I don't need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve." By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr's group, and by the next day it had 284,000.

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they'd like it.

He was right. Within days, the tide reversed. Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they'd learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about - Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? - when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group - proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace - all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users' worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing most of their information through News Feed.) Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site's growth. A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook's success. "Facebook has always tried to push the envelope," he said. "And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren't yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of."

In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness." It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does - body language, sighs, stray comments - out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for "microblogging": posting frequent tiny updates on what you're doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They're far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates - limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message - on what they're doing. There are other services for reporting where you're traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you're looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.

For many people - particularly anyone over the age of 30 - the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme - the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world. Twitter, in particular, has been the subject of nearly relentless scorn since it went online. "Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day?" wondered Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, in an essay about Twitter last month. "Even I don't care."

Indeed, many of the people I interviewed, who are among the most avid users of these "awareness" tools, admit that at first they couldn't figure out why anybody would want to do this. Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too.

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich - and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update - each individual bit of social information - is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of E.S.P.," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

"It's like I can distantly read everyone's mind," Haley went on to say. "I love that. I feel like I'm getting to something raw about my friends. It's like I've got this heads-up display for them." It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley's group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by - ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they've never actually been apart. They don't need to ask, "So, what have you been up to?" because they already know. Instead, they'll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of "co-presence" has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night - tiny updates like "enjoying a glass of wine now" or "watching TV while lying on the couch." They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn't very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.

"It's an aggregate phenomenon," Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. "No message is the single-most-important message. It's sort of like when you're sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You're sitting here reading the paper, and you're doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you're aware of them." Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you've experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger's Twitter or Facebook feed isn't interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it's a novel.

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book "Bowling Alone." The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to "feel less alone," as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

When I decided to try out Twitter last year, at first I didn't have anyone to follow. None of my friends were yet using the service. But while doing some Googling one day I stumbled upon the blog of Shannon Seery, a 32-year-old recruiting consultant in Florida, and I noticed that she Twittered. Her Twitter updates were pretty charming - she would often post links to camera-phone pictures of her two children or videos of herself cooking Mexican food, or broadcast her agonized cries when a flight was delayed on a business trip. So on a whim I started "following" her - as easy on Twitter as a click of the mouse - and never took her off my account. (A Twitter account can be "private," so that only invited friends can read one's tweets, or it can be public, so anyone can; Seery's was public.) When I checked in last month, I noticed that she had built up a huge number of online connections: She was now following 677 people on Twitter and another 442 on Facebook. How in God's name, I wondered, could she follow so many people? Who precisely are they? I called Seery to find out.

"I have a rule," she told me. "I either have to know who you are, or I have to know of you." That means she monitors the lives of friends, family, anyone she works with, and she'll also follow interesting people she discovers via her friends' online lives. Like many people who live online, she has wound up following a few strangers - though after a few months they no longer feel like strangers, despite the fact that she has never physically met them.

I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online. The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that's several thousand little social pings to sift through daily. What would it be like to get thousands of e-mail messages a day? But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren't as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It's personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they're not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you'll read them all, maybe you'll skip some. Seery estimated that she needs to spend only a small part of each hour actively reading her Twitter stream.

Yet she has, she said, become far more gregarious online. "What's really funny is that before this 'social media' stuff, I always said that I'm not the type of person who had a ton of friends," she told me. "It's so hard to make plans and have an active social life, having the type of job I have where I travel all the time and have two small kids. But it's easy to tweet all the time, to post pictures of what I'm doing, to keep social relations up." She paused for a second, before continuing: "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before."

I realized that this is becoming true of me, too. After following Seery's Twitter stream for a year, I'm more knowledgeable about the details of her life than the lives of my two sisters in Canada, whom I talk to only once every month or so. When I called Seery, I knew that she had been struggling with a three-day migraine headache; I began the conversation by asking her how she was feeling.

Online awareness inevitably leads to a curious question: What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another's fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming - chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice - we won't really feel that we "know" someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the "Dunbar number," as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online - people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others - it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn't actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.

But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their "weak ties" - loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently "friended" them on Facebook, or somebody from last year's holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist. I have noticed this effect myself. In the last few months, dozens of old work colleagues I knew from 10 years ago in Toronto have friended me on Facebook, such that I'm now suddenly reading their stray comments and updates and falling into oblique, funny conversations with them. My overall Dunbar number is thus 301: Facebook (254) + Twitter (47), double what it would be without technology. Yet only 20 are family or people I'd consider close friends. The rest are weak ties - maintained via technology.

This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that "weak ties" greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you're looking for a job and ask your friends, they won't be much help; they're too similar to you, and thus probably won't have any leads that you don't already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they're farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out. Many avid Twitter users - the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers - explicitly milk this dynamic for all it's worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant who has become a minor celebrity on Twitter - she has more than 5,300 followers - recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year's taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

"I outsource my entire life," she said. "I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes." (She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family - "My little secret," she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)

It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you're reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they're dating and whether they're happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in "parasocial" relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial - peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

"The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship," Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. "I've been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they're writing saying, 'Hey, I broke my neck!' And I'm like, 'You're being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don't.' " Boyd sighed. "They can observe you, but it's not the same as knowing you."

When I spoke to Caterina Fake, a founder of Flickr (a popular photo-sharing site), she suggested an even more subtle danger: that the sheer ease of following her friends' updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person. "At one point I realized I had a friend whose child I had seen, via photos on Flickr, grow from birth to 1 year old," she said. "I thought, I really should go meet her in person. But it was weird; I also felt that Flickr had satisfied that getting-to-know you satisfaction, so I didn't feel the urgency. But then I was like, Oh, that's not sufficient! I should go in person!" She has about 400 people she follows online but suspects many of those relationships are tissue-fragile. "These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people."

What is it like to never lose touch with anyone? One morning this summer at my local cafe, I overheard a young woman complaining to her friend about a recent Facebook drama. Her name is Andrea Ahan, a 27-year-old restaurant entrepreneur, and she told me that she had discovered that high-school friends were uploading old photos of her to Facebook and tagging them with her name, so they automatically appeared in searches for her.

She was aghast. "I'm like, my God, these pictures are completely hideous!" Ahan complained, while her friend looked on sympathetically and sipped her coffee. "I'm wearing all these totally awful '90s clothes. I look like crap. And I'm like, Why are you people in my life, anyway? I haven't seen you in 10 years. I don't know you anymore!" She began furiously detagging the pictures - removing her name, so they wouldn't show up in a search anymore.

Worse, Ahan was also confronting a common plague of Facebook: the recent ex. She had broken up with her boyfriend not long ago, but she hadn't "unfriended" him, because that felt too extreme. But soon he paired up with another young woman, and the new couple began having public conversations on Ahan's ex-boyfriend's page. One day, she noticed with alarm that the new girlfriend was quoting material Ahan had e-mailed privately to her boyfriend; she suspected he had been sharing the e-mail with his new girlfriend. It is the sort of weirdly subtle mind game that becomes possible via Facebook, and it drove Ahan nuts.

"Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone's trivia and gossiping," she said.

Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won't stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what's being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you're doing - right now! - if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has closely studied how college-age users are reacting to the world of awareness, told me that athletes used to sneak off to parties illicitly, breaking the no-drinking rule for team members. But then camera phones and Facebook came along, with students posting photos of the drunken carousing during the party; savvy coaches could see which athletes were breaking the rules. First the athletes tried to fight back by waking up early the morning after the party in a hungover daze to detag photos of themselves so they wouldn't be searchable. But that didn't work, because the coaches sometimes viewed the pictures live, as they went online at 2 a.m. So parties simply began banning all camera phones in a last-ditch attempt to preserve privacy.

"It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor - a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early '90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity - become someone new.

"If anything, it's identity-constraining now," Tufekci told me. "You can't play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, 'Oh, right, ha-ha - I know you, and you're not into that.' " She laughed. "You know that old cartoon? 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'? On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog! If you don't want people to know you're a dog, you'd better stay away from a keyboard."

Or, as Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London who writes regularly about ambient tools, put it to me: "Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What's that going to do to them?" Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching - but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another - quite different - result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter's Web site - "What are you doing?" - can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Laura Fitton, the social-media consultant, argues that her constant status updating has made her "a happier person, a calmer person" because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. "It drags you out of your own head," she added. In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

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I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson

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"Everyone was freaking out," Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn't any way to opt out of News Feed, to "go private" and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options.

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Dealing with the projection of 'perfection' on instagram: the solution? A 'finsta'

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Dealing with the projection of 'perfection' on instagram: the solution? A 'finsta'

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I first heard the term "Finsta" from my 16-year-old cousin. She had just taken a ridiculous selfie of herself, and had declared it "Finsta-worthy".

When I asked what she meant, she explained a "Finsta" is a fake Instagram, or a "Finstagram" (shortened for cool factor, probably).

"But ... Why do you need a fake Instagram account? Isn't one enough?" I asked her.

She showed me her real Instagram account -- a perfect, edited collage of great moments with high school friends, her prom date, and vacation shots with family.

"My real Instagram account is kind of fake -- like, only pictures of my 'best' life," My cousin explained. "I use my Finsta to share funny, inside jokes with my closest friends. My real Instagram has like, 400 followers. My fake one only has like, eight."

As you probably already know, Instagram is often used as an opportunity to present an "ideal" life to your followers -- even if that life is, in fact, a poor representation of reality. It's not the place to post embarrassing photos, or unedited "I just woke up" selfies.

However, Instagram's mirage of perfect, well-filtered lives doesn't always lend itself to happiness. For instance, one recent study found a correlation between the amount of strangers you follow, and depressive symptoms including fearfulness, loneliness, or fatigue. Unfortunately, Instagram can lead users to feel their lives aren't good enough, compared to everyone else's (edited) ones.

Which is why Finsta's might not be such a bad idea. Ultimately, a Finsta is a chance to share a goofier, less-edited version of yourself with a trustworthy group of friends -- and for those friends to see less 'perfect' posts, and more real ones.

Ironically, a "Fake Instagram" just might be a solution to feelings of inadequacy on the platform, as friends learn to share more honest stories about their lives -- the good, and the bad. If you want to learn how to make a Finsta for yourself, keep reading.

What's a Finsta?

A Finsta is a shortened term for Fake Instagram, which is an Instagram account used by teens and young adults to document more real, candid posts they share with only close friends.

Oftentimes, an Instagram account is used to curate a public collage of edited images for upwards of hundreds or thousands of followers. By contrast, a Finsta is a private account only followed by 10-20 people. A Finsta allows users to post more funny, unedited snapshots of their daily lives, or share inside-joke moments with friends.

How to Make a Finsta

Creating a Finsta is a simple process. However, before you begin adding an additional account, you'll want to brainstorm a unique username that doesn't use your real first or last name -- additionally, you'll want to make sure you don't use a real photo of yourself as your profile picture. Remember, your Finsta should be impossible to find unless you share the username with friends.

To create a Finsta, follow these easy steps:

1. Open your Instagram account, and click the three-line icon in the top right.

2. At the bottom of "Settings", click "Add Account".

3. At the bottom of the next page, click "Sign Up" to create your new account.

4. Next, input your phone number.

5. Click Create New Account.

Once you input your phone number, a box will pop-up to ask whether you'd like to log into the account you already have. Click "Create New Account" to continue creating your Finsta.

6. Next, add your username.

Remember, you don't want to use your real first and last name here. Instead, consider coming up with a clever username only good friends will understand.

7. Don't link to outside accounts.

Skip the option to link your Finsta to your Facebook account (which could make it easier to link the Finsta to you). Add a profile picture, then click "Next".

8. Start posting.

Voila! Your Finsta is ready. You can now post pictures and videos, and invite your closest friends to follow you.

Finsta Examples

Did you know that celebrities make Finstas too? Last year, Bella Hadid created a Finsta account for her blonde alter ego named R ebekka Harajuku. The Instagram was similar to a normal influencer account, however, it featured Bella in disguise as the character she created.

This Finsta, managed by Riverdale star Cole Sprouse is where he posts pictures of people who take pictures of him. While he's not chronicling his life as he does on his more traditional Instagram, this account still shows off his humorous side.

Pammburglar is the Finsta identity of Pam Bump, a fellow HubSpot blogger. Because she loves fast-food, her Finsta name is a quirky combination of Pam and Hamburglar. On her Finsta, she posts photos and videos of events she attends, food, and travel. Along with posting about daily happenings, she also shares plenty of selfies and funny memes.

While her profile is private, you can scroll down to see a few Finsta picture examples that she's permitted for this post.

Finsta Post Ideas

Because Finsta's don't necessarily need to follow rules -- or social norms, you can express yourself with a variety of different posts. Here are two styles that are fairly common on Finstas.

Food Posts

While you might use your professional Instagram to show photos or videos of yourself networking, in the office, or talking about your company, you might want to share a lighter side of day, like lunchtime, on your Finsta.

In the post below, @Pammburglar, noted in the example above, enjoys a ginormous turkey leg.

Throwback Posts

In this post, @Pammburglar reminisces on the time she was "rejected" as a Starbucks model back in 2014. In reality, she was actually starring in a student produced film that took place at the coffee chain while in college.

Nostalgic throwback posts like these are both funny and interesting to people who have or haven't known you in the past.

Finsta Names

To ensure random followers can't find your Finsta, and to keep it private amongst close friends, you'll want to create a fake name for your Finsta account.

A website called SpinXO offers a free tool that helps generate potential Finsta names based on your name or nickname, hobbies, interests, or other random words or numbers.

For instance, without inputting any of my own information, SpinXO initially offered these random Finsta names:

JavaPerfect

ChellFalls

KinGambit

RadiantEnjoy

VividGiggly

SimpleEye

Airbiosav

Alternatively, you might brainstorm a unique Finsta account name by considering inside jokes you share with your friends, or TV shows or movies only your good friends know you like. You'll want to avoid using any abbreviation of your first or last name, and try to be as obscure as possible.

For instance, if I were making a Finsta (which, trust me, I'm not), I might call it "Buttercup", the name of my cat (on second thought ... a lot of people have heard me talk about Buttercup. So, scratch that).
Editor's note: This post was published in November 2018, but was updated in October 2019 for comprehensiveness.

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What's a Finsta? We Explain This Confusing Instagram Trend

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I first heard the term "Finsta" from my 16-year-old cousin. She had just taken a ridiculous selfie of herself, and had declared it "Finsta-worthy". When I asked what she meant, she explained a "Finsta" is a fake Instagram, or a "Finstagram" (shortened for cool factor, probably). "But ...

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Visual representation of the length of various social media group's terms and conditions.

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designboom | architecture & design magazine

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dima yarovinsky prints out the 'terms of service' of leading online services such as facebook, snapchat, instagram and tinder on standard a4-size rolls. part of an infographics course led by roni levit at the bezalel academy of arts and design, the project aims to visualize how small and helpless users are against large corporations.

viewing the work

according to the designer, the average person reads at a rate of 200 words per minute while a standard 'terms of service' agreement contains 11.972 words which means that even if a user did attempt to read the terms before agreeing to them, it would take approximately 60 minutes. the terms were printed using standard legal contract font size and typeface, and hung on the academy's gallery space, while the project is on show during aalto university's visualizing knowledge conference in finland. pointing out that these terms are actual legal contracts between the user and the online service provider, yarovinsky's 'I agree' project visualizes the contractual obligations users agree to when subscribing for a free or paid service/app.

viewing the work

instagram data

snapchat data

side view of the work

front view of the work

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dima yarovinsky visualizes facebook, instagram and snapchat terms of service

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dima yarovinsky prints out the 'terms of service' of leading online services such as facebook, snapchat, instagram and tinder on standard a4-size rolls. part of an infographics course led by roni levit at the bezalel academy of arts and design, the project aims to visualize how small and helpless users are against large corporations.

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Massive data breaches, marketers tracking your every step online, shady people exploring the photos you shared in social networks - the list of digital annoyances goes on and on. However, it's not completely hopeless: You do have control over your data. Here's how to improve your privacy online.

1. Check social privacy settings

If you have social accounts, those networks have a lot of information about you, and you might be surprised how much of it is visible to anybody on the Internet by default. That's why we strongly recommend you check your privacy settings: It's up to you to decide what info you want to share with complete strangers versus your friends - or even nobody but you.

2. Don't use public storages for private information

Oversharing is not limited to social networks. Don't use online services that are meant for sharing information to store your private data. For example, Google Docs isn't an ideal place to store a list of passwords, and Dropbox is not the best venue for your passport scans unless they are kept in an encrypted archive.

Don't use services meant for sharing to store your private data.

3. Evade tracking

When you visit a website, your browser discloses a bunch of stuff about you and your surfing history. Marketers use that information to profile you and target you with ads. Incognito mode can't really prevent such tracking; you need to use special tools.

4. Keep your main e-mail address and phone number private

Your reward for sharing your e-mail address and phone number? Tons of spam in your e-mail inbox and hundreds of robocalls on your phone. Even if you can't avoid sharing this info with Internet services and online stores, don't share it with random people on social networks. And consider creating a separate, disposable e-mail address and, if possible, a separate phone number for these cases.

Create an additional e-mail account and purchase an additional SIM card to use for online shopping and other situations that require sharing your data with strangers.

5. Use messaging apps with end-to-end encryption

Most modern messaging apps use encryption, but in many cases it's what they call encryption in transit - messages are decrypted on the provider's side and stored on its servers. What if someone hacks those servers? Don't take that risk - chose end-to-end encryption - that way, even the messaging service provider can't see your conversations.

Use a messaging app with end-to-end encryption - for example, WhatsApp;

Note that by default, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Google Allo do not use end-to-end encryption. To enable it, manually start a secret chat.

6. Use secure passwords

Using weak passwords to protect your private information is as good as shouting that information to passersby. It's nearly impossible to memorize long and unique passwords for all the services you use, but with a password manager you can memorize just one master password.

Use long (12 characters and more) passwords everywhere;

Use a different password for each service;

Use a Kaspersky Password Manager to make using secure passwords easier.

7. Review permissions for mobile apps and browser extensions

Mobile apps prompt you to give them permissions to access contacts or files in device storage, and to use the camera, microphone, geolocation, and so on. Some really cannot work without these permissions, but some use this information to profile you for marketing (and worse). Fortunately, it's relatively easy to control which apps are given which permissions. The same stands for browser extensions, which also have unfortunate spying tendencies.

Review the permissions you give to mobile apps. Here's how to do that on Android and on iOS;

Do not install browser extensions unless you really need them. Carefully check the permissions you give them.

8. Secure your phone and computer with passwords or passcodes

Our computers and phones store a lot of data we'd rather keep private, so protect them with passwords. These passwords don't have to be complicated and unique, but they should keep random people out. On mobile devices, do a bit better: six-digit PINs or actual passwords rather than four digits and screen-lock patterns. For devices that support biometric authentication - whether fingerprint reading or face unlock - that's generally OK, but remember that these technologies have limitations.

Use passwords or biometric authentication to lock your phones, tablets, and computers.

9. Disable lock screen notifications

Protect your phone with a long, secure password, but leave notifications on the lock screen? Now any passerby can see your business. To keep that information from appearing on the locked screen, set up notifications correctly.

Disable lock-screen notifications or hide sensitive information from the lock screen. Here's how to do it on Android and on iOS.

10. Stay private on Wi-Fi networks

Public Wi-Fi networks usually do not encrypt traffic, and that means anyone on the same network can try to snoop on your traffic. Avoid transmitting any sensitive data - logins, passwords, credit card data, and so forth - over public Wi-Fi, and use a VPN to encrypt your data and protect it from prying eyes.

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How to improve privacy online in 10 easy steps

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Massive data breaches, marketers tracking your every step online, shady people exploring the photos you shared in social networks - the list of digital annoyances goes on and on. However, it's not completely hopeless: You do have control over your data. Here's how to improve your privacy online.

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Season 4: Episode 5

In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard Business School's Shoshana Zuboff argues that tech companies - like Google and Facebook - collect so much personal data for profit, that they're changing the fundamentals of our economy and way of life. And now these companies are learning to shape our behavior to better serve their business goals. Shoshana joins Manoush Zomorodi to explain what this all means for us.

We then explore whether or not it's time to end our relationship with corporate spies. OG advice columnist Dear Abby gives us some tips to start with. We chat with philosopher S. Matthew Liao. He asks if we have a moral duty to quit Facebook. Alice Marwick explains why most people won't leave the social network. And journalist Nithin Coca tells us what it was like for him to quit both Facebook and Google. Spoiler alert: it wasn't easy, but he has no regrets.

Transcript

Manoush Z.: Do you know the advice column, Dear Abby? People have spilled their guts to this namesake newspaper advice columnist since 1956. Millions of people have enjoyed reading the sharing of secrets and confessions, and the no-nonsense advice Abby offers in return.

Jeanne Phillips: Hi everyone, this is Dear Abby. Actually I'm Jeanne Phillips, but I'm better known as Dear Abby.

Manoush Z.: Jeanne Phillips inherited the job from her mother, Pauline Phillips. We reached out to Jeanne, or Abby, because because we could use some relationship advice ourselves. It's about our relationship with this friend we spend most of our time with: the Internet. Maybe this is a friend we can longer trust?

Speaker 3: Dear Abby. I think my friend the Internet is spying on me. I share everything with her. She knows what I like and don't like. What I buy and where I shop. Where I've been and where I want to go. Who I might vote for and what issues I believe in. Everything. It turns out, my friend the Internet is taking my information and sharing it with other friends. They even pay her for it! It sucks because she is a huge part of my life. But it's like she's spying on me! What do I do? Signed, it's Complicated.

Jeanne Phillips: To It's Complicated, A close friend does not disclose the private chats that you're having. You can't trust a person like this. You can't take back what's out there. A person who mistreats you isn't a friend. Somebody who uses you is not a friend. In the future, be careful what you reveal to this so-called friend, who doesn't seem like much a friend to me at all.

Manoush Z.: Dear Abby's tough love makes it obvious: on the internet, we let tech companies get away with more bad behavior than we'd ever let our real life friends get away with. The Big Tech companies especially - like Google, Facebook, Amazon and so on.And the relationships we all have with these companies have fueled an entire digital economy. An economy where companies watch everything we say and do, and then turn that knowledge into profit. This online data economy is so pervasive - and so lucrative - that author Shoshana Zuboff has coined a new word for it: Surveillance Capitalism.

In a moment, Shoshana explains what Surveillance Capitalism is and how it is shaping, and modifying our online and offline behavior. And then, we'll explore if we should cut ties with these companies... or if we even could cut those ties if we wanted to.

I'm Manoush Zomorodi. This is IRL: Online Life is Real Life. An original podcast from Mozilla.

Mozilla fights for a safe and open Internet that everyone can enjoy. You can support that mission, by trying out the Firefox browser. Firefox never sells your data. Download it at firefox dot com.

Manoush Z.: Shoshana Zuboff doesn't think Google, Facebook, or the others are our friends. She believes the online world they've created doesn't leave much room for pleasantries. I mean, it's right there in the title of her book.

Shoshana Zuboff: My new book is called "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power".

Manoush Z.: Shoshana says these companies are not the democratizing and empowering tools they claim to be. And surveillance capitalism is spreading across our entire economy. A market economy where our private lives are what's for sale.

Shoshana Zuboff: This is a new era of capitalism in which it is now private, human experience that lives outside the marketplace, that has been unilaterally claimed for the market, dragged into the market, renamed as "behavioral data", and now traded and exchanged in a new kind of marketplace that is founded and operated by surveillance capitalism.

Manoush Z.: How did you come up with the term "surveillance capitalism"?

Shoshana Zuboff: Well, I think it comes down to this: you know, reading early documents, and listening to many early speeches, and reading some of the early patents, and at this point I'm talking largely about Google, right at the beginning here. Once they discovered that they could extract more behavioral data than they needed to improve, for example, their search products and services, this extra data, that was just at that point sort of stuffed into their data logs, sitting on their servers and not being used, and through a series of events they realized that they could use those data to predict who was most likely to click on which ad.

These extra data are what I call "behavioral surplus", because it was more than they needed just to improve their products and services. Their desire to hunt and capture these behavioral surplus data was so intense, because it was going to finally be the road that cracked the code to how to monetize this young internet business. So their desire for these data was so intense that they began to explicitly formulate the idea that they were willing to hunt and capture that data while bypassing the user's awareness.

Therefore, surveillance capitalism is essentially the only thing that you can call it, because it represents the social reality, as well as the economic imperative.

Manoush Z.: It is very, very poetic, and quite sinister actually, when you describe it. Can we make clear how Facebook fits into surveillance capitalism?

Shoshana Zuboff: Sheryl Sandberg, she's a very brilliant and talented woman, and she was an extremely successful executive at Google, where she was involved in these very early phases of developing the logic of surveillance capitalism. In my book I describe Sheryl Sandberg as the "Typhoid Mary" of surveillance capitalism, because she's really the one who began the process of dispersing ... bringing the germs from one institution to another, where it gradually began to infect all internet businesses, all start-ups, all apps, all developers, and then as we now know, has moved out from Silicon Valley across the entire economy, really to found a new surveillance-based economic order.

Manoush Z.: Right. So it's not just Facebook, all the companies ... majority of the companies, are part of this surveillance capitalism. Why is it so irresistible, Shoshana?

Shoshana Zuboff: I think one reason that it's irresistible, Manoush, is that in our globalized economy where prices have been driven down to the lowest common denominator, and people can shop online and easily find the lowest price, everyone in our very modern economy is chasing margins. We've had relatively low inflation, and so now this data surplus, this behavioral surplus, which we can sell into these new markets that trade explicitly in bets on the future of human behavior, I call these "behavioral futures markets", now we see these same behavioral futures markets thriving in the retail sector, and the insurance sector, and the healthcare sector, in the entertainment sector, in the automotive sector.

Just recently the CEO of Ford Motor saying, "Hey, you know what? Our vehicles really are surveillance operations. We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in our vehicles, we can collect so much data about their behavior, and then we can monetize that data." So maybe that should be Ford's new business.

Manoush Z.: Can I just ask you, is there proof that surveillance capitalism does indeed work, that it increases the margins of these companies who are doing the ad targeting, or selling their wares based on the information they're getting from the big tech companies?

Shoshana Zuboff: We see that Google has shot up in record time in market capitalization, Facebook has followed that same path. Amazon, a ruthless capitalist, but for many years not a surveillance capitalist, but now we see with its Alexa and this whole push toward ubiquitous sensing and recording and so forth, with it's personalization effort, it has now swerved into the surveillance capitalist domain. And as these companies move into this domain, we see their bottom line, their revenues and their profit, are increasing.

And slowly, what the competitive pressures have forced these companies to realize, is that the most predictive data of all is the data that comes from my actually intervening in your behavior and shaping it toward those courses of action that are going to be most profitable for me because they're most profitable for my business customers.

Manoush Z.: Right. So not just collecting behavior, but shaping behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff: So one example of this is Pokemon Go. It was peddled to us as all fun and games for the family, out having an adventure in the city or across the parks of your suburban town. But in fact Pokemon Go was, as I argue, was a kind of experiment in population scale behavior modification for the purposes of serving ... the company behind Pokemon Go is called Niantic Labs ... for serving Niantic Labs' behavioral futures markets. Where it had restaurants and retailers and bars and pizza joints that paid to play. They said, "Yeah, we'll have a Pokemon gym in our place, and you herd people to my bar, to my restaurant, to my establishment, and I'll pay you per visit."

Manoush Z.: Can I just ask you, what ... Where does ... Where do we ... Let's say someone's like, "Pokemon Go, that's annoying. But it's really fun, and I get outside and I run around, and it's a great time." How do you recommend people sort of weigh the enjoyment or convenience that they get out of these services, versus the huge trade-offs that you have outlined?

Shoshana Zuboff: The first thing is that we all need to better grasp what the trade-offs really are, because once you learn how to modify human behavior at scale, we're talking about a kind of power now invested in these private companies. This is a really big deal, because it bodes for a future kind of society that I don't think any of us would choose, because it's a deeply anti-democratic kind of future that we're on the road to here.

The second thing is that, it is entirely illegitimate and unjust for individuals to have to bare the brunt of this situation. What has been created under the regime of surveillance capitalism is a situation where our means of social participation have been conflated with the means through which surveillance capitalists collect their data and seek to modify our behavior, we are simply the source of raw material for a vibrant dynamic market process that serves others and does not serve us. This is a deep pathological injustice, a new source of inequality, that is now institutionalized in our societies, that we don't really know anything about, and this is simply not okay.

Manoush Z.: Shoshana Zuboff's book is "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". And look, if we lived in a world where the big tech companies actually told us what they do with all of our data, where they keep it, how they use it in their algorithms, maybe we wouldn't have to be as worried as Shoshana says. Maybe if we had some transparency, there'd be more of a working relationship that we could have with these companies.

But they don't tell us, and we don't know, and so when Shoshana argues that big tech companies data mining practices turns people, us, into little more than data points to be manipulated and commodified, well, it rings pretty true, and it doesn't sound so friendly.

Shoshana says that Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, is the Typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism. Facebook is a master of this new economy.

In the past year, Facebook has drawn the most fire for this practice. The spread of propaganda and misinformation on the platform? The Cambridge Analytica scandal? And how that may have influenced an election? All thesE controversies, and the others, it's all a result of how Surveillance Economy mines and sells our data.

If we followed Dear Abby's advice to the letter... would we break up with Facebook for being an untrustworthy friend? The New York Times wrote that Facebook feels like, quote, and I love this quote, "a cheating romantic partner who was caught betraying us and apologized - only to be caught again weeks later."

Last year, the hashtag #deletefacebook made the rounds, and some people did that very thing. They quit Facebook. And for a moment there, the blowback even cost the company money. $37 billion dollars of its market value.

So a lot of us in some circles are fed up with how Facebook is spying on us and adding us into the behavioral data market that Shoshana described. It won't surprise you to learn that she is not on Facebook:

Shoshana: Of all the surveillance capitalists, Facebook is the most intimate. I have never had an account on Facebook. I don't operate on Facebook. I caution all those who are close to me, friends and family, to do the same, but I also recognize that that's not a viable solution for many people.

Manoush Z.: Unlike Shoshana, though, well over two billion people are still on the platform. The company still rakes in billions in earnings every quarter. Users don't seem ready or willing to leave. So why not? Matthew Liao has been wrestling with that question.

Matthew Liao: I'm the Director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University.

Manoush Z.: Matthew is a philosopher, and in November he wrote an article asking if users should quit Facebook.

Matthew Liao: The title of my article is called "Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook?".

Manoush Z.: Matthew joined Facebook in 2009, and he says it's been useful for him both professionally and personally. He's always felt pretty good about it.

Matthew Liao: That is, until recently. When I started to get worried about it, when I learned that ... it was about the Cambridge Analytica and how Facebook might have been involved in being used to influence a political election, and that got me worried about my complicity, like whether I am contributing to that too, the demise of democracy.

Manoush Z.: What did you decide? Are you complicit with the demise of democracy?

Matthew Liao: I started to realize that the situation's a lot more complex. As I learned about how Facebook was involved in being used to perpetrate genocide in Myanmar, or the hate crimes, and also the fake news that's rampant on social media generally.

Manoush Z.: What you've just said would, I think, make anyone want to quit Facebook. Does this mean that you have quit Facebook?

Matthew Liao: So I haven't yet quit Facebook. I was thinking, what would Facebook have to do for me to quit it? It seems that Facebook didn't know that Cambridge Analytica was using the data to try to influence a political election, I think they were just a bit too loose with their regulations regarding data privacy, but they weren't intentionally trying to influence the election.

Manoush Z.: So you're arguing that it's not Facebook's fault that Facebook has been used for the kind of stuff that you just described?

Matthew Liao: Yeah. Yeah, so I think that's right. It's not their fault directly, but given that it's sort of taking place on their platform I do think that they have a responsibility. At the same time, I am giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and partly the reason is that there are about 2 billion users on Facebook at the moment, and I think we just ... we've never had a technology with that many users, so I can see from their perspective that try as they might they ... it's just very hard for them to be everywhere.

Manoush Z.: You sound "Oh, god. This one friend, They just need to get their act together or else I cannot hang out with them anymore."

Matthew Liao: That's exactly it, that's exactly how I feel.

Manoush Z.: You can read Matthew's full argument online, we'll put a link to it in the show notes to this episode at irlpodcast.org.

Moral duty or not... surveillance economy or not... plenty of us are sticking with Facebook for now.

Alice Marwick: I think without a service to jump to, a lot of the current users are not going to give up the benefits that it provides.

Manoush Z.: Alice Marwick is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Alice Marwick: I talk to a lot of people who hate the way that Facebook targets advertising, and they feel that Facebook knows things about them that they don't necessarily want Facebook to know. But at the same time, they ... a lot of people feel that they're addicted to Facebook, or that they need to check Facebook every day or they are going to miss out on what their friends and family are doing.

So there's this kind of sense that there's nothing better to use, they're stuck using it, all their friends use it.

Manoush Z.: This is essentially the secret to Facebook's success. If you love it, it can feel irreplaceable.

Alice Marwick: We know that when people go through big life transitions, like when they have a baby for example or when they retire, they often need a lot of social support during those time periods, and Facebook is often where people who don't necessarily have a lot of other social support in their day-to-day life can go to get that.

Manoush Z.: So if you depend on it to stay connected, why would you let that go?

Alice Marwick: So when you have a technology where there's this benefit to you right in front of you, and the harms are this ... kind of negligible, I don't really know what this is, that is a trade-off that most people aren't gonna make. Only the most vocipherous privacy advocates, and not even all of them, are going to opt out of using a technology simply because it violates privacy.

Manoush Z.: Ok, so... Matthew isn't ready to break up ... Alice explains why a lot of people will never quit. Even Dear Abby admits she's hooked!

Dear Abby: Oh my god, you really want to know what my relationship with Facebook is? I spend too much time on it. It's the darndest thing. I start looking at the feed that I'm getting, and it's on and on and on and all of a sudden an hour has gone by and I'm going, "What happened?"

Manoush Z.: If you really do worry about where all this is headed, and you want to minimize your part in this game, you can opt out. People have been known to quit Facebook and go on living happy lives. Freelance journalist Nithin Coca did so many years ago. He opted out of the surveillance economy - at least, as much as he could. He admits it was hard. At first.

Nithin Coca: I remember that there was several weeks where I would reflexively type in Facebook on my browser without even thinking about it, and then the page would show up, I'd be like, "Oh, yeah. I don't have an account anymore."

Manoush Z.: And then, well, things got better.

Nithin Coca: I remember I felt like I had more time to do other things online that I didn't before, because Facebook did take up so much time. I felt like the communication that I was having with my close friends was like a lot better, and more meaningful and more in person than it was before. There was definitely some people that were not inviting me to events, and there were some ... I felt like I had less idea what was going on socially in graduate school. I didn't know who was seeing who, I didn't have the same level of access to gossip as before, but actually that was ... I found that I don't really need that.

Manoush Z.: Nithin didn't miss Facebook, then in 2016 he took things a step further. He tried to quit Google.

Nithin Coca: Quitting Google took me over a year because there's just so many different Google services I was using, and I had to find alternatives for every single service and like move my information over from those different services to an alternative. It was far, far more challenging than Facebook ever was and required, I can't imagine, how many hours of just testing and trying different tools, and just trying to find a ... figure out ways to move information.

Manoush Z.: And Nithin's pulled it off, mostly. He lives an online life without the biggest social media site, and without the biggest internet services company. He is proof that if you really wanna quit, it is possible.

Nithin Coca: I think the benefit is, now I control all my data, I know where all my information is. I've been able to learn a lot about how challenging it is for these other alternatives to compete with Google because they have such huge market share, and it kinda shows how the internet is no longer this open space for people to develop different tools and ideas, it's really being monopolized by a few big giants.

Manoush Z.: Throughout this episode, I have called out the big tech companies, and Facebook in particular, for their data practices. Why? Well because they're the biggest, but the surveillance economy as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, it spreads wider than that. For more on how our data trail is harvested, go back to the first episode of this season. The episode is called "Checking Out Online Shopping", it's a good one. That's where you can hear about how brick and mortar stores, offline stores, are actually also playing the data game.

Change seems to be coming, if slowly. France just fined Google nearly $57 million US dollars for violating Europe's sweeping privacy law, the GDPR. Chump change for Google, but it's also a warning.

And the US Federal Trade Commission has been investigating if Facebook has broken privacy rules. So, on the regulatory front, it's looking like companies may start to pay - literally - for their rampant collection and usage of our data.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is saying it's time to stand up for privacy. And, of course, he's saying that because it's good for Apple's core business. But it's also true. It is time to stand up for privacy.

It might also be time for these companies to follow our lead... maybe reach out to Dear Abby for advice on how to they can do better.

Saving Face: Dear Abby, Last year, a bunch of my users - sorry, uh, "friends" - confronted me. They accused me of taking their personal information and sharing it with strangers for my own personal gain. I've admitted that I've made mistakes. I said I'm sorry many many many many times. How can I prove to them that I can be a good friend? Signed, Saving Face

Jeanne Phillips: To Saving Face. Treat them as you would want to be treated. Let your actions from now on speak for themselves. That's how you'll be judged.

Manoush Z.: Mozilla is with you. Instead of asking what we can do with technology, their asking what we should do with tech. Their Firefox browser is safe, includes private browsing and tracking protection. You can also install an extension called "Facebook Container", it can limit some of the data Facebook collects about you, and even reduce micro targeting. Get it for free at mozilla.org/firefox/facebookcontainer, or just find the link in the show notes.

In our next episode, bold alternatives to big tech's internet dominance. We're checking out the decentralized web, which I promise you, is way more interesting than it sounds. We're gonna find out if, as it's proponents say, it really is the future of a more secure internet, one that gives you control over your data and your life.

For now, this is "IRL: Online Life is Real Life", an original podcast from Mozilla. I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

I'm gonna ... I hope you're okay with this. I'm gonna label your behavior as "Leader of the Rebellion."

Shoshana Zuboff: I'd be very proud. I'd be very proud to carry that banner, Manoush.

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In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard Business School's Shoshana Zuboff argues that tech companies - like Google and Facebook - collect so much personal data for profit, that they're changing the fundamentals of our economy and way of life.

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The privacy paradox: why do people keep using tech firms that abuse their data? | John Naughton

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Despite privacy scandals, Facebook is more profitable than ever

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Internet is growing and transforming our lives but it is essential to balance a "thriving, open, vibrant virtual world" and one where users are still protected from harm. View into how gov aims to react to concerns over safety of internet users.

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Joint ministerial foreword

This is an exciting and unprecedented age of digital opportunity, and this government is committed to unleashing the full power of this country's first-class technology and boosting our standing in the world. Digital advances will undoubtedly drive our economy and enrich our society, but to fully harness the internet's advantages, we must confront the online threats and harms it can propagate, and protect those who are vulnerable to them.

That's why we want to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online and the best place to start and grow a digital business. We will make sure the benefits of technology are spread more widely and shared more fairly. Our approach is guided by the need to promote fair and efficient markets where the benefits of technology are shared widely across communities; ensure the safety and security of those online; and maintain a thriving democracy and society, where pluralism and freedom of expression are protected.

By getting it right, we will drive growth and stimulate innovation and new ideas, whilst giving confidence and certainty to innovators and building trust amongst consumers. As we leave the EU, we have an incredible opportunity to lead the world in regulatory innovation.

As the internet continues to grow and transform our lives it is essential that we get the balance right between a thriving, open and vibrant virtual world, and one in which users are protected from harm.

The scale, severity and complexity of online child sexual exploitation and abuse is a concern for government, law enforcement and companies, with 16.8 million referrals of child sexual abuse material by US technology companies to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2019. In the UK, law enforcement is making 500 arrests and safeguarding 700 children a month as a result of these referrals and other sources. Terrorist propaganda and vile online child sexual abuse destroy lives and tear families and communities apart. We cannot allow these harmful behaviours and content to undermine the significant benefits that the digital revolution can offer.

Two thirds of adults in the UK are concerned about content online, and close to half say that they have seen hateful content in the past year. Online abuse can have a severe impact on people's lives and is often targeted at the most vulnerable in our society. Cyberbullying has been shown to have psychological and emotional impact. In a large survey of young people who had been cyberbullied, 37% had developed depression and 26% had suicidal thoughts. These figures are higher than corresponding statistics for 'offline' bullying, indicating the increased potential for harm.

This update shares some of the findings from the Online Harms White Paper consultation, as we work to ensure the digital revolution works for families, communities and businesses. We are grateful to everybody who responded to the consultation on our proposals to eradicate these corrosive and abhorrent harms. There were some clear themes amongst the responses which we will pay close attention to as we move towards the legislation announced in the Queen's Speech.

Firstly, freedom of expression, and the role of a free press, is vital to a healthy democracy. We will ensure that there are safeguards in the legislation, so companies and the new regulator have a clear responsibility to protect users' rights online, including freedom of expression and the need to maintain a vibrant and diverse public square.

We are also introducing greater transparency about content removal, with the opportunity for users to appeal. We will not prevent adults from accessing or posting legal content, nor require companies to remove specific pieces of legal content. The new regulatory framework will instead require companies, where relevant, to explicitly state what content and behaviour is acceptable on their sites and then for platforms to enforce this consistently.

Secondly, respondents emphasised the need for clarity and certainty for businesses, and proportionate regulation. Analysis so far suggests that fewer than 5% of UK businesses will be in scope of this regulatory framework. The 'duty of care' will only apply to companies that facilitate the sharing of user generated content, for example through comments, forums or video sharing. Just because a business has a social media presence, does not mean it will be in scope of the regulation. Business to business services, which provide virtual infrastructure to businesses for storing and sharing content, will not have requirements placed on them.

Thirdly, many respondents reinforced the importance of higher levels of protection for children, which will be reflected in the policy we develop through this consultation. The proposals assume a higher level of protection for children than for the typical adult user, including, where appropriate, measures to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate or harmful content. This approach will achieve a more consistent and comprehensive approach to harmful content across different sites and go further than the Digital Economy Act's focus on online pornography on commercial adult sites.

On the question of who will be taking on the role of the regulator, having listened to feedback from this consultation, we are minded to appoint Ofcom. This would allow us to build on Ofcom's expertise, avoid fragmentation of the regulatory landscape and enable quick progress on this important issue.

We are a pro-technology government and we are keen to continue to work with industry to drive forward the digital agenda. We are continuing to work at pace to ensure the right regulatory regime and legislation is in place. The ICO has recently published its Age Appropriate Design Code, and more detailed proposals on online harms regulation will be released in the spring alongside interim voluntary codes on tackling online terrorist and child sexual exploitation and abuse content and activity.

In the meantime, we will continue our efforts to unlock the huge opportunities presented by digital technologies whilst minimising the risks.

To ensure that we keep momentum on a comprehensive package of measures we will be publishing and undertaking further work to address online harms, such as:

● government media literacy strategy

● The Law Commission's consultation on abusive and offensive online communications

● a review into the market for technology designed to improve online safety, where the UK is a leading innovator

● developing our understanding and evidence base of online harms and approaches to tackling them. This is why we have supported cross-government research to understand how platforms can recognise their child users through age assurance

We are confident that this publication, and the other plans we are driving forward, will help us to achieve our objectives; making Britain the safest place to be online and the best digital economy in the world.
The Rt Hon Baroness Morgan of Cotes
Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
The Rt Hon Priti Patel MP
Secretary of State, Home Office

Executive summary

1. The Online Harms White Paper set out the intention to improve protections for users online through the introduction of a new duty of care on companies and an independent regulator responsible for overseeing this framework. The White Paper proposed that this regulation follow a proportionate and risk-based approach, and that the duty of care be designed to ensure that all companies have appropriate systems and processes in place to react to concerns over harmful content and improve the safety of their users - from effective complaint mechanisms to transparent decision-making over actions taken in response to reports of harm.

2. The consultation ran from 8 April 2019 to 1 July 2019. It received over 2,400 responses ranging from companies in the technology industry including large tech giants and small and medium sized enterprises, academics, think tanks, children's charities, rights groups, publishers, governmental organisations and individuals. In parallel to the consultation process, we have undertaken extensive engagement over the last 12 months with representatives from industry, civil society and others. This engagement is reflected in the response.

3. This initial government response provides an overview of the consultation responses and wider engagement on the proposals in the White Paper. It includes an in-depth breakdown of the responses to each of the 18 consultation questions asked in relation to the White Paper proposals, and an overview of the feedback in response to our engagement with stakeholders. This document forms an iterative part of the policy development process. We are committed to taking a deliberative and open approach to ensure that we get the detail of this complex and novel policy right. While it does not provide a detailed update on all policy proposals, it does give an indication of our direction of travel in a number of key areas raised as overarching concern across some responses.

4. In particular, while the risk-based and proportionate approach proposed by the White Paper was positively received by those we consulted with, written responses and our engagement highlighted questions over a number of areas, including freedom of expression and the businesses in scope of the duty of care. Having carefully considered the information gained during this process, we have made a number of developments to our policies. These are clarified in the 'Our Response' section below.

5. This consultation has been a critical part of the development of this policy and we are grateful to those who took part. This feedback is being factored into the development of this policy, and we will continue to engage with users, industry and civil society as we continue to refine our policies ahead of publication of the full policy response. We believe that an agile and proportionate approach to regulation, developed in collaboration with stakeholders, will strengthen a free and open internet by providing a framework that builds public trust, while encouraging innovation and providing confidence to investors.

Our response

Freedom of expression

1. The consultation responses indicated that some respondents were concerned that the proposals could impact freedom of expression online. We recognise the critical importance of freedom of expression, both as a fundamental right in itself and as an essential enabler of the full range of other human rights protected by UK and international law. As a result, the overarching principle of the regulation of online harms is to protect users' rights online, including the rights of children and freedom of expression. Safeguards for freedom of expression have been built in throughout the framework. Rather than requiring the removal of specific pieces of legal content, regulation will focus on the wider systems and processes that platforms have in place to deal with online harms, while maintaining a proportionate and risk-based approach.

2. To ensure protections for freedom of expression, regulation will establish differentiated expectations on companies for illegal content and activity, versus conduct that is not illegal but has the potential to cause harm. Regulation will therefore not force companies to remove specific pieces of legal content. The new regulatory framework will instead require companies, where relevant, to explicitly state what content and behaviour they deem to be acceptable on their sites and enforce this consistently and transparently. All companies in scope will need to ensure a higher level of protection for children, and take reasonable steps to protect them from inappropriate or harmful content.

3. Services in scope of the regulation will need to ensure that illegal content is removed expeditiously and that the risk of it appearing is minimised by effective systems. Reflecting the threat to national security and the physical safety of children, companies will be required to take particularly robust action to tackle terrorist content and online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

4. Recognising concerns about freedom of expression, the regulator will not investigate or adjudicate on individual complaints. Companies will be able to decide what type of legal content or behaviour is acceptable on their services, but must take reasonable steps to protect children from harm. They will need to set this out in clear and accessible terms and conditions and enforce these effectively, consistently and transparently. The proposed approach will improve transparency for users about which content is and is not acceptable on different platforms, and will enhance users' ability to challenge removal of content where this occurs.

5. Companies will be required to have effective and proportionate user redress mechanisms which will enable users to report harmful content and to challenge content takedown where necessary. This will give users clearer, more effective and more accessible avenues to question content takedown, which is an important safeguard for the right to freedom of expression. These processes will need to be transparent, in line with terms and conditions, and consistently applied.

Ensuring clarity for businesses

6. We recognise the need for businesses to have certainty, and will ensure that guidance is provided to help businesses understand potential risks arising from different types of service, and the actions that businesses would need to take to comply with the duty of care as a result. We will ensure that the regulator consults with relevant stakeholders to ensure the guidance is clear and practicable.

Businesses in scope

7. The legislation will only apply to companies that provide services or use functionality on their websites which facilitate the sharing of user generated content or user interactions, for example through comments, forums or video sharing. Our assessment is that only a very small proportion of UK businesses (estimated to account to less than 5%) fit within that definition. To ensure clarity, guidance will be provided by the regulator to help businesses understand whether or not the services they provide or functionality contained on their website would fall into the scope of the regulation.

8. Just because a business has a social media page that does not bring it in scope of regulation. Equally, a business would not be brought in scope purely by providing referral or discount codes on its website to be shared with other potential customers on social media. It would be the social media platform hosting the content that is in scope, not the business using its services to advertise or promote their company. To be in scope, a business would have to operate its own website with the functionality to enable sharing of user-generated content, or user interactions. We will introduce this legislation proportionately, minimising the regulatory burden on small businesses. Most small businesses where there is a lower risk of harm occurring will not have to make disproportionately burdensome changes to their service to be compliant with the proposed regulation.

9. Regulation must be proportionate and based on evidence of risk of harm and what can feasibly be expected of companies. We anticipate that the regulator would assess the business impacts of any new requirements it introduces. Final policy positions on proportionality will, therefore, align with the evidence of risk of harm and impact to business. Business-to-business services have very limited opportunities to prevent harm occurring to individuals and as such will be out of scope of regulation.

Identity of the regulator

11. We are minded to make Ofcom the new regulator, in preference to giving this function to a new body or to another existing organisation. This preference is based on its organisational experience, robustness, and experience of delivering challenging, high-profile remits across a range of sectors. Ofcom is a well-established and experienced regulator, recently assuming high profile roles such as regulation of the BBC. Ofcom's focus on the communications sector means it already has relationships with many of the major players in the online arena, and its spectrum licensing duties mean that it is practised at dealing with large numbers of small businesses.

12. We judge that such a role is best served by an existing regulator with a proven track record of experience, expertise and credibility. We think that the best fit for this role is Ofcom, both in terms of policy alignment and organisational experience - for instance, in their existing work, Ofcom already takes the risk-based approach that we expect the online harms regulator will need to employ.

Transparency

13. Effective transparency reporting will help ensure that content removal is well-founded and freedom of expression is protected. In particular, increasing transparency around the reasons behind, and prevalence of, content removal may address concerns about some companies' existing processes for removing content. Companies' existing processes have in some cases been criticised for being opaque and hard to challenge.

14. The government is committed to ensuring that conversations about this policy are ongoing, and that stakeholders are being engaged to mitigate concerns. In order to achieve this, we have recently established a multi-stakeholder Transparency Working Group chaired by the Minister for Digital and Broadband which includes representation from all sides of the debate, including from industry and civil society. This group will feed into the government's transparency report, which was announced in the Online Harms White Paper and which we intend to publish in the coming months.

15. Some stakeholders expressed concerns about a potential 'one size fits all' approach to transparency, and the material costs for companies associated with reporting. In line with the overarching principles of the regulatory framework, the reporting requirements that a company may have to comply with will also vary in proportion with the type of service that is being provided, and the risk factors involved. To maintain a proportionate and risk-based approach, the regulator will apply minimum thresholds in determining the level of detail that an in-scope business would need to provide in its transparency reporting, or whether it would need to produce reports at all.

Ensuring that the regulator acts proportionately

16. The consideration of freedom of expression is at the heart of our policy development, and we will ensure that appropriate safeguards are included throughout the legislation. By taking action to address harmful online behaviours, we are confident that our approach will support more people to enjoy their right to freedom of expression and participate in online discussions.

17. At the same time, we also remain confident that proposals will not place an undue burden on business. Companies will be expected to take reasonable and proportionate steps to protect users. This will vary according to the organisation's associated risk, first and foremost, size and the resources available to it, as well as by the risk associated with the service provided. To ensure clarity about how the duty of care could be fulfilled, we will ensure there is sufficient clarity in the regulation and codes of practice about the applicable expectations on business, including where businesses are exempt from certain requirements due to their size or risk.

18. This will help companies to comply with the legislation, and to feel confident that they have done so appropriately.

Enforcement

19. We recognise the importance of the regulator having a range of enforcement powers that it uses in a fair, proportionate and transparent way. It is equally essential that company executives are sufficiently incentivised to take online safety seriously and that the regulator can take action when they fail to do so. We are considering the responses to the consultation on senior management liability and business disruption measures and will set out our final policy position in the Spring.

Protection of children

20. Under our proposals we expect companies to use a proportionate range of tools including age assurance, and age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content and to protect them from other harms. This would achieve our objective of protecting children from online pornography, and would also fulfil the aims of the Digital Economy Act.

Next steps

1. Online Harms is a key legislative priority for this government, and we have a comprehensive programme of work planned to ensure that we keep momentum until legislation is introduced as soon as parliamentary time allows. As mentioned above, this is an iterative step as we consider how best to approach this complex and important issue. We will continue to engage closely with industry and civil society as we finalise the remaining policy. While preparation of legislation continues, and in addition to the full response to be published in the spring, we are developing other wider measures in order to ensure progress now on online safety. These will include:

Interim codes of practice

2. The government expects companies to take action now to tackle harmful content or activity on their services. For those harms where there is a risk to national security or to the safety of children, the government is working with law enforcement and other relevant bodies to produce interim codes of practice.

3. The interim codes of practice will provide guidance to companies on how to tackle online terrorist and Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) content and activity. The codes will be voluntary but are intended to bridge the gap until the regulator becomes operational, given the seriousness of these harms. We are continuing to engage with key stakeholders in the development of the codes to ensure that they are effective. We will publish these interim codes of practice in the coming months.

Government transparency report

4. The Online Harms White Paper committed the government to producing its first annual transparency report. We intend to publish this report in the next few months. The report will be informed by discussions at a multi-stakeholder Transparency Working Group chaired by the Minister for Digital and Broadband.

Non-legislative measures

5. The White Paper made clear that all users should have the tools and resources available to manage their own online safety, and that of others in their care. It committed the government to developing a media literacy strategy and we announced in the government's response to the Cairncross Review that the strategy would be published in summer 2020. The media literacy strategy will ensure a coordinated and strategic approach to online media literacy education and awareness for children, young people and adults. It will aim to support citizens as users in managing their privacy settings and their online footprint, thinking critically about the things they come across online (disinformation, catfishing etc), and how the terms of service and moderating processes can be used to report harmful content. We will publish this in the summer of 2020.

6. We are keen to continue to work in partnership with tech companies and wider stakeholders to refine our approach, and to work on collaborative solutions, especially looking at how we can use technology to tackle these issues. Industries such as the safety tech sector are central to the government's aim to promote innovation and develop a flourishing tech industry that also delivers technological solutions to meet regulatory requirements. To that end, we can also announce the upcoming publication of a full report into the safety technology ecosystem, which will identify opportunities for increasing competition and quality within the sector.

Wider regulation and governance of the digital landscape

7. As well as delivering on our commitments set out in the Online Harms White Paper, the government is undertaking an ambitious programme of wider work on how we govern digital technologies to unlock the huge opportunities presented by digital technologies whilst minimising the risks. Work on electoral integrity and related online transparency issues is being taken forward as part of the Defending Democracy programme together with the Cabinet Office.

8. We want the wider institutional landscape for digital technologies to be future-proof and fit for the digital age. As a result, over the coming months we will engage experts, regulators, industry, civil society and the general public to ensure our overarching regulatory regime for digital technologies is fully coherent, efficient, and effective.

Chapter one: Detailed findings from the consultation

1. The next sections cover:

Chapter One: Methodology of the written consultation and engagement with stakeholders across industry, civil society, international partners and user groups

Chapter Two: Responses on the regulatory framework (ie scope, user redress, industry transparency, enforcement options and appeals)

Chapter Three: Responses on the proposals for the independent regulator, regulatory accountability and funding models

Chapter Four: Responses to the non-legislative measures: the opportunities and challenges around technological innovation, safety by design, child online safety and education and awareness

Methodology - public consultation

2. Following the White Paper's publication, we undertook a formal 12-week public written consultation, complemented by an extensive programme of stakeholder engagement. The written consultation took place between April and July 2019, and included 18 questions on aspects of the government's plans for regulation and tackling online harms. In total, we gathered 2,439 responses from across academia, civil society, industry and the general public. The face-to-face stakeholder engagement enabled a constructive dialogue with key stakeholders, and those groups that may have been underrepresented in the written consultation.

Written consultation

3. We gathered written consultation responses via an online portal, email and post, both from organisations and from members of the public. Not all respondents engaged with every question - and indeed the response rate dropped throughout the questions. Of the 18 questions, 6 were closed questions with predefined response options on the online portal, allowing us to provide statistics for the responses to these questions for those who responded via the portal. These statistics, therefore, represent 63% of all responses (69% of all individuals and 32% of all organisations), and do not represent the major organisational respondents.

4. The remainder of the questions invited free text qualitative responses and each response was individually analysed. The response summaries below include the key themes and issues highlighted across all responses, but do not include statistics due to the nature of these questions.

5. A notable number of individual respondents to the written consultation disagreed with the overall proposals set out in the White Paper. Those respondents often seemed not to engage with the substance of questions on the specific proposals, but instead reiterated a general disagreement with the overall approach. This was most notable in those questions on regulatory advice, proportionality, the identity and funding of the regulator, innovation and safety by design, which seemed to attract a relatively large amount of confusion in responses. For these respondents, it was therefore difficult to delineate between an objection to the overall regime and an objection to the specific proposal within the question.

Profile of respondents

6. In total we received 1,531 online responses and 908 responses via email. 84% of these responses were from individuals and 16% from organisations (including tech sector, civil society, charities etc).

7. We collected demographic information for just over 90% of individuals who responded via the online portal, covering 58% of all responses:

Age: The largest proportions of responses were from those aged 45-54 (21%) and 55-64 (17%), followed by those aged 35-44 (16%) and 25-34 (15%). Respondents aged 18-24 and over 65 each made up 13% of the sample while 5% were under 18

Gender: Almost three quarters (72%) of respondents identified as male, with around a quarter (24%) female and 4% identified as "other"

Ethnicity: A little under two thirds (60%) of respondents identified as "White British/English/Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish". Followed by 11% "White: Any other background", 3% "asian", 2% "mixed/multiple ethnic groups" and "Black/African/Caribbean background" respectively. Fewer than 1% identified as "Arab", 13% selected "other" and 9% preferred not to say

Disability: Just over one in ten (11%) consider themselves as disabled under the Equality Act 2010, 75% do not and 14% preferred not to say.

8. As these demographics indicate, this sample, as with all written consultation samples, may not be representative of public opinion as some key groups are over- or under-represented.

9. A number of 'campaigns' were organised in response to the consultation from three sources: Samaritans, Open Rights Group, and Hacked Off. These responses were either identical or very similar and were submitted through central coordination. These responses were analysed and included in the same way as all other responses.

Engagement

10. Over the 12 week period we held 100 meetings, which supported the written consultation. This engagement enabled detailed conversations with a wide range of stakeholders and ensured we heard the views of important groups. Our engagement reflected the range of organisations that may be in scope of the online harms regulatory framework, including tech organisations, the games industry and retail. We also engaged with academia, regulators and civil society. Furthermore, we consulted the devolved administrations and discussed the policy in international multi-stakeholder fora and with international partners.

11. We recognise that some abuse or content which targets users based on actual or perceived protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 means that some people face disproportionately negative experiences online. In line with this, during the consultation period we conducted workshops with groups representing users with various protected characteristics. This included engaging with a range of user groups representing those who are likely to be disportionately affected by online harms, such as the LGBTQ+ community; survivors of abuse and violence; disabled users; mental health organisations; religious groups; children, parents and child safety organisations. This engagement ensured groups were able to feed back expert knowledge on specific issues faced by the users they represent.

12. Engagement included a series of thematic workshops to consult on the core White Paper policies. These workshops focused on: the scope of regulation; transparency; enforcement powers; technology as a solution; safety by design; the regulator; user complaints; media literacy and education. Other meetings included 17 ministerial engagements, 'deepdive' sessions with major technology companies, and roundtable meetings with industry associations. We also engaged stakeholders on specific, key issues raised following the White Paper's release, including the regulation of the press and freedom of expression, and the approach to the interim codes of practice on terrorist content and child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Summary of response findings:

13. The key themes from responses to the consultation and our engagement were:

The White Paper stated, on the activities and organisations in scope, that the regulatory framework will apply to online providers that supply services or tools which allow, enable or facilitate users to share or discover user-generated content or interact with each other online. Respondents welcomed the targeted, proportionate and risk based approach that the regulator is expected to take. Responses also highlighted the need to ensure that proposals remain flexible and able to respond as technology develops in the future. Companies and stakeholders, however, asked for more detail on the breadth of both services and harms in scope. Responses focused on ensuring that freedom of expression is protected.

The White Paper made clear that under the new duty of care, companies will need to ensure they have user redress mechanisms in place. This would mean that companies need to have effective, accessible complaints and reporting mechanisms for users to raise concerns about specific pieces of harmful content or activity and seek redress. The White Paper also highlighted a role for designated bodies to make 'super complaints' to the regulator to defend the needs of users. Respondents welcomed this, and highlighted the importance of ensuring that companies have effective reporting mechanisms for harmful content, accessible to all users. Organisations showed stronger support for the proposals for super-complaints than individuals did. Broadly, respondents requested more guidance on how a super-complaints function could work, and how it could take into account accountability and transparency mechanisms.

On transparency, the White Paper set out that companies in scope will be required to issue annual transparency reports. Respondents to the consultation as well as the stakeholders who were engaged highlighted the importance of transparency, both in terms of reporting processes and moderation practices. They see this as being central in holding companies accountable for enforcement of their own standards. Industry respondents suggested that transparency requirements should be proportionate - noting that a 'one size fits all' approach was unlikely to be effective and could be costly to implement for smaller companies.

The White Paper set out that the regulator will have an escalating range of powers to take enforcement action against companies that fail to fulfil their duty of care - including notices and warnings, fines, business disruption measures, but also senior manager liability, and Internet Service Provider (ISP) blocking in the most egregious cases. Respondents to the consultation as well as the stakeholders who were engaged recognised the role for a tiered enforcement structure, ensuring that enforcement powers are used fairly and proportionately. Civil society groups overall expressed support for firm enforcement actions in cases of non-compliance. Industry and rights groups expressed some concerns about the impact of some of the measures on the UK's attractiveness to the tech sector and on freedom of expression. They sought further clarity on the intervention and escalation structure, including the grounds for enforcement. They want the regulator to support compliance with the regime in the first instance.

The White Paper proposed that companies have nominated representatives in the UK, to assist the regulator in taking enforcement action against companies based overseas. Respondents acknowledged that this system would support the effectiveness of the proposed legislation, however concerns were raised about the potential impact on smaller businesses.

The White Paper set out that the regulator will offer regulatory advice to companies on reasonable expectations for compliance, based on both the severity and scale of the harm, the age of their users and the size of the company and resources available to it. Respondents welcomed this. The main suggestions provided were on opportunities for the regulator to provide clarity on any specific standards and thresholds, alongside guidelines and expert advice on how organisations could comply.

The White Paper acknowledged that online harms can materialise via private communications services, and committed to setting out a differentiated framework for harm over private communications. Responses across stakeholders recognised the balance between taking appropriate action to address the serious harms, such as child grooming, that can be initiated and escalate from private forums and ensuring appropriate protections for users' privacy. Most companies and organisations agreed that expectations of private services to tackle harm should be greater, firstly where content and activity is illegal, and secondly where children are involved. Most respondents opposed the inclusion of private communication services in scope of regulation. However, some responses - both from individuals and organisations acknowledged that abuse, harassment and some of the most serious illegal activity occur in private spaces, like closed community forums and chat rooms. These responses expressed support for the principle that platforms should be responsible for their users' safety in private channels.

The White Paper set out that there must be an appeals mechanism for companies and others to challenge against a decision by the regulator when appropriate. Responses showed broad support for a mechanism allowing appeals against enforcement action by the regulator. Companies suggested that appeals mechanisms should be quick and affordable, focussed on the merits of the action taken and that administrative processes should be as streamlined as possible.

The White Paper stated that proportionality would be central to enforcement decisions by the regulator. Respondents welcomed the suggestion that the compliance systems could be designed similarly to current models in, for example, the finance sector. Specifically, they expressed support for options allowing companies to self-assess whether their services are in scope, and enabling members of the public to raise concerns with the regulator where a company is not complying.

The White Paper did not express a specific preference for the identity of the regulator. Most of the stakeholders we engaged with had no particular preference. Responses were supportive of a new body or of extending the duties of an existing regulator. Some feared that the latter option could prove overwhelming for an existing body and thus instead voiced support for a transitional or temporary body.

The White Paper set out that the regulator will be cost-neutral, and that for funding it would recoup costs via charges or a levy on companies in scope. Companies who responded to the consultation viewed the application of a charge with concern, citing worries around potential double or disproportionate costs to certain services and exemption for others.

The White Paper proposed a duty on the regulator to lay an annual report and accounts before Parliament and provide Parliament with information as and when requested for accountability. All groups generally expressed support for Parliament to have a defined oversight role over the regulator in order to hold it to account, maintain independence from government and build public trust and hold industry confidence.

The White Paper committed to developing a framework on safety by design and innovation, to make it easier for start-ups and small businesses to embed safety in their products. Stakeholders expressed broad agreement and recognition that safety is improved when organisations build in user-safety at the design and development stage of their online services. They also emphasised that machine learning solutions require extensive data and were supportive of the 'regulatory sandbox' model (i.e. allowing businesses to test innovations in a controlled environment).

The White Paper committed to make the UK the safest place to be online, having key regard for child online safety. Respondents welcomed this, and one of the key themes of our engagement was parents' concerns about the safety of their children online. In particular, although parents felt that they know their children best and are therefore usually the best placed to tailor standard advice for them, they also agreed on the need for more advice and education on how to be online safely.

The White Paper recognised that users want to be empowered to manage their safety online, and that the regulator should consider education and awareness to support this. Throughout our engagement, digital education and awareness were key recurring themes. Many felt that the regulator could have an important role in creating a framework for evaluating the impact of existing education and awareness activity in their space. Others recognised that there could be a role for the regulator or for government in supporting the most vulnerable children and disseminating alerts about emerging online threats for young people.

Chapter two: Regulatory framework

1. The Online Harms White Paper set out the intention to bring in a new duty of care on companies towards their users, with an independent regulator to oversee this framework. The approach will be proportionate and risk-based with the duty of care designed to ensure companies have appropriate systems and processes in place to improve the safety of their users.

2. The White Paper stated that the regulatory framework will apply to online providers that supply services or tools which allow, enable or facilitate users to share or discover user-generated content, or to interact with each other online. The government will set the parameters for the regulatory framework, including specifying which services are in scope of the regime, the requirements put upon them, user redress mechanisms and the enforcement powers of the regulator.

3. The consultation responses indicated that some respondents were concerned that the proposals could impact freedom of expression online. We recognise the critical importance of freedom of expression, and an overarching principle of the regulation of online harms is to protect users' rights online, including the rights of children and freedom of expression. In fact, the new regulatory framework will not require the removal of specific pieces of legal content. Instead, it will focus on the wider systems and processes that platforms have in place to deal with online harms, while maintaining a proportionate and risk-based approach.

4. To ensure protections for freedom of expression, regulation will establish differentiated expectations on companies for illegal content and activity, versus conduct that may not be illegal but has the potential to cause harm, such as online bullying, intimidation in public life, or self-harm and suicide imagery.

5. In-scope services will need to ensure that illegal content is removed expeditiously and that the risk of it appearing is minimised by effective systems. Reflecting the threat to national security and the physical safety of children, companies will be required to take particularly robust action to tackle terrorist content and online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

6. Companies will be able to decide what type of legal content or behaviour is acceptable on their services. They will need to set this out in clear and accessible terms and conditions and enforce these effectively, consistently and transparently.

7. We do not expect there to be a code of practice for each category of harmful content. We recognise that this would pose an unreasonable regulatory burden on in-scope services. However, we will publish interim codes of practice in the coming months to provide guidance for companies on how to tackle online terrorist and CSEA content and activity. The codes will be voluntary but are intended to bridge the gap and incentivise companies to take early action prior to the regulator becoming operational, thus continuing to promote behaviour change from industry on the most serious online harms. We are continuing to engage with key stakeholders in the development of the codes to ensure that they are effective.

8. We will expect the regulator to set expectations around imagery that may not be visibly illegal, but is linked to child sexual exploitation and abuse, for example, a series of images, some of which were taken prior to or after the act of abuse itself. We will consider further how to address this issue through the duty of care.

9. The legislation will only apply to companies that provide services which facilitate the sharing of user generated content or user interactions, for example through comments, forums or video sharing. Only a very small proportion of UK businesses (estimated to account for less than 5%) fit within that definition. To ensure clarity, guidance would be provided to help businesses understand whether or not the services they provide would fall into the scope of the regulation.

10. To be in scope, a business's own website would need to provide functionalities that enable sharing of user generated content or user interactions. We will introduce this legislation proportionately. We will pay particular attention to minimising the regulatory burden on small businesses and where there is a lower risk of harm occurring.

11. We have listened to and taken into account feedback from industry stakeholders. It is clear that business-to-business services have very limited opportunities to prevent harm occurring to individuals and as such remain out of scope of the Duty of Care.

12. We are continuing the work on the final details of the organisations in scope, to ensure proportionality and effective implementation of our proposals. We will produce an impact assessment to accompany legislation which will take into account burdens to businesses.

Activities and organisations in scope

Are proposals for the online platforms and services in scope of the regulatory framework a suitable basis for an effective and proportionate approach?

Engagement

13. Throughout our engagement, organisations expressed support for the targeted, proportionate, and risk-based approach for the regulator. Many parties expressed a need for clarity as the proposals develop around the kind of organisation and platforms that would be in scope.

14. The tech industry, while broadly supportive, emphasised the importance of providing clear definitions of the companies and harms in scope, in particular addressing what is meant by 'user generated content'. A number of organisations suggested that business to business (B2B) services should not be in scope, as their view was that there was a lower risk that the harms covered in the White Paper would develop on such platforms. Press freedom organisations and media actors also expressed the view that journalistic content should not be in scope, to protect freedom of expression and in accordance with established conventions of press regulation.

15. Civil society organisations representing disadvantaged groups demonstrated strong support for the proposals and emphasised the importance of including any provider of a platform or service made available to users in the UK within the scope of the regulation. Women's groups , LGBT+, disability, and religious groups cited larger social media companies most frequently as the platforms of greatest concern, but were also concerned about smaller platforms, chat rooms, and anonymous apps, which they believe can easily be infiltrated for harm. A number of organisations suggested that economic harms (for instance, fraud) should be in scope. While the White Paper was clear that the list of harms provided was not intended to be exhaustive or definitive, a number of organisations suggested specific harms, for example misogyny. Many civil society organisations also raised concerns about the inclusion of harms which are harder to identify, such as disinformation, citing concerns of the impact this could have on freedom of expression.

Written consultation

16. Just over half of respondents to the written consultation answered this question. Responses which expressed support for the proposed platforms and activities in scope called on the government to increase education and public awareness of online harms. Responses also stressed the need to ensure that the proposals remain flexible and able to change as technology develops in the future, and that they maintain a special focus on young people and children.

17. Many respondents expressed concerns around the potential for the scope of the regulator to be too broad or for it to have an adverse impact on freedom of expression. Many of these respondents, therefore, called for further clarification of services and harms in scope. Some respondents also raised concerns that the proposals would have disproportionate impacts on specific organisations or, on the other hand, that they may not go far enough.
A systems based approach to online safety
The White Paper outlined a systems based approach:

The duty of care is designed to ensure companies have appropriate systems and processes in place to improve the safety of their users.

The focus on robust processes and systems rather than individual pieces of content means it will remain effective even as new harms emerge. It will also ensure that service providers develop, clearly communicate and enforce their own thresholds for harmful but legal content.

Of course, companies will be required to take particularly robust action to tackle terrorist content and online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. The new regulatory framework will not remove companies' existing duty to remove illegal content.

18. When broken down, the responses from organisations and members of the public differed in regard to the main perceived issues. For instance, concerns for freedom of expression were significantly more prevalent amongst individual respondents than amongst organisations. Instead, organisations reported a higher concern around the overreach of scope and a need for further clarity.

19. In general, organisations were more supportive of regulation when compared to public respondents. The tech sector and civil society groups expressed a level of support for the activities listed in scope, with many agreeing that focus should be on risk of harm, and that the regulator should take a proportionate approach to the companies in scope according to their risk profile.

20. At the same time, almost all industry respondents asked for greater clarity about definitions of harms, and highlighted the subjectivity inherent in identifying many of the harms, especially those which are legal. The majority of respondents objected to the latter being in scope.

21. Regarding harms in scope, several respondents stated that the 23 harms listed in the White Paper were overly broad and argued that too many codes of practice would cause confusion, duplication, and potentially, an over-reliance on removal of content by risk-averse companies. We do not expect there to be a code of practice for each category of harmful content, however, as set out above we intend to publish interim codes of practice on how to tackle online terrorist and Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) content and activity in the coming months.

22. Specific groups echoed many of the general points raised in the written consultation, as well as suggesting specific services for inclusion in scope. For example, counter-extremism and religious groups noted the need for clarity to ensure that harms can properly be protected against and to minimise risks to constraining free expression. A common perspective among children's charities was that gaming should be in scope.

23. Across responses and engagement, there was broad support for the proposed targeted, proportionate and risk-based approach that the regulator is expected to take. Responses also highlighted the need to ensure that proposals remain flexible and able to respond as technology develops in the future. However, companies and stakeholders wanted more detail on the breadth of both services and harms in scope. There was also a consistent focus on ensuring that freedom of expression was protected. Respondents welcomed the focus on protecting vulnerable users, including young people and children, and a number of respondents also suggested that further work should be done to increase education and public awareness of online harms.

User redress

24. The White Paper recognised that companies' claims of having a strong track record on online safety are often at odds with users' reported experiences. The White Paper made clear that, under the new duty of care, government expects companies to ensure they have effective, accessible complaints and reporting mechanisms for users to raise concerns about specific pieces of harmful content or activity and seek redress, or to raise wider concerns that the company has breached its duty of care. The White Paper also highlighted a role for designated bodies to make 'super complaints' to the regulator to defend the needs of users.

25. The regulator will have oversight of these processes, including through transparency information about the volume and outcome of complaints, and the power to require improvements where necessary. The regulator will be focused on oversight of complaints processes, it will not make decisions on individual pieces of content.

26. Recognising concerns about freedom of expression, while the regulator will not investigate or adjudicate on individual complaints, companies will be required to have effective and proportionate user redress mechanisms which will enable users to report harmful content and to challenge content takedown where necessary. This will give users clearer, more effective and more accessible avenues to question content takedown, which is an important safeguard for the right to freedom of expression. These processes will need to be transparent, in line with terms and conditions, and consistently applied.

Should designated bodies be able to bring super complaints to the regulator in specific and clearly evidenced circumstances? If your answer is yes, in what circumstances should this happen?

What, if any, other measures should the government consider for users who wish to raise concerns about specific pieces of harmful content or activity, and/or breaches of the duty of care?

Engagement

27. While the written consultation did not directly ask about internal company processes, many organisations shared their views in written responses and in supporting stakeholder engagement. They overwhelmingly agreed that companies should have effective and accessible mechanisms for reporting harmful content and felt that current processes often fell short. They agreed that this process should start with reports directly to the platform. Some respondents, including disability and children's advocates, noted the importance of making these mechanisms accessible and prominent for all users, as they are often not easy to find on websites. Some also noted the importance of companies providing explanations to users whose content is removed, in order to protect rights and to help all users understand what is acceptable on different platforms. Some respondents also argued for a more standardised approach to reporting complaints to enable comparison and analysis.

28. A number of organisations highlighted concerns about a potential risk that the regulator would become the arbiter of what is considered harmful and the potential impact of this on freedom of expression.

29. A recurrent theme in organisational responses was that more effective complaints and reporting processes must also be accompanied by education and awareness-raising by companies and other stakeholders, including on people's rights and responsibilities and the avenues available to them to raise concerns. Nevertheless, as the section summarising responses to the question of how users should be educated shows, there was no consensus on which body or bodies should be responsible for educating users.

30. We stated that we do not envisage a role for the regulator itself in determining disputes between individuals and companies. Several organisations agreed with this, noting that it would not be feasible for the regulator to look into individual complaints and that it could risk users' rights to freedom of expression. Other respondents instead suggested that the regulator should have powers to look at specific cases, for example those which are particularly high-profile or serious.

Written consultation

31. The White Paper written consultation included a specific question on whether legislative provision should be made for designated bodies to bring 'super-complaints' to the regulator for consideration, in specific and clearly evidenced circumstances. 88% of respondents online answered this question, of whom almost a third (32%) agreed with the proposal and almost half (49%) disagreed. The remainder (19%) said they did not know.

32. When considering organisational responses only, the proportion of respondents who agreed with the proposal rises to almost two-thirds (63%). The majority of stakeholders with whom we engaged also supported super-complaints. Many noted that super-complaints could prove particularly useful for tackling issues regarding legal harms, which cannot be addressed through law enforcement agency routes. Groups representing religious users felt that super-complaints could provide an effective means to address online discrimination and abuse. Disability and children's advocacy groups, as well as some academics, were especially supportive, noting that super-complaints would allow for people who might not otherwise raise concerns or report issues to be heard and to have their concerns alerted to the regulator.

33. Several organisational respondents sought further clarity on how a super-complaints function would work in practice, and others (including regulators with super-complaint functions) noted that they are not normally intended to deliver direct redress to individuals. Women's charities expressed support, but noted that other mechanisms may be necessary, for example in the case of low-level continuous harassment, which causes distress through its repetitiveness rather than its content. Some respondents also noted that a super-complaints function would only be effective if it was transparent and backed up by accountability mechanisms.

34. For those answering 'yes', we asked a further question on the circumstances under which super complaints should be admissible. Among organisational respondents, there was a high level of agreement that super-complaints should be permitted when there has been a large number of complaints or where there is evidence of clear abuses of company policy or standards. However , there was little consensus on what the criteria would look like in practice. There were relatively few individual responses to this question, as individuals responding online were only shown the question if they had responded 'yes' to part one. Of those individuals who did respond, there was little consensus, although in general individuals were more supportive than organisations of super-complaints regarding specific pieces of content.

35. We also consulted on other measures for users who wish to raise concerns about specific pieces of harmful content or activity, and/or breaches of the duty of care. Less than two fifths of respondents answered this question, and while the majority of responses expressed general disagreement with the proposals, a significant number expressed support and proposed options for users to raise concerns.

36. Many responses, particularly from organisations, argued for an independent review mechanism, such as an ombudsman, although no-one gave further detail on how this could work and some organisations raised concerns about the feasibility and desirability of an ombudsman. Other proposals included the possibility for automatic suspensions of reported posts on request by regulator or individuals.

37. While many individual respondents raised concerns about freedom of expression and how the envisaged user redress framework will be implemented in practice, there was a general consensus amongst organisations about the need for effective and accessible mechanisms for users to seek redress, and in favour of the measures we proposed.
Protecting users' rights online
The White Paper stressed that users should receive timely, clear and transparent responses to their complaints of harmful content and committed to protecting their rights.

Companies covered by the regulator will be required to have an effective, proportionate, easy-to-access complaints process, allowing users to raise concerns about harmful content or activity, or that the company has breached its duty of care.

The regulator will set minimum standards for these processes, so that users will know how they can raise a complaint, how long it will take a company to investigate, and what response they can expect.

We do not envisage a role for the regulator itself in determining disputes between individuals and companies, but where users raise concerns with the regulator, it will be able to use this information as part of its consideration of whether a company may have breached duty of care.

38. The importance of ensuring that companies should have effective reporting mechanisms for harmful content, accessible to all users, was highlighted here. There was stronger support for the proposals for super-complaints from organisations responding than from individuals, with organisations highlighting that super-complaints could provide particularly useful for addressing legal-but-harmful content prevalent on some platforms. Broadly, respondents requested more support on how a super-complaints function could work, and how it could take into account accountability and transparency mechanisms. A number of respondents suggested a role for an independent review mechanism.

Transparency

39. As set out in the White Paper, the government has committed to giving the regulator the power to require annual transparency reports from companies in scope. These reports would, for example, outline the prevalence of harmful content on their platforms, and what measures are being taken to address these.

40. The regulator would publish these reports online to support users and parents in making informed decisions about internet use. The regulator would also have powers to require additional information from companies to inform its oversight or enforcement activity, and to establish requirements to disclose information.

41. Effective transparency reporting will help ensure that content removal is well-founded and freedom of expression is protected. In particular, increasing transparency around the reasons behind, and prevalence of, content removal may address concerns about some companies' existing processes for removing content. Companies' existing processes have in some cases been criticised for being opaque and hard to challenge.

42. In addition, as part of the transparency reporting framework, the regulator will encourage companies to share anonymised information with independent researchers, and ensure companies make relevant information available.

43. The government is committed to ensuring that conversations about this policy are ongoing, and that stakeholders are being engaged to mitigate concerns. In order to achieve this, we have recently established a multi-stakeholder Transparency Working Group chaired by the Minister for Digital and Broadband, which includes representation from all sides of the debate, including civil society members as well as industry. This group will feed into the government's transparency report, which was announced in the Online Harms White Paper and which we intend to publish in the coming months.

44. Some stakeholders expressed concerns about a potential 'one size fits all' approach to transparency, and the material costs for companies associated with reporting. The regulatory framework is designed to be proportionate, and so will set out minimum thresholds that a company would need to meet before reporting requirements would apply. In line with the overarching principles of the regulatory framework, the reporting requirements that a company may have to comply with will also vary in proportion with the type of service that is being provided, and the risk factors involved.

The government has committed to Annual Transparency Reporting. Beyond the measures set out in this White Paper, should the government do more to build a culture of transparency, trust and accountability across industry and, if so, what?

Engagement

45. Transparency has been a key theme discussed with a range of organisations and user groups. A wide variety of stakeholders, including rights groups and tech companies, supported such measures and agreed that increased transparency is needed. Children's charities, LGBT+ organisations and religious groups especially welcomed the framework's focus on transparency - both in terms of reporting processes and moderation practices for the purpose of holding companies accountable to their own standards. Freedom of expression groups were similarly supportive of greater transparency and accountability but were keen to emphasise that transparency reporting should promote users' rights and should contain information about how companies uphold users' right to freedom of expression online.

46. The importance of proportionality in relation to the transparency requirements emerged as a key point. Furthermore, a number of companies noted that, given the variation between companies, a 'one size fits all approach' was unlikely to be effective.

Written consultation

47. The written consultation asked people whether, beyond the measures set out in the White Paper, the government should do more to build a culture of transparency, trust and accountability across industry and, if so, what? 90% of online respondents answered this closed question. Of these, there was little difference between those who agreed the government should do more and those who disagreed (41% and 39% respectively). Almost a fifth (19%) said they didn't know.

48. When broken down, the responses from organisations and members of the public differ, with 72% of organisations agreeing that the government should do more, compared to only 39% of individuals.

49. Those who agreed that the government should do more provided answers for how and what measures could go beyond the White Paper proposals to increase transparency. A large proportion of responses suggested this could be done through requiring increased clarity and detail of reporting. Many responses also suggested that engagement with international partners would help to promote a culture of transparency and trust.

50. In particular, amongst organisations, civil society groups were considerably more supportive of the proposals advanced in the White Paper around transparency, which they saw as a crucial mechanism to increase companies' accountability and foster positive relationships with the regulator. While the technology sector was also overall broadly supportive of transparency, there was less consensus about the format the reporting should take. Some small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) highlighted resource and capability challenges associated with collecting or reporting certain types of information. Other respondents, including dating sites and retailers, echoed this concern, stating that transparency reporting might be overly onerous on them should it require significant re-engineering of their given product or service if it had not been designed to gather certain types of data. Generally, respondents expressed support for flexibility over rigid guidelines, although, at the same time, some did acknowledge the benefit of having structure and direction from the regulator.

51. Many responses also explicitly mentioned that reporting should be qualitative, not just quantitative, avoiding a one size fits all approach, and that the data reported should be clear and meaningful. Respondents also asked that transparency reports be written in plain English and made accessible to the public.

52. Responses from both organisations and individuals contained specific proposals for how to increase transparency. These proposals included requiring social media companies to show how safety features are being improved in line with the regulator's recommendations. Other suggestions included: increased transparency from social media platforms on content moderation decisions, involving the public in formulating online harms policy and encouraging social media companies to promote their own transparency reports to their users.

53. Responses also suggested specific focal points and metrics for the transparency report, such as an independent review of AI/algorithms, an attention to 'addiction by design,' a specific separate focus on child safety, advertising, and finally expert medical advice.

54. Additionally, although not directly relevant to the question, many responses took the opportunity to suggest an increase in government transparency and that any future regulator should also be transparent.

55. Many of those who disagreed that the government should do more asserted that government should not be involved or should be less involved. Other responses attested that it was not possible to hold the companies in scope to account.

56. Overall, responses to this question varied, expressing suggestions for what government should do to increase transparency, trust and accountability across industry, as well as some respondents expressing concerns with an increasing government role.

Enforcement

57. The regulator will have a range of enforcement powers to take action against companies that fail to fulfil their duty of care. This will drive rapid remedial action, and ensure that non-compliance faces serious consequences. The enforcement powers referenced are the power to issue warnings, notices and substantial fines. The White Paper also included proposals for business disruption measures - including potential for business disruption, Internet Service provider (ISP) blocking, senior management liability.

Should the regulator be empowered to i) disrupt business activities, or ii) undertake ISP blocking, or iii) implement a regime for senior management liability? What, if any, further powers should be available to the regulator?

Engagement

58. Throughout our engagement, industry representatives ranging from larger tech firms to start-up companies expressed a measure of support for the tiered enforcement approach set out in the White Paper. At the same time, they asked for further clarity on what would be considered appropriate points for intervention and escalation, as well as what limits could be considered reasonable for sanctions in order for these not to represent an unacceptable business risk. Internet service provider (ISP) blocking represented the main area of concern across discussions. Industry stated in principle support in some cases (e.g. when websites are set up for solely unlawful purposes), but argued that it would need to be mandated only as a last resort following due process and underpinned by the legal framework.

59. Senior manager liability emerged as an area of concern. Discussions with industry highlighted the risk of potential negative impacts on the attractiveness of the UK tech sector. Further concerns emerged that this approach may unduly penalise individuals for content often originating from other third-parties who would not be adversely affected by the sanctions, unless the regime proposed is able to account for these. With regard to further powers, industry representatives felt that the regulator should fulfill a supervisory function and look to support compliance in the first instance.

60. Civil society groups overall expressed support for firm enforcement actions, in cases of non-compliance. Nevertheless, rights organisations expressed concerns about risks to freedom of expression and the potential impact of censorship associated with enforcement powers.

Written consultation

61. The written consultation specifically asked whether the regulator should be empowered to:

62. We also asked if any further powers should be available to the regulator.

63. This question did not receive a high response rate. Across all categories, the majority of respondents highlighted concerns that excessive enforcement could have a detrimental effect on both business and personal freedoms - and risk that measures could incentivise companies to over-block user-generated content to avoid penalties.

64. Analysis of the responses of organisations and individuals showed a large difference in levels of support - with a significantly larger portion of concerns coming from the individual respondents, while organisations generally supported the proposals. This result is not surprising given the apprehension amongst many individual respondents about how the proposals would impact usability and personal freedoms. The creative industries, sport sector, local government, law enforcement organisations and children's charities particularly expressed broad support for the majority of enforcement mechanisms listed in the White Paper.

65. Respondents who supported the proposals took the view that the regulator should have robust enforcement powers that are used fairly and proportionately.

66. Respondents expressing support for the business disruption proposals highlighted the importance of the need to ensure these powers are used proportionately and should be an escalation from demonstrable non-compliance and prior warnings being issued. This view was also expressed for senior management liability. Many who welcomed it as a measure to hold individuals to account felt it should only be used after demonstrable non-compliance and the failure of previous measures. For ISP blocking the common view was that it be used as a last resort. A small number of respondents suggested additional powers, including further enforcement measures against companies such as temporary content takedowns, and sanctions for failing to duly protect freedom of expression.

67. Organisations raised other points of criticism. Rights groups expressed concerns that the proposed enforcement approach may be disproportionately punitive, and the regulator would need to demonstrate it had met the proportionality test for freedom of expression under human rights law. This was a particular concern for ISP blocking.

68. Although many industry members noted their opposition to ISP blocking in general, they acknowledged that there may be circumstances in which the exercise of such powers would be appropriate. Practically, industry requested clear guidance and an agreed process for notifying operators when websites are required to be blocked (or reinstated), and clarification on the anticipated volume of websites that would be in scope.

69. From a technical perspective, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) also noted the importance of developing the future regulation with reference to wider technical developments such as encryption, which might undermine the effectiveness of website blocking. Industry requested a transition period to adjust to or implement the new regulations without the threat of severe sanctions. Larger tech companies highlighted the implementation challenges they may have due to the size and complexity of their systems.

70. In summary, while civil society groups overall expressed support for firm enforcement actions, the proposals remain contentious for industry, freedom of expression groups, and members of the public. For the implementation of the proposed measures, respondents expressed a preference for the regulator to begin its operations by supervising companies and supporting compliance through advice, and that any further enforcement measures should be used proportionately and following a clear process.

Nominated Representative

71. Noting the particularly serious nature of some of the harms in scope and the global nature of many online services, the White Paper proposed that the regulator should have the power to ensure that action can be taken against companies without a legal presence in the UK. It sets out the possibility of a requirement for companies to nominate a UK or EEA-based representative for these purposes, similar to the concept in the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Should the regulator have the power to require a company based outside the UK or EEA to appoint a nominated representative in the UK or EEA in certain circumstances?

Engagement

72. Throughout our engagement with industry, concerns of impracticality and challenges of implementation emerged as a key theme, with SMEs arguing that this could be excessively burdensome for them. Some proposed other ideas, such as the establishment of an endorsement system for companies demonstrating best practice.

Written consultation

73. Less than half of online respondents answered this question (48%), of which almost two thirds (62%) responded"no", followed by "yes" (27%) and "don't know" (11%). Respondents to the written consultation generally disagreed that the regulator should have the power to require a company based outside the UK or EEA to appoint a nominated UK or EEA representative.

74. When broken down by organisations and members of the public, the responses are contrasting, with the majority of organisations responding "yes" (63%) as opposed to less than a quarter of individuals (24%). Furthermore, the proportion of those that responded "don't know" is larger amongst organisations than members of the public (25% and 10% respectively).

75. Across both groups, among those who agreed that the regulator should have the power to require a UK or EEA representative, many responses focused on this being necessary to support international consistency and cooperation. A large proportion of these responses highlighted a need for increased international dialogue, followed by consideration of issues such as online harms being too complex to be regulated in a single country.

76. Responses from organisations in particular often suggested that a representative would be necessary to enable UK legislation to be effective, aid the implementation of regulation and making it harder for companies to avoid complying.

77. Additionally, many responses suggested that the requirement to have a UK or EEA representative should only apply to organisations over a certain size or with a particular user base, echoing a theme that regulation should be proportionate.

78. Of the majority of all respondents who disagreed with the proposed requirement, the most common concern was around the potential negative impact on business. Some small business respondents explicitly expressed disagreement, feeling that this proposal would impose costs and demands that will negatively affect them.

79. Other concerns included: potential for a negative impact on users; a lack of effectiveness when the UK leaves the European Union; and concerns over how it could be practically enforced.

80. Overall, it is clear that the impacts of nominated representation on business costs and operations is a point of concern for industry, and SMEs in particular.

Regulatory advice

81. The White Paper set out how the regulator will take a proportionate approach, with reasonable expectations of companies dependent on both the severity and scale of the harm, the age of their users and the size of the company and resources available to it. The White Paper also set out the principles of better regulation, including a commitment for the regulator to help SMEs and start-ups to fulfill their obligations for compliance.

82. The written consultation asked how the regulator could provide advice and support to help businesses comply with the regulatory framework, acknowledging the potential for specific impacts to SMEs and start-ups.

What, if any, advice or support could the regulator provide to help businesses, particularly start-ups and SMEs, comply with the regulatory framework?

Engagement

83. Throughout our engagement with industry, the main ask was for the regulator to provide clarity over any specific standards as a basis for the new regulation.

Written consultation

84. Written responses provided a variety of suggestions for how the regulator could provide support to businesses. The most common response from both organisations and individuals was for guidelines and expert advice on how organisations need to comply, and for a need for effective engagement strategies.

85. Some responses made suggestions about the approach to regulation more generally, suggesting exemptions for start-ups and SMEs and a differentiated approach depending on the business type. Respondents also highlighted that engagement would need to be clear on how regulation interacts with international legal obligations. A number of responses, the majority from individuals, also expressed disagreement with the implicit assumption in the question that a regulator would be established, possibly further impacted by confusion in the role of regulators amongst some responses. A small proportion expressed that no advice or support should be provided to help businesses.

86. Organisations particularly emphasised the need for support and advice. SMEs and cloud service providers emphasised that they would like to see the regulator have an open door policy with business stakeholders and begin its operation offering advice through resources and "how-to" guides. Similarly, other respondents advanced suggestions that the regulator offer, and have the power to charge for, specific advice services to companies that request detailed advice on how they can comply with the regulations.

87. It is clear that organisations, particularly SMEs, want the regulator to provide guidance on how different services can fulfil the duty of care. Organisations also want to be able to contact the regulator for more tailored advice. They feel that the regulator should be able to provide advice at an early stage of its operation.

Private communications

88. The White Paper acknowledged both the importance of privacy online and the aim to protect UK users from harmful content or behaviour wherever it occurs online. It noted that criminals should not be able to exploit the online space to conduct illegal activity. The development of harmful activity online frequently involves a combination of activity taking place on both 'public' and 'private' communication channels. For example, people targeting children to commit serious online harms often make initial contact with a child on public social media platforms, before moving to private messaging services to continue the grooming process. The White Paper consulted on what criteria should be considered in developing a definition for 'private' communication services, noting the complexity of defining 'private' and 'public' in the online space.

89. Reflecting the importance of privacy, the White Paper committed to setting out a framework that will ensure a differentiated approach for private communication. The White Paper consulted on which channels or forums which could be considered private should be in scope of the regulatory framework. It asked what specific requirements might be appropriate to apply to private channels and forums in order to tackle online harms.

In developing a definition for private communications, what criteria should be considered?

Which channels or forums that can be considered private should be in scope of the regulatory framework?

What specific requirements might be appropriate to apply to private channels and forums in order to tackle online harms?

Engagement

90. We engaged with experts from academia, industry, think tanks and wider civil society organisations on the questions of defining private communications, the scope of the regulatory framework in relation to private channels, and what requirements should be applied to private channels.

91. Throughout our engagement, organisations representing vulnerable groups expressed strong support for private communications falling in scope of the regulatory framework. Children's charities were particularly insistent that community forums, chat rooms and messaging apps all need to be in scope, providing evidence of how people targeting children to commit serious online harms use these services to groom and abuse children.

92. Industry representatives and some civil society groups expressed concern that to include private channels in scope might lead platforms to take steps that create unacceptable, negative impacts on users' privacy. Some civil society groups were more comfortable with online platforms empowering users to themselves report harmful activity on private channels, but expressed concern about more intrusive steps such as proactive moderation of private channels. Most companies and organisations agreed that the regulator's expectations of companies to tackle harms on private services should be greater where the content and activity is illegal and/or where children are involved.

Written consultation

93. Around a third of respondents answered question 6. Organisations were more likely to advance criteria for defining private communications than individual respondents. A common response was that user intent and purpose of the service should be taken into account when considering if a communication is private.

94. Several responses from organisations stated that one-to-one phone calls, messages, and video calls should not be included in scope and cautioned against using the number of users as the sole indicator for whether a communication is private. However, others state that identifying a maximum number of people beyond which a conversation is no longer considered private could be helpful.

95. In terms of which fora and services should be in scope, many organisations responded "none", and only a small proportion responded "all". In between these two, the other most common responses were based on suggestions for specific activities or platforms.

96. Those who answered "none" with regard to which private services should be in scope, when elaborating on their answer, argued that the presence of a blocking feature on a private service, enabling users to block content from other individuals, is sufficient for tackling harm. These respondents argued for the need to respect user privacy and also maintained that encrypted services be ruled out of scope.

97. Among those who expressed agreement with including private communications in scope, a large portion of responses from organisations mentioned specific activities and platforms to include, such as social media, dating, and gaming sites as well as services enabling private messaging, and video and photo sharing. These responses identified the significance of private communications as spaces where harms can be planned and carried out. Some responses also expressed concern about the migration of illegal activity - such as child grooming and the sharing of child abuse imagery - to encrypted spaces, arguing that encrypted services should be in scope.

98. Those respondents - both organisations and individuals - who responded 'none' to the question of which private services should be in scope also tended to answer 'none' to the question of which requirements should be applied to private services.

99. Those respondents who agreed that some private communication services should be in scope provided a range of answers to the question of which requirements should be applied to private services. These included suggestions of requirements which might limit the impact on users' privacy. For example, responses suggested that platforms should offer reporting mechanisms allowing users to report abusive or offensive content sent to them privately - a process, which would not require companies to monitor private messages for harm.

100. In conclusion, overall respondents opposed the inclusion of private communication services in scope of regulation. However, there was acknowledgement in some responses - both from individuals and organisations - that abuse, and harassment and some of the most serious illegal activity occur in private spaces, like closed community forums and chat rooms. These responses expressed support for the principle that platforms should be responsible for their users' safety in private channels.

Appeals

101. The White Paper acknowledged that companies and others must have confidence that the regulator is acting fairly and within its powers. As with other regulatory systems, companies will have the ability to seek a judicial review of the regulator's decisions through the High Court. The White Paper also considered other avenues of appeal and asked whether there should be a further statutory mechanism for companies to appeal against a decision of the regulator. We gave the example of section 192-196 of the Communications Act 2003, through which there is the ability to appeal against an Ofcom decision via the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

In addition to judicial review should there be a statutory mechanism for companies to appeal against a decision of the regulator, as exists in relation to Ofcom under sections 192-196 of the Communications Act 2003?

If your answer to question 14 is 'yes', in what circumstances should companies be able to use this statutory mechanism?

If your answer to question 14 is 'yes', should the appeal be decided on the basis of the principles that would be applied on an application for judicial review or on the merits of the case?

Engagement

During engagement, companies suggested that the appeals mechanism should be quick and affordable, and focused on the merits of the action taken. Companies mentioned blocking measures and app removal as areas where they would especially seek to be able to appeal regulator decisions. Companies also emphasised that for an appeals mechanism involving judicial scrutiny, an administrative process as seamless as possible would be needed to minimise bureaucratic burdens, and accelerate the process. SMEs expressed support for additional mechanisms other than Judicial Review due to concerns around the costs and overall accessibility of the latter.

Written consultation

103. Less than half of all online portal respondents (48%) answered this question. Of those who did over two thirds (71%) of respondents were in favour of such an additional statutory mechanism. 15% of respondents disagreed with such a mechanism and the remaining 14% said they did not know.

104. A relatively large proportion of respondents suggested specific circumstances where access to this appeal mechanism should be allowed. Respondents suggested that the mechanism be available in cases where decisions related to legal content that is not harmful, when it is claimed that the best effort was made to deal with an issue by the company, when the penalty applied is considered disproportionate, and if a company is adversely affected financially and operationally.

105. The second supplementary question (question 14b) asked whether the appeal should be decided on the basis of the principles that would be applied on an application for judicial review (i.e. whether the regulator in reaching its decision had acted lawfully and fairly) or on the merits of the specific case. An appeal on the merits of the case would involve a full reappraisal of both the facts and the applicable law relating to the regulator's original decision. The majority of responses were in favour of an appeal being decided on the merits of the case, but with minimal further commentary about the reasons for this preference.

106. Overall, responses were supportive of companies in scope of regulation being able to appeal decisions, offering a range of circumstances when companies may need to do this. Respondents did not provide further details about the advantages of a statutory appeals body in particular or how the duties of such a body could be discharged.

Chapter three: The regulator

1. The White Paper stated that the online harms regime will be overseen and enforced by an independent regulator. To inform the set up of this regulator, we asked a number of questions about the identity of the regulator, its funding model and accountability to Parliament.

2. The White Paper also explained that the government is carefully considering whether a broader restructuring of the regulatory landscape would reduce the risk of duplication and minimise burdens on business. Over the coming months we will engage experts, regulators, industry, civil society and the wider public to ensure our overarching regulatory regime for digital technologies is fully coherent, efficient, and effective. This is part of an ambitious programme of wider work to unlock the huge opportunities presented by digital technologies whilst minimising the risks.

Proportionality

What further steps could be taken to ensure the regulator will act in a targeted and proportionate manner?

Engagement

3. In our engagement with industry, companies suggested a model whereby companies self assess whether their services are in scope, notifying the regulator if something goes wrong, and where members of the public would be able to raise concerns with the regulator where a company is not complying. Another suggestion was that, similar to the banking regulatory model, the regulator could build the scope through dialogue with industry, designating systemically important services on which higher responsibilities would be placed.

4. Freedom of expression groups suggested that further transparency requirements placed on the regulator, and the incorporation of a duty to respect freedom of expression within the codes of practice, would also serve to ensure proportionality.

5. The consideration of freedom of expression is at the heart of our policy development, and we will ensure that appropriate safeguards are included throughout the legislation. By reducing the prevalence of online abuse, we are confident that our approach will support more people to enjoy their right to freedom of expression and participate in online discussions.

6. At the same time, we also remain confident that proposals as set out here will not place an undue burden on business. Companies will be expected to take reasonable and proportionate steps to protect users. This will vary according to the organisation's size and the resources available to it, as well as by the risk associated with the service provided. In recognition of concerns raised about possible uncertainty about how the duty of care could be fulfilled, we will ensure that there is sufficient clarity in the regulation and codes of practice about the applicable expectations on business. This will help companies to comply with the legislation, and to feel confident that they have done so appropriately.

Written consultation

7. Around half of respondents answered this question. Those who responded positively suggested that the regulator take steps to:

adopt an international approach

prioritise vulnerable groups

issue tight guidelines and code of practice

clarify its scope

follow a code of conduct

work with other existing bodies from the tech sector (e.g. Ofcom)

offer support and guidance

receive expert advice/evidence and

collaborate with industry players

8. Many industry respondents expressed approval for the targeted, proportionate, risk-based and systematic approach proposed in the White Paper.

9. Multiple responses proposed that the government carry out an economic impact assessment to determine the anticipated effect regulation will have upon businesses and the United Kingdom's economy. A number of individual respondents also expressed concerns, around the creation of the regulator and possible restrictions on freedom of expression.

10. In conclusion, responses identified that the government should take further steps to ensure the regulator will act in a targeted and proportionate manner. Respondents expected regulation to balance respect of freedom of expression standards, while applying reasonable requirements and providing appropriate support for business.
Proportionality
In the White Paper, we made it clear that the regulatory framework would be proportionate and that we would avoid imposing excessive burdens. For example, we said:

All companies will be required to take reasonable and proportionate action to tackle harms on their services, but we will minimise excessive burdens, particularly on small businesses and civil society organisations.

The regulator's initial focus will be on those companies that pose the biggest and clearest risk of harm to users.

The regulator will set clear expectations of what companies should do to tackle illegal activity and keep children safe online.

The regulator will be required to assess the action of companies according to their size and resources, and the age of their users, as well as the risk and prevalence of harms on their service.

Identity of regulator

11. The White Paper proposed to establish an independent regulator to implement, oversee and enforce the regulatory framework. The regulator will be equipped with the powers, resources and expertise it needs to effectively carry out its role. Ofcom was the only regulator referenced in the White Paper as a possible candidate.

12. We judge that such a role is best served by an existing regulator with a proven track record of experience, expertise and credibility. We are minded to appoint Ofcom as they present the best fit for this role, both in terms of policy alignment and organisational experience - for instance, in their existing work, Ofcom already take the risk-based approach that we have outlined above.

13. Our proposal also sits within a wider programme of work by the government to respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by digital technology, through carefully considering the wider institutional landscape to ensure an effective overall approach to digital regulation that avoids overlap and confusion.

Should an online harms regulator be: (i) a new public body, or (ii) an existing public body? If your answer to question 10 is (ii), which body or bodies should it be?

Engagement

14. In engaging with different groups we learned that most were neutral towards the identity of the regulator. Some stakeholders felt that the scope of work envisaged by the White Paper could overwhelm an existing regulator, but at the same time organisations recognised the inherent challenges of creating a new body and setting up operations to process an enormous volume of information, and voiced support for a transitional or temporary body.

15. Several organisations expressed a preference for Ofcom to be the new regulator, citing its regulatory expertise. Some civil society groups, particularly children's charities, proposed the establishment of an interim body to reflect the urgency of the harms. Most of the big tech companies had no preference either way but stressed the point that the regulator should have the necessary capabilities, infrastructure, resources and expertise to function effectively.

16. During engagement, respondents emphasised the need for there to be consistency between existing and new regulatory regimes, with some suggesting a need for a coordinating body. In their view, the regulator should draw upon existing expertise across government and across current arrangements for self and co-regulation.

Written consultation

17. In the consultation we asked whether the proposed regulator should be a new public body or an existing public body. For those respondents who preferred an existing public body, we asked which body or bodies it should be.

18. The response rate via the online portal for this question was low at 38%, and of these a majority (62%) were in favour of a new public body.

19. There were a number of different reasons for respondents expressing a preference for a new body. Both organisations and individuals believed that there was a need for a new body with specific focus and expertise in tech and online safety. Other less frequent themes such as placing too much burden on an existing regulator or the need for a regulator to be independent from government were also identified in the written responses.

20. Over a third of those responding (38%) favoured an existing body; citing a variety of reasons. The experience of existing organisations and their understanding of the sector were the two most significant and recurring advantages highlighted. Respondents also believed it would be cheaper to set up the regulator within an existing body.

21. The sub-question (10a) asked, where respondents had expressed a preference for an existing body, which body it should be. This question received a variety of suggestions, with Ofcom receiving the greatest level of endorsement, particularly amongst organisations.

22. Other common suggestions for the regulator were the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the police, and a very small proportion of respondents believed the courts should act as the regulator. Other respondents suggested a range of public and private bodies, such as the Advertising Standards Agency, or the UK Council for Internet Safety, but also government departments including DCMS, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

23. Overall the response to this question demonstrated that the options on regulatory bodies for online harms come with different benefits and risks. Whilst a new body provides the opportunity for a dedicated focus and an innovative approach, it was suggested that it will be challenging to implement a new regulatory regime without the expertise, experience and organisational structure that an existing body brings.

24. We are minded to give Ofcom the role of the new regulator, in preference to giving this function to a new body or to another existing organisation. This preference is based on its organisational experience, robustness, and experience of delivering challenging, high-profile remits across a range of sectors. Ofcom is a well-established and experienced regulator, recently assuming high profile roles such as regulation of the BBC. Ofcom's focus on the communications sector means it already has relationships with many of the major players in the online arena, and its spectrum licensing duties mean that it is practised at dealing with large numbers of small businesses (both in terms of regulatory activity and fees collection). Further, Ofcom already takes a risk-based approach to investigations, similar to that envisaged for the Online Harms regulator. Ofcom would also remain subject to the Public Sector Equality Duty in its work on online harms, meaning that it must consider how its approach or decisions affect people with protected characteristics.

Funding

25. The White Paper makes clear that in order to recoup both the implementation costs and running costs of the regulator, the government is considering fees, charges or a levy on companies whose services are in scope. This could fund the full range of the regulator's activity. The government intends the new regulator to become cost neutral to the public sector.

A new or existing regulator is intended to be cost neutral: on what basis should any funding contributions from industry be determined?

Engagement

26. During engagement, companies viewed the application of a charge/tax with concern. For some, there was a risk that a regulatory charge or tax would amount to double taxation on the same businesses. Companies with only a small segment of their business activities within the scope of the regulator requested clarity on how the regulator funding would be proportionate and affordable. Others contended that an unintended consequence of the charge/tax is that it could be diverting money away from businesses who may use it to address online harms. The collection of contributions from companies based overseas, particularly from smaller companies with a higher prevalence of online harms on their platforms compared to businesses in the UK, was expressed as a further concern.

27. Finally, some companies felt that a business's revenue/profit would not be an appropriate basis on which to determine funding contributions from industry, but instead the age profile of users and work currently being undertaken by a company to combat online harms should be taken into consideration. On the other hand, the companies acknowledged that the inclusion of any non-financial measures may lead to a charge or tax being subjective.

Written consultation

28. Around a third of respondents answered this question, suggesting a variety of considerations for funding contributions. The size and type of business was highlighted as being the main factor on which funding contributions should be determined. Beyond that, there was also support for licence fee/taxes on industry, from both organisations and individuals at broadly the same level.

29. There was some limited support from both individuals and organisations for the regulator to be funded by the government. There was also limited support for the regulator to be funded by fines against companies for breaking the law, and general funding from the private sector.

30. Many individual respondents expressed disagreement with the formation of the regulator, and, therefore, with the need for a funding mechanism and the proposal that industry should contribute.

31. In conclusion, respondents and stakeholders both agreed that whilst funding should primarily be from industry, the model should be proportionate and practical.

Accountability

32. The White Paper stated that the regulator will be an independent body and that it will be important to ensure that Parliament is able to scrutinise the regulator's work. We consulted on this and on what role Parliament should play in developing regulatory codes of practice.

33. As the White Paper notes, Parliament's role particularly "in relation to codes of practice and guidance issued...varies across different regulatory regimes, ranging from formal approval to no specific role". The starting point of accountability in the White Paper is a duty on the regulator to lay an annual report and accounts before Parliament and provide Parliament with information as and when requested.

What role should Parliament play in scrutinising the work of the regulator, including the development of codes of practice?

Engagement

34. During our engagement with stakeholders, all groups generally expressed support for Parliament to have a defined oversight role over the regulator in order to maintain independence from government and build public trust and hold industry confidence. Freedom of Expression groups advanced specific proposals calling for parliamentary oversight over codes of practice to protect fundamental freedoms. Several responses suggested establishing a dedicated body for reviewing codes to ensure consistency with civil liberties or establishing an independent Children's Digital Champion to inform and report on codes to Parliament. Some respondents suggested that the regulator should report targeted areas of concern in platform failures to allow Parliament to debate further evidence.

35. The most popular reason for giving Parliament a role, for both organisations and individuals, was the need to hold the regulator to account.

Written consultation

36. Broadly, responses showed strong support for parliamentary oversight, with various ideas on how this should be carried out. Many respondents called for the regulator to draft the codes of practice independently. Some responses proposed that codes of practice should be subject to public consultation and agreed by Parliament. A limited number of organisations and individual respondents believed that Parliament should have no role in scrutinising the role of the regulator.

37. Overall, respondents generally agreed that Parliament should have an important role in scrutinising the work of the regulator. Whilst some respondents advocated a more active role for parliament in developing codes of practice, others maintained that this would encroach upon the regulator's independence.
Codes of practice
The White Paper talked about the different codes of practice that the regulator will issue to outline the processes that companies need to adopt to help demonstrate that they have fulfilled their duty of care to their users.

The kind of processes the codes of practice will focus on are systems, procedures, technologies and investment, including in staffing, training and support of human moderators.

As such, the codes of practice will contain guidance on, for example, what steps companies should take to ensure products and services are safe by design or deliver prompt action on harmful content or activity.

Given the range of services in scope of the regulatory framework, some of the expectations below may not be applicable to every company.

The primary responsibility for each company in scope is that they will be required to complete an assessment of the risk associated with its service(s) and take reasonable steps to guard against the risk of harm in order to fulfill its duty of care.

We do not expect there to be a code of practice for each category of harmful content, however, we intend to publish interim codes of practice on how to tackle online terrorist and Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) content and activity in the coming months.

Chapter four: Non-legislative

1. Alongside the proposed regulatory framework, we are committed to implementing a number of non-legislative measures in order to ensure a holistic response to online harms. In order to inform these measures, the consultation asked questions about safety by design, children's online safety and media literacy.

Innovation and adoption of safety technologies

2. The White Paper set out the government's ambition to position the UK as a world leader in safety technology. It included commitments that the government and new regulator will work with leading industry bodies and other regulators to support innovation in and adoption of products and services that support user safety, and the growth of the UK's safety technology market. It proposed specific action to assess the online safety sector's capability and potential, and to explore how organisations can securely access training data to develop AI solutions while ensuring that AI use is safe and ethical.

What are the greatest opportunities and barriers for (i) innovation and (ii) adoption of safety technologies by UK organisations, and what role should government play in addressing these?

Engagement

During our engagement with industry, organisations emphasised that machine learning solutions required large amounts of training data. Several highlighted the opportunity for government or the regulator to enable the development of a system of common reference datasets, which third parties could use to safely and securely develop and test machine learning solutions. Organisations were supportive of the 'regulatory sandbox' model (ie. allowing businesses to test innovations in a controlled environment), and several respondents suggested that the data trust model could facilitate data sharing around online harms. Some organisations highlighted that machine learning still needs human assistance to identify context and nuance.

Written consultation

4. The written consultation asked respondents to identify the opportunities and barriers for innovation and adoption and to suggest how the government could work to address these. This question received a relatively low number of responses, particularly from individuals.

5. Where a response was given, a relatively large number of responses expressed disagreement with the overall proposals for regulation, with many focusing on concerns around freedom of expression. Many responses, in particular from individuals, did not engage with the different elements of the question, making it difficult in many cases to identify clear reasons for disagreement or concerns with the focus of the question.

6. Some respondents expressed concerns that regulation could stifle innovation if it was over-prescriptive, disproportionate or inflexible, or if a regulator did not have sufficient in-house technical capability. Conversely, several responses highlighted the positive role that regulators could play in supporting innovation, for example by increasing competition, preventing monopolies and addressing market failures.

7. In terms of opportunities, the most common one highlighted for innovation was the role that government could play through influence and advocacy, for example by supporting cross-sector initiatives to share technologies and ideas to tackle potential harms, and through using its convening power to help ensure closer collaboration and coordination across the value chain. In particular, organisations highlighted the positive role that groups such as the Technology Coalition and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism played in supporting the development and adoption of cross-sector solutions, such as hash-sharing databases for illegal content. A number of respondents felt that more action was needed to strengthen the evidence base used to inform and assess technical innovations - for example, through greater research into user behaviour online.

8. Some respondents to the written consultation focused on the role that government and the regulator could play in encouraging a competitive and world-leading market in online safety solutions, through which companies of all sizes could access a range of solutions to achieve safer outcomes for users. Several organisations felt that more could be done by government to articulate priorities for investment or innovation, or to identify the standards which safety technologies should adhere; to provide assistance in linking SMEs with larger organisations; and where appropriate to fund programmes of development support for startups and scaleups, for example through accelerators or incubator programmes.

9. In terms of the opportunities highlighted for adoption of safety technologies, many responses, particularly from organisations, highlighted the need to provide companies with high-quality information, training and guidance. Some responses focused on how regulation, government influence and public pressure also had the potential to drive adoption of safety technology.

10. Many of the barriers to both innovation and adoption were similar. Organisations were particularly concerned about the cost of innovation and adoption of safety technologies, and a potential lack of clear definitions of safety standards by a regulator. There was concern that smaller platforms' ability to innovate for safety might be restricted by regulation geared toward the capabilities and needs of larger platforms.

11. Overall, the consultation response suggested a number of ways in which the government or the regulator could support the innovation and adoption of safety technology. These were suggestions such as designing the regulatory framework to ensure that the goals of innovation and safety are intertwined, advocacy of the emerging safety tech sector, and enabling a data and AI infrastructure that supports innovation, competition and transparency. The main barrier highlighted for both innovation and adoption was the cost to businesses of such development.

Safety by Design

12. In the White Paper, the government committed to developing a safety by design framework to make it easier for start-ups and small businesses to embed safety during the design, development or updates of products and services.

What, if any, are the most significant areas in which organisations need practical guidance to build products that are safe by design?

Engagement

13. Throughout our engagement with industry during the lead up to the Online Harms White Paper, stakeholders expressed broad agreement and recognition that standards of safety are improved when organisations build in user-safety at the design and development stage of their online services. They also recognised that a safety by design approach was needed for smaller companies in particular, and that the government should help them build capacity and technical expertise as they grow. Stakeholders also argued that assistance for designing safer services was specifically required in areas such as the needs of vulnerable users, age assurance, and more generally the different safety considerations applicable to children and adults.

Written consultation

14. This question had a relatively low number and wide variety of written responses, suggesting both drop off in the response rate and potential confusion amongst respondents due to the specificity of the question. This pattern of responses could also potentially indicate a lack of understanding amongst responders on what the principle of safety by design encompasses. This is compounded by the lack of specificity amongst the noticeable minority of, mostly individual, responses which expressed their disagreement with the overall proposals.

15. Of the responses which suggested areas for inclusion in the guidance, many seemed to focus on guidance in general and not specifically in areas that would enable organisations to build services that are safe by design. Educating users and new technologies were the most common areas highlighted as being those where organisations need guidance. Other responses also highlighted general compliance, data privacy, ethical guidance, encryption and content moderation.

16. Responses from organisations in particular highlighted child safety as a key area where organisations require guidance. This was followed by calls for overarching guidance on all areas, as well as age assurance. Responses from charities for girls and young women, and for other vulnerable groups, suggested that members of these groups should be actively involved and consulted in designing safe products.

17. During direct engagement over the consultation period, organisations also raised the need for broader organisational support and culture-changing efforts to help embed a safety by design approach. Organisations in particular felt that, while, specific guidance on high impact safety measures in many of the areas highlighted above are needed and effective, interventions further "upstream" in the design process would also be an impactful way to deliver a safety by design approach - and for this, they argued, government guidance is needed. They also recognised that support on safety by design needs to address all levels within an organisation to be effective at driving change.

18. Overall, it is clear that there is a strong feeling amongst organisations that greater guidance to enable a safety by design approach is needed. The breadth of the responses and the general lack of specificity on what type of intervention would be helpful also suggests that greater education is required on the function and objective of 'safety by design'. Work is taking place to develop the key emerging themes, including guidance on specific high impact safety measures and supporting safety interventions upstream in the design process. For example, work is already underway with the VoCO (Verification of Children Online) project, a cross-sector research initiative undertaken in partnership between DCMS, HO and GCHQ, exploring the concept of age assurance as a risk-based approach to recognising child users online, without undermining their privacy. The project has engaged with children, parents, industry & regulators and other experts to build a vision for a safer internet for children, and it has produced research into key technologies, data sources, standards and commercial models. Future work will look to develop further the key emerging themes, including guidance on specific high impact safety measures and supporting safety interventions upstream in the design process.

Child online safety

19. The White Paper committed to make the UK the safest place to be online. It also recognised that users want to be empowered to manage their online safety, and that of their children, but there is insufficient support in place and users currently feel vulnerable online.

20. As part of the overarching mission to protect the rights of users online, the duty of care will enshrine in legislation the requirement for companies to have appropriate and proportionate measures and processes in place to ensure a higher level of protection for children and vulnerable users. The extent of those processes would be correlated with the risk of harm to young people taking place on the site. This provides the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children from inappropriate content online, and also enables the regulatory framework to deliver the objectives of Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act,. Companies would be able to use a number of methods to protect children, including possibly - but not necessarily - age assurance tools, which we expect will continue to play a key role in keeping children safe online.

Should the government be doing more to help people manage their own and their children's online safety and, if so, what?

Engagement

21. One of the key themes of our engagement was parents' concerns about the safety of their children online. Parents' groups, especially, considered online safety to be a particular area where parents' confidence needs to be raised. Although parents felt that they know their children best and are therefore usually the best placed to tailor standard advice for them, they also agreed on the need for more advice and education on how to be online safely. Organisations against violence against women and girls (VAWG) argued that education for online safety should focus not only on behaviours to adopt, but also on discouraging adoption of negative behaviours.

Written consultation

22. From those individual respondents using the online portal, there was an almost even split between those who agreed with the question and those who disagreed (49% and 51% respectively). Conversely, this result was very different amongst organisations who responded online, with 95% agreeing that the government should be doing more.

23. Of those who responded "yes" and provided suggestions for what the government should do more of, the most common response was for the government to provide guidance, training and resources. Following this, responses focused on the need to increase education for parents and children. Some responses highlighted other specific areas for intervention looking at increasing and improving education, for example providing resources for teachers and implementing media literacy and privacy education.

24. Other responses included specific suggestions for actions the government should take, for example implementing age assurance measures and increasing the provision and use of family-friendly filters.

25. Some tech companies and civil society organisations, including women's groups and children's charities, agreed that there should be a role for the regulator to play in empowering and educating users. Likewise, many respondents noted that behavioural changes that prevent the content from coming online in the first place are crucial. Nevertheless, some cautioned against 'blaming the victim', and any empowering methods that might absolve companies of their duties and liability.

26. Other respondents from children and vulnerable groups' charities argued that schools should incorporate digital literacy into their curriculum. Similarly, financial services companies urged economic crime to be included in the national curriculum.

27. A few organisations mentioned that an advisory body of relevant public sector and industry experts such as UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) has value in facilitating communication, anticipating future harms to children online, and coordinating activity to address the complex environment children encounter online.

28. Law enforcement organisations suggested expanding the government's Cyber Aware Campaign to cover online abuse and threats, while retaining information about cyber security and crime.

29. Although written consultation responses highlighted some mixed views on the issue, overall the feedback gathered across both a large proportion of responses and in our engagement points to a strong appetite for more support from the government in helping users feel empowered in managing their safety and that of their children.

Education & Awareness

30. The White Paper committed to make the UK the safest place to be online. It also recognised that users want to be empowered to manage their online safety, and that of their children, but there is insufficient support in place and users currently feel vulnerable online.

What, if any, role should the regulator have in relation to education and awareness activity?

31. In the consultation we asked what role, if any, the regulator should have in relation to education and awareness activity. A relatively large proportion of responses, mostly from individuals, stated that the regulator should have no role in education and awareness activity.

32. Education and awareness are key to supporting children to navigate the digital world safely and the statutory relationships, sex and health education curriculum in England will teach them the rules and principles for keeping safe online.

Engagement

33. Throughout our engagement, digital education and awareness were key recurring themes. Some of the industry organisations, as well as children and advocacy groups, emphasised the presence of several existing online safety education programmes and questioned whether the regulator's role would be to reduce or streamline what is already there to improve quality. Many felt that the regulator could have an important role in creating a framework for evaluating the impact of existing education and awareness activity. Others recognised that there could be a role for the regulator or for government in supporting the most vulnerable children. Some also proposed a potential role for the regulator in disseminating alerts about emerging online threats for young people.

Written consultation

34. Of the written consultation responses which agreed the regulator should have a role, many responses suggested it should provide information, advice and guidance, and should work to protect and educate all users.

35. Many responses suggested the regulator should work with other organisations, institutions or government departments to jointly improve education materials and the online safety curriculum, with a number focusing on a need for increased education for children. Additionally, responses stated that the regulator should work to quality assure educational materials and ensure companies fund educational programmes.

36. In line with this, among organisations, respondents from different sectors suggested that the regulator create a national awareness-raising campaign with calls to action for citizens of all ages and technical abilities, including children, teenagers, parents and other adults.

37. Advocacy organisations also argued that via the regulator the government should play a role in making the public aware of how companies are regulated and what their rights and protections are.

38. Overall, while some respondents felt that the regulator should not have a role in education and awareness, others made a range of suggestions for how the regulator might take specific action, including: overseeing industry activity and spend; creating an evaluation framework for assessing education and awareness activity and promoting awareness of online safety.

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Online Harms White Paper - Initial consultation response

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This is an exciting and unprecedented age of digital opportunity, and this government is committed to unleashing the full power of this country's first-class technology and boosting our standing in the world.

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The cruelty and relentlessness of tabloid media

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The cruelty and relentlessness of tabloid media

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"It wasn’t just social media, it was the media amplifying what social media was doing. It was both strands. There is a human impact." Media discussions over the need for regulation of media harassment and its impacts on mental health following the death of Caroline Flack.

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No 10 has called on social media companies to go further to remove unacceptable content from their platforms following the death of the television presenter Caroline Flack.

ITV went ahead with its reality TV show Love Island, which Flack previously hosted, on Monday night after a two-day hiatus.

The episode began with a tribute to Flack by narrator Iain Stirling, who praised her "passion, warmth and infectious enthusiasm". Stirling said: "We are all absolutely devastated by the tragic news that Caroline, a much loved member of our Love Island family, has passed away."

He added: "Like many of you right now we are all just trying to come to terms with what has happened. My only hope is that we can all try to be kinder, always show love and listen to one another.

"Caroline, I want to thank you for all the fun times we had making our favourite show. You were a true friend to me. I'm going to miss you, Caz."

Boris Johnson's deputy official spokesman said Flack's death was a "tragedy", adding "our thoughts are with her family and friends at this very difficult time".

Politicians have condemned press intrusion, calling for more regulation of both traditional and social media after the death of Flack, who is understood to have taken her own life on Saturday at her home in London. She had been charged with assaulting her partner and was due to stand trial in several weeks' time.

Asked for the prime minister's view on social media bullying and press intrusion in light of Flack's death, he said: "The industry must continue their efforts to go further. We expect them to have robust processes in place removing content breaching their acceptable use policies." His answer appeared to be referring to social media companies rather than the press.

The spokesman declined to comment on ITV's decision to pull episodes of Love Island and said the decision to charge Flack - even though her partner did not support the prosecution - was a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service.

After Flack's death, the companion programme Love Island Aftersun - which was due to air on Monday at 10pm on ITV2 - was also cancelled.

Explaining the decision to air the main programme, Kevin Lygo, director of television at ITV, noted that it would include a tribute and said: "Caroline loved Love Island and was very vocal in her support of the show. Viewers could relate to her and she to them and that was a big part of the programme's success."

Lygo also said that the possibility of Flack's return to the show had remained open, saying: "After Caroline stepped down from the show ITV made it clear that the door was left open for her to return and the Love Island production team remained in regular contact with her and continued to offer support over the last few months."

Aftersun, usually broadcast on a Monday night directly after Love Island, is hosted by Laura Whitmore, who spoke of her affection for Flack and called on listeners to "be kind" during her BBC Radio 5 live show on Sunday.

"Caroline loved to love, that's all she wanted, which is why a show like Love Island was important to her, because the show is about finding love, friendship and having a laugh," Whitmore said. "The problem wasn't the show. The show, to work on, is loving and caring and safe and protected. The problem is the outside world is not."

The cancellation of the Aftersun programme, which is filmed live in front of a studio audience in the UK and features panel discussions and games, follows ITV's decision to pull Saturday's omnibus Love Island: Unseen Bits and Sunday's episode of the main show.

On Monday ITV and the show sponsor Just Eat also said the regular idents that run on the show would be dropped and replaced with information on sources of support for viewers affected by Flack's death.

It has been widely reported that contestants currently competing in the show - which finishes next Sunday - have not yet been told about Flack's death. ITV has been approached for comment but is yet to respond.

The Labour leadership contender Keir Starmer criticised mainstream outlets for "amplifying" damaging social media posts about Flack, and signalled he would take action to "diversify" the press if he won the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn.

The former director of public prosecutions said the presenter's death "shocked a lot of people", adding: "It wasn't just social media, it was the media amplifying what social media was doing. It was both strands. There is a human impact.

"The press more widely have to take responsibility as well. Not just for the hatred and abuse but for the vilification constantly of Labour MPs and Labour leaders. We have got to do something to diversify our press, to have a better media."

His fellow leadership contender Lisa Nandy said social media companies could not be left to police themselves, suggesting the current situation was like the "wild west".

"I worry about the approaches that say we allow the social media companies to regulate themselves," she said. "In no other area of life would we allow private companies to police themselves. We ought to make sure the state has a system of regulation and support around that."

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, in a media round on Sunday on behalf of the government, referred to the results of the online harms white paper consultation, which looked at ways of better protecting children and vulnerable people.

Shapps said he did not know the full circumstances of the case but said the Crown Prosecution Service had a duty of care.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. Topics

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No 10 calls on social media firms to act after Caroline Flack death

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No 10 has called on social media companies to go further to remove unacceptable content from their platforms following the death of the television presenter Caroline Flack. ITV went ahead with its reality TV show Love Island, which Flack previously hosted, on Monday night after a two-day hiatus.

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Steven Levy's book 'Facebook: The Inside Story' a friendly portrait of the social network, positioning Mark Zuckerberg as a Utopian genius undone by the world's wickedness.

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Revolts are breaking out all over the world. From Lebanon to Iraq to Hong Kong, populist uprisings are demanding the status quo change.

People have had enough.

So, what is the status quo and why are individuals waking up to its toxicity? Let's consider the economy, the central facet of modern life.

It's important to understand how today's top companies earn revenue. In spite of the maxim, "There is no such thing as a free lunch," tech behemoths sold the populace on the notion we could enjoy the internet's spoils without paying the piper.

"Facebook is free and always will be," was Facebook's slogan. Yet in recent years, books like Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and movies such as The Great Hack have shown this slogan's hollowness. The internet is pay-for-play and always has been. Or as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff says: "On Facebook, we're not the customers. We are the product."

But it's not just Facebook commoditizing the web; it's most every site you visit, whether it be Instagram, Amazon, or Google. Also, the public isn't just the product, we're customers, too. We're all participating in a cleverly orchestrated, capitalistic symphony, shrink-wrapped in the feel-good rhetoric of something called "The Attention Economy."

Likes, clicks, smiley emojis, hashtags, emphases - whatever the symbol evidencing engagement - results from the same market logic. It goes like this: The more time a prospect spends with a product, service, offering, idea, persona, or any other simulacrum of a brand, the better. After all, an engaged prospect is one who might take action. They just might buy what's being sold if their interest is held long enough.

This insight is hardly new. The advertising-based business model has served companies for nearly a century. Yet, the well-known cash-for-eyeballs approach is transforming into something more complex and insidious. In the past few years, the public has woken up to the realization that the technology behind social media was designed to be as addictive as slot machines. "Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites," said Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addition by Design, for an article in The Guardian. "In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention - which is measured in clicks and time spent."

So, how is the Attention Economy going?

Not so well. "People are openly revolting," says Cindy Goss, founder and president of Propel Business Solutions, Inc., a Southern California-based branding and marketing firm. "Across the web, professional service providers, consumer product manufacturers, distributors - even nonprofits - are courting their target audience's attention in more competitive ways than ever before. But people are no longer listening."

An expert in the public persuasion space, Goss possesses more than two decades of experience working with marketing giants such as Anheuser-Busch and Ingram Micro, a Fortune 500 distributor of information technology products. So, we should listen to her when she says the public has hit a wall. "Companies must be careful of burnout," she warns. "The 'overwhelm factor.' There can be too much of anything. Even a good thing."

The "good thing" in this case was once upon a time heralded by tech oracles such as Al Gore as " the information superhighway." Back then, pre-Y2K prognosticators painted a cheery picture, one in which people of all classes and divisions could digitally link up for mutual benefit. Two decades into the mass adoption of the internet, people are beginning to push back against this moment in time.

Our era has been rightfully termed the "Information Age."

In the past few years big data has dethroned oil as the world's most valuable commodity. But so many bits and bits and bits come at a cost. As Goss suggests, people are rebelling due to overload. "There's too much content in the Attention Economy for anyone to even make sense of it, much less use it to its full advantage," she says. A study by the World Economic Forum puts her assertion in context. "By 2025, it's estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally - that's the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day!"

Necessity being invention's mother suggests solutions to the rising content cacophony aren't some utopian fantasy. Though the specter of bloodshed shows little sign of abatement as tensions mount in struggles for self-determination worldwide, cracks are becoming visible when it comes to transforming information overload. Both consumers and marketers are turning to AI to counter a digital advertising onslaught.

Though big data has proven to be a tool for less-than-virtuous companies to profit from data misappropriation, it is also being commandeered to hyper-target messaging to intended recipients. Want your message to reach more people? Experts suggest using AI to determine something called "relevance at scale."

Mike Kaput of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute says humans are adept at generating content to sell to others on a one-to-one capacity. "Chances are, we know enough about a coworker, friend, or family member to communicate with them in ways they respond to most effectively," he writes. "We usually have at least some data on their behaviors, preferences, and desires."

According to Kaput, problems set in when marketers try crafting messaging that can appeal to a large group of people, each with their own individual tastes and values. "Humans don't have the time, resources, or intellectual bandwidth to do this. But AI systems do."

To illustrate AI's capabilities, first in determining a piece of content's relevance to a specific individual, then acting upon such information, Kaput cites Phrasee, a business tool that can write well-branded, social media copy, as an example of using the technology for relevance at scale. "Their ad product recently reduced one client's cost-per-lead by 31 percent."

Yes, such innovations might work like a dream. At least in theory. But perhaps we needn't look to yet another technological solution for mindshare in the Attention Economy. Maybe the breakthroughs we need have more to do with a human/machine symbiosis than a cold algorithm.

At least that's Goss' contention. "We keep hearing all the time that businesses need to post more content, share more content, like more content," she says. "But what if that's not true? What if the key to thriving in the Attention Economy involves a mixture of good old-fashioned human-to-human connection, aided by technology?"

Goss' solution isn't just to return to a bygone era in which businesses hand-delivered paper brochures or cold-called prospects before the no-call list. Rather, she advises today's companies, particularly service providers, to marry big data with old school outreach. "Our major and mid-sized clients do a lot of networking. I can't tell you how many have said how beneficial it is to share a targeted piece of content, such as a relevant article or video for a prospect's services, but real engagement is spurred in the follow-up with a face-to-face encounter."

AI can also play a role in this hybrid tactic. Returning to achieving relevance at scale, savvy companies can turn to algorithms to suggest what information would be most valuable to a prospect or customer, based on profiles developed by AI insights. But as Goss suggests, it would be a mistake to then "spam" these targets with depersonalized messages, posts, or emails that will never be opened.

"Instead, integrate the technology with an authentic follow-up," advises Goss. "In the age of autocorrect, consider writing your own email. Even better, do something dangerous. Pick up the phone and call the person you want to reach. The results might surprise you. You just might make a (profitable) human connection."

These suggestions might feel backward in the Information Age until we consider that life proceeds cyclically. Humans often rush to create a new technology, something promising to transform life, only to witness its downsides. This, in turn, causes backlash. We can see this with fast food. Once hailed as the future of cuisine for its convenience, the public eventually soured on it as books, like Fast Food Nation detailed its many negative health implications.

This past year, I cowrote a book about AI and how businesses can use this important tool. Yet, what my coauthor Neil Sahota and I learned in writing it is that there can be technology overreach. People can become convinced AI will solve every issue a company faces. This is just not true. Even though we hear a lot of hype about how AI will completely transform the economy, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. After all the hysteria dies down, I think we will find a new cycle of thinking, one in which we celebrate the contributions of both humans and machines.

When this occurs, it is my hope that a new revolution will take place. The most important revolt of all, it will be a change in consciousness suggesting every person's life possesses meaning. Not just because of how much money they can bring us, but rather, others will be seen as valuable for existing at all.

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Sick Of The Attention Economy? It's Time To Rebel

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Revolts are breaking out all over the world. From Lebanon to Iraq to Hong Kong, populist uprisings are demanding the status quo change. People have had enough. So, what is the status quo and why are individuals waking up to its toxicity? Let's consider the economy, the central facet of modern life.

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"Modern technology isn’t changing us. It’s changing society. There’s a difference."

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This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of non sequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes in through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen.

Last month, Kim Kardashian "broke the internet." And by "broke the internet," I mean she photoshopped a picture of her bare ass and put it on a magazine cover.

But, of course, because it's a naked ass, and because that ass happens to belong to Kim Kardashian, the photo was republished umpteen bazillion times, as adults rolled their eyes and guffawed at the insanity of it all, while the teenagers giggled and masturbated.

The media brought out the obligatory screeds about how lewd or classless the pictures were. People then complained that the media gives this woman - a woman who has accomplished nothing in her life other than being born rich and fucking rappers - way too much airtime. Then people pointed out that criticizing the media for publicizing Kardashian ironically just gives Kardashian even more attention and cultural presence. Being the internet, these people were then berated for being neckbeard virgins and their mothers were threatened with sexual violence. The neckbeards then respond by creating ironic memes that involved Kardashian's bare ass with an espresso machine. Everyone LOLZ'd and moves on with their lives.

And this is why she's still famous.

Kardashian has come to represent pretty much everything we loathe about the social media age: bite-sized, meaningless content that you hate looking at, but for some reason you can't look away. And because nobody has the self-control to look away, the bite-sized meaningless content spreads like wildfire, creating an online experience of a never-ending series of cultural car wrecks where we all gawk, rubberneck, discuss and/or make fun of something for 12 minutes until distracted by the next oncoming collision.

There are three common complaints against social media and the internet in general: 1) that it's making us all narcissistic and shallow, 2) that it's crapping on our ability to maintain meaningful relationships and therefore making us lonelier, and 3) that it's interfering with our ability to focus and get quote, unquote "more important shit" done in our lives.

Interestingly, after quite a bit of research, it turns out that none of these claims are completely accurate. Social media doesn't necessarily cause people to become more narcissistic, it just gives narcissistic people more opportunities to indulge their narcissism, and to a larger audience. It's not interfering with either the closeness we feel to others or how many people we feel close to, it simply expands our network of casual acquaintances and the quantity of our casual social interactions. And while technology does present more opportunities for distraction (which we'll get to), it also presents easier transmission of information, tools for collaboration and opportunities for organization.

What I'm saying is that the whole "the internet is ruining us" argument is a big whiff. It's likely just the anxiety that's always wrought by new technologies. When TV and radio were invented, people complained that everyone's brain was going to go to mush. When the printing press was invented, people thought it was going to destroy our ability to speak eloquently. Complaints about the minds of children being ruined by technology are as old as technology itself.

Modern technology isn't changing us. It's changing society. There's a difference. One is how we are, and one is simply how we react every day to the world around us. The social media age is changing the basic economics of our day-to-day lives. It's changing them in profound ways, ways that most of us likely don't notice. And surprisingly, it's people like Kim Kardashian who are taking advantage of it.

The Attention Economy

If you've ever spent time in a really poor country or with people who grew up in awful poverty, you'll notice how much they talk about food - their favorite foods, what they're going to eat this weekend, how they like this and don't like that, and so on.

Much of these people's lives and conversations revolves around food for the simple reason that the scarcity of food makes it appear incredibly important. The fact you prefer strawberries to oranges matters a lot when you can rarely afford to have either. But in first-world cultures where food is never an issue, discussions of food among most people are superficial and usually over within a few seconds.

For most of human history, the big economic scarcity in the world was land. There was a limited amount of productive land, therefore there was a limited amount of food. And because there was a limited amount of food, most day-to-day economic concerns and political squabbles involved land. Most people spent their lives contemplating what land they were going to work, what they were going to grow, what kind of harvest to expect, and so on. Food was always on the top of people's mind.

Eventually, when the industrial revolution hit, the primary scarcity was no longer land, as machines could now help cultivate more than enough food for everybody. Now the big scarcity was labor. You needed trained people to run all of these machines that did all of the cool new shit so you could make money and get rich. Thus, for a couple hundred years, the organizing principle in society was based on labor - who you worked for, how much you made, and so on.

Then, in the 20th century, there was more being produced than any one person would ever need or could ever purchase. The new scarcity in society was no longer labor or land, the scarcity was now knowledge. People had so many choices of what to purchase with their hard-earned money, but they didn't know what to purchase. Thus, people spent most of their day-to-day existence trying to figure out what the best toothpaste was, what a toaster oven could do, how to spend their bonus money over the holidays and so on. The fields of advertising and marketing were invented and came to dominate society, as they were the means of disseminating the information people needed to allocate their resources appropriately.

Still with me? Because this is where the internet and smartphones have fucked everything up - or, ahem, where they've "disrupted" everything.

With the advent of the internet, the primary scarcity in society is no longer information. In fact, there is now more information than any of us could possibly know what to do with. If you want to know about a new product, you can have the Wikipedia article and 500 Amazon reviews up within 10 seconds. If you want a refresher on the process of photosynthesis, you can have it figured out within a few minutes. If you need to know every actor Kevin Spacey has ever worked with, you can figure it out in mere seconds.

The scarcity in our world is no longer knowledge. There's an abundance of knowledge, just as there's an abundance of labor and an abundance of land.

No, the new scarcity in the internet age is attention. Since there is a surplus of information, more information flowing through our society than any of us could ever hope to process or understand, the new bottleneck on our economy is attention. We now live in an attention-based economy.

This is why today we are each bombarded with over 3,000 advertising messages per day. This is why these advertisements get zanier and more nonsensical - like the Geico gecko or the Old Spice guy - because the goal of advertisements is no longer information but simply attention.

This is why social media is plastered with ridiculous article headlines such as, "I Thought I Was Going To Die, But Then You'll Never Believed How This Polar Bear Saved My Life," and when you click it, it takes you to a series of stupid animated GIFs or a YouTube video that has nothing to do with polar bears but is instead slathered in advertisements.

This is why politics is becoming less about actual policies and more about dramatic actions designed to draw either positive or negative attention to various actors and political parties.

This is why everything is becoming a version of softcore porn: music videos, commercials, movies and reality TV shows. And when it's not softcore porn, it's some other kind of porn: food porn, murder porn, disaster porn, or actual, like real life porn. Porn gets attention. And today, attention is what sells.

This is why Kim Kardashian is famous and has continued to be famous for the better part of a decade for no other reason than - you guessed it - she's already famous! This woman has contributed absolutely nothing to humanity. Yet in the age of attention, she is goddamned Master Yoda. She's got it all figured out.

Kim Kardashian is a genius. Not an Einstein-like genius. Not a "solves differential equations in her head but can't tie her shoes" genius. But she's a genius. A savant. She's like the Rainman of attention whoredom. The same way an autistic prodigy can count 2,318 toothpicks dumped on the floor just by looking at them, Kim Kardashian can command the attention of tens of millions of people with the crack of her ass.

The quality of that attention doesn't matter. What matters is the attention. That attention is an asset, the most valuable asset in the new economy. Millions of eyeballs follow her wherever she goes and she leverages the shit out of it. She earns millions off a crappy iPhone app that does nothing and a TV show that shows nothing. Just the fact she stands in a nightclub allows that club to charge $2,500 for entry. She gets paid more for public appearances than Nobel Prize winners. Forbes estimates her income last year at $28 million.

But making stupid people rich and famous isn't anything new in our culture. While the attention economy may exacerbate the problem, it didn't create it. But when we apply the attention economy to the other areas of our lives, we run into some problems.

How the Attention Economy Promotes Extremism

Social networks are the business model of the attention economy. They are wholly dependent on eyeballs and clicks to make all of their revenue. To do this, they design algorithms that show you the most interesting and attention-grabbing information available in your social network. If your newsfeed was full of the boring and drab day-to-day stuff, you'd stop looking at it. So instead, Facebook shows you the most extreme occurrences in your social network for the simple reason that the extreme events draw the most attention.

This has drastic effects not only on our perceptions of society as a whole, but also on how we perceive our personal lives.

1. If it seems like "everybody" is getting married or having kids or having amazing trips around the world or doing something cool and fun and sexy, it's only because we are exposed to these events in disproportionate numbers. It's not that everyone is having amazing life experiences all the time, it's that we're always shown people's amazing life experiences all the time. As a result, many of us begin to feel a constant gnaw of somehow "missing out" when really, we just have a heavily-biased perception of what's going on in our peers' lives.

2. The attention economy rewards people who are narcissistic and self-promotional because these people excel at getting attention. Therefore, it seems that everyone is becoming more shallow and self-absorbed, when in fact, we are merely becoming more exposed to other people's self-promotion.

3. Politically, the most extreme, radical and ignorant views get the most airtime because they're the most unique and they grab the most attention. Therefore, it appears as if the world is spiraling into a festering shithole, when really, we're just getting exposed to the people on the fringes more often than ever before.

4. Threats such as Ebola or terrorism become sensationalized, not because they're actually that threatening, but because of their extremity and how much attention they garner. You're more likely to get eaten by a shark while getting struck by lightning than dying from a terrorist attack. You're more likely to die from the flu this year than you are from Ebola, ever. Yet, in our culture, it feels as though the world is in a constant state of imminent collapse.

5. Pointless but dramatic events such as nipple slips, gaffs, errant interviews, and celebrities doing stupid celebrity stuff seem as though they are taking on a much greater cultural significance than they actually are. If Kim Kardashian got hit by a truck tomorrow and died, I'm sure you'd see the usual media-driven mourn fest and televised funeral, but would anyone really miss her? Would anybody's life be altered? Probably not. In fact, we'd probably get another really good Kanye album.

When you look at all of the complaints about social media, smartphones, and the internet at large, most of the complaints boil down to one thing: attention. People don't have any attention span anymore. People don't focus on what's in front of them anymore. People don't even fucking talk to you at dinner anymore.

The problem is that the attention economy makes it economical to spread one's attention across eight different interests and 23 different friends each day. And because we're all spreading our attention so thin, many of us are losing the all-important life skill of focus.

Focus is what generates long-term success. Focus leads to deeper and more meaningful relationships. Focus determines how well we can improve at something. Yet our current economy is constantly providing incentive away from focus and towards - whoa, did you see that video of the guy on the motorcycle who landed on the car? That was crazy!

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah... focus. The new age presents problems of attention, not of happiness or narcissism or loneliness. And as the technology's critics point out, this issue is not going to go away, it's simply going to get worse.

The Silent Benefits of The Attention Economy

But the attention economy brings with it a host of social benefits, many of which are not immediately obvious to us. In fact, some of the benefits are actually painful to bear in some ways.

Take, for example, the recent exposure that Bill Cosby is (very likely) a rapist. This is a man that was a role model for decades and took that role seriously, traveling around the country lecturing people on values and responsibilities. Women had been accusing him of rape for years, yet it was the attention economy that finally allowed the allegations to make their way into the public consciousness in a significant way.

Pre-internet, things such as sexual assault or gay rights or intransigent racism or the failed drug war, they were all abstract concepts that we never had to confront in any tangible way. They were fairy tales of some far away land. They had nothing to do with us.

But new technologies bring these issues right in front of our face, over and over again, whether we like them or not. Sexual assault does happen and most of the perpetrators do go unpunished. LGBT people are humans too, and they deserve to be treated like humans. The drug war is a dismal failure and ruining millions of people's lives. And because these experiences are now easily transmittable and experienced by large swaths of the population, we see these social policies changing faster than ever before.

The past five years has seen a wave of protests and political mobilization, mostly throughout the developing world. From Egypt to Turkey to Brazil to Mexico, millions of people are able to react immediately upon major political issues and demand changes from long-corrupt governments. Sure, most of them don't work. But some of them do. And at the least, they alter the political discourse. Just look at what's been going on lately with racism in the US and Ferguson and Eric Garner. Regardless of what you think, the issue of racism and police brutality is forced on you. You can't turn away. There are videos. There are dead kids. It's impossible to not see it, and therefore an issue that has lasted for as long as the country has existed is being confronted more seriously than it has been in decades.

But beyond politics, technology does benefit our relationships, even if we don't always recognize it. We are the first generation that is still within easy contact of old friends from grade school, summer camp and college. We are capable of being in constant contact with one another, for better or worse. It's never been easier to transmit important life events and emergency situations worldwide. Travel and long distance relationships - romantic or otherwise - are easier than ever before. One can spend months or even years abroad and never feel "out of touch" with what's going on at home.

Obviously, technology shouldn't replace face time and in-person interactions. But it can definitely supplement them.

And, of course, there is simply the breadth of information available at our fingertips. For all of the headaches the attention economy can cause, it's the cost of having limitless information accessible at any time. You used to have to go to the library to do research. You used to have to call stores to find out if they had something in stock. You used to have to buy a map and spend five minutes studying it to figure out where you wanted to go.

We forget so easily what the whole point of all of this was in the first place: the availability of limitless and free knowledge. These benefits are so widespread and ubiquitous that we can't even remember what it was like to not have them. And as a result, we overestimate how much these technologies are hurting us and underestimate how much they're helping us.

Yes, the attention economy has come with new social challenges like identity theft and cyberbullying and assholes who text while they drive. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
The problem is not the technology itself, it's how we choose to use the technology. Is it serving us or are we serving it?
These are the new challenges new generations must face. Our grandparents had to learn to master their time and their energy in order to take advantage of the labor economy. Our parents had to master their minds and their problem-solving in order to take advantage of the knowledge economy. We must learn to master our focus and our self-awareness to properly take advantage of the attention economy.

Limitless access to knowledge brings limitless opportunity. But only to those who learn to manage the new currency: their attention. In the new economy, the most valuable asset you can accumulate may not be money, may not be wealth, may not even be knowledge, but rather, the ability to control your own attention, and to focus.

Because until you are able to limit your attention, until you are able to turn away, at will, from all of the shiny things and nipple slips, until you are able to consciously choose what has value to you and what does not, you and I and everyone else will continue to be served up garbage indefinitely. And it will not get better, it will get worse.

In the future, your attention will be sold. And it may be that the only people able to capitalize, are the people that can control their own.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some stupid cat videos to watch.

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In The Future, Our Attention Will Be Sold

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This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of non sequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes in through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen. Last month, Kim Kardashian "broke the internet." And by "broke the internet," I mean she photoshopped a picture of her bare ass and put it on a magazine cover.

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"77% believe social networking sites distract people from issues that are truly important, and 71% agree with the assertion that 'social media makes people believe they’re making a difference when they really aren’t.'"

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Monica Anderson, Skye Toor, Kenneth Olmstead, Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith

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With the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, along with others like #MeToo and #MAGA, a look at Americans’ views on the impact of social media on political and civic engagement

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Slacktivism or activism? Arguably the case of #metoo can be an example of how hashtag activism can make a difference, generating a discussion surrounding sexual abuse and encouraging victims to share their stories. The digital platform can be seen in this way as  somewhere stories that might not normally be brought up in conversation can be shared.

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The #MeToo hashtag first went viral on Twitter a year ago this month. Although the social movement of the same name existed beforehand, the hashtag was popularized on Oct. 15, 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano urged victims of sexual abuse to share their stories on Twitter in the wake of accusations of misconduct against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein.

Amid ongoing discussions about sexual harassment in the workplace and beyond, here are five findings about how these issues have been discussed on Twitter and other social media outlets in the past year:

1 The #MeToo hashtag has been used more than 19 million times on Twitter from the date of Milano's initial tweet through Sept. 30 of this year, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of publicly available English-language tweets. That works out to an average of 55,319 uses of the hashtag per day. The day with the single-greatest number of mentions was Sept. 9, when Leslie Moonves, chairman and chief executive of CBS, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

2 Personal stories and prominent celebrities have been key topics in #MeToo tweets. The Center conducted a separate analysis of five time periods with a high volume of English-language #MeToo tweets to examine how often three specific topics were mentioned in connection with the hashtag. The topics were: Twitter users sharing personal stories of harassment; users talking about the entertainment industry or celebrities in their tweets; and users discussing national politics or politicians. Some 15% of tweets across these specific time periods mentioned celebrities or the entertainment industry more broadly, while 14% referenced personal stories or narratives. A smaller share of these tweets (7%) mentioned politics or specific politicians. (The high-volume time periods in this analysis do not necessarily correspond with the above graphic. An individual tweet could mention one or more of these topics, and the tweets that mentioned multiple topics were counted in each relevant category. See methodology for more details on this analysis.)

3 A majority of #MeToo tweets in high-volume periods have been in English, but interest spanned multiple languages. Roughly seven-in-ten #MeToo tweets (71%) over these five high-usage time periods were written in English. But the movement has sparked social media interest across the globe, and the analysis shows that 29% of the #MeToo tweets during these periods were written in another language, with Afrikaans (7% of the total), Somali (4%) and Spanish (3%) making up the largest shares of the non-English tweets mentioning the hashtag over these time periods.

4 It's common for social media users in the U.S. to see content about sexual harassment or assault. Roughly two-thirds (65%) of U.S. adults who use social media say that at least some of the content they see on these platforms pertains to sexual harassment or assault. This includes 29% who say that a great deal of what they see on social media is focused on this issue, according to newly released data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year. It is common for social media users from various demographic groups to encounter these types of posts. For example, men are as likely as women to report seeing at least some content related to sexual harassment or assault while using social media.

5 In the immediate aftermath of prominent sexual harassment allegations in 2017, some members of Congress addressed the issue on their official Facebook pages - but there was a large gender gap in doing so. More than four-in-ten members of Congress (44%) mentioned sexual misconduct in at least one post on their official Facebook accounts between Oct. 1 and Dec. 30, 2017, according to a previous Center analysis. Across both political parties, female legislators were far more likely than their male counterparts to raise the issue in their posts.
Note: See full topline results and methodology here (PDF).

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How social media users have discussed sexual harassment since #MeToo went viral

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The #MeToo hashtag first went viral on Twitter a year ago this month. Although the social movement of the same name existed beforehand, the hashtag was popularized on Oct. 15, 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano urged victims of sexual abuse to share their stories on Twitter in the wake of accusations of misconduct against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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As ownership of mobile phones, especially smartphones, spreads rapidly across the globe, there are still notable numbers of people in emerging economies who do not own a mobile phone, or who share one with others. A Pew Research Center survey in 11 emerging economies finds that a median of 6% of adults do not use phones at all, and a median of 7% do not own phones but instead borrow them from others. The mobile divides are most pronounced in Venezuela (32%), India (30%) and the Philippines (27%), countries where about three-in-ten adults do not own a mobile phone.

We can see a lot of things on a smartphone. You can learn more about life. Woman, 40, Tunisia

At the same time, the new findings show that mobile divides even exist for phone owners. Significant numbers of owners struggle to use their phones to full advantage. A median of 46% in these countries say they frequently or occasionally have difficulties getting reliable phone connections, 37% say it can be a challenge to pay for their phones and 33% report finding places to charge their phones is a problem at least occasionally. In addition, a median of 42% report frequently or occasionally avoiding some activities on their phones because they use too much data.

[Owning a smartphone] is not my priority. My priority is basic needs. Woman, 37, Philippines

In some countries, mobile owners' problems are particularly striking. In Lebanon, for example, 77% of phone owners report having problems getting reliable mobile connections, and about two-thirds (66%) say they avoid doing things with their phones because those activities use too much data. In Jordan, nearly half (48%) report having trouble paying for their phone, while in Tunisia four-in-ten (40%) say it can be a challenge to find places to recharge their phones.

Beyond those concerns, other issues can disrupt life for a portion of phone users and sharers. Around three-quarters or more mobile phone owners in every country except India report concerns about identity theft, and around nine-in-ten or more in Mexico (95%), Colombia (94%), Tunisia (90%), South Africa (89%) and the Philippines (89%) say they are at least somewhat concerned.

Mobile phone sharers, too, are often quite concerned about identity theft; outside of India and Lebanon, at least half of mobile phone sharers in every country report being very concerned about this issue. For mobile sharers, too, concerns about device security can play a role in why people choose not to own their own devices. While cost is the primary reason mobile phone sharers give for why they do not personally have a phone (a median of 34% across eight countries reports this), the second most commonly cited reason is that a previous mobile phone was lost, broken or stolen. Another 2% say they do not own their own mobile phone because of concerns that it will be stolen.

Additionally, a median of 29% of mobile owners in these 11 emerging economies say they have frequently or occasionally experienced problems finding information online in their preferred language. This problem ranges from 17% of mobile owners in Jordan to 37% in South Africa.

People cite a variety of reasons why they don't own or share mobile phones

The cost of phones themselves and data plans are important factors in why people don't own or feel compelled to share mobile phones. But costs are hardly the only deterrent.

Among non-mobile phone users, a median of 51% across eight countries say the cost of a phone is a reason they do not have one, with non-users in Venezuela (89%) and Tunisia (71%) topping the list. A median of 34% of non-mobile users in these eight countries report that data costs are a reason. Non-users in Tunisia (63%), Venezuela (50%) and Mexico (45%) were particularly likely to cite data costs as a reason for not having a phone.

At the same time, a median of 48% of non-users in eight of these countries report the reason they personally do not have a phone is that another family member has a phone. This reason was especially likely to be cited by non-mobile phone users in the Philippines (59%), India (56%), Lebanon (49%) and Mexico (44%). This may be because these non-users can accomplish some kinds of mobile communications and other activities by relying on that other family member.

You can borrow a [family member's] phone, right? They will say, 'Why don't you buy a [smart]phone like this?' I answered, 'I don't have enough money.' Man, 49, Philippines

Technological literacy and general literacy issues also figure into the situation. A median of 43% of non-users say phones are too complicated for them, and 31% report they cannot read well enough to use a phone. Reading problems are particularly likely to be cited as a factor in India (49%) and Lebanon (45%).

A median of 43% of non-users in these countries say they have no need for a mobile phone. This is often the case in countries where relatively high levels of nonowners say other members of their family have mobile phones like India, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Phone hardships often come in multiples

As part of the analysis, Pew Research Center created four scales related to the different kinds of hardships people might experience related to mobile phones - whether they own them, share them or don't use them at all. The scales synthesized people's answers related to connectivity problems, financial difficulties, language issues and security woes, flagging cases where the issue prevented or frequently impaired mobile use. (A full description of the development of the scales can be found in " Obstacles to using phones" and Appendix B.)

This analysis finds that security hardships are the most commonly experienced across the 11 emerging economies studied, hitting a median of 69% of adults in these countries, followed by financial struggles (a median of 60%), connectivity difficulties (28%) and language issues (13%).

Outside of India, half or more adults report facing at least one security-related hardship, meaning many are very concerned about the security of their information or the physical security of their device. These hardships are especially common in Colombia (84%), Mexico (82%) and South Africa (79%).

Financial hardships are highest in Kenya, where 74% of adults report an issue related to affording mobile devices and/or data.

Connectivity issues are most common in Lebanon, where about four-in-ten adults (41%) report a frequent difficulty with connectivity. But, few mobile users have difficulty both getting reliable service and charging their phones.

The highest rate of language issues is found in South Africa, where about a quarter (23%) report a language issue. This may be due in part to the diversity of languages found in South Africa.

A key finding from this analysis of hardships is that barriers to mobile use do not occur in isolation. Between 27% and 67% of individuals in each country simultaneously experience two or more types of hardship, and between 1% and 7% of individuals experience all four types of hardship we asked about.

For the two most common hardships - security and financial - between 13% and 56% of individuals in each country surveyed experience both hardships concurrently. For example, around four-in-ten Filipinos (39%) simultaneously experience security and financial issues (for all country-specific numbers, see Appendix C). In fact, aside from India, roughly half or more who experience one of these issues also experiences the other (between 56% and 87%).

Some other findings from this analysis of hardships include:

Smartphone use is associated with higher rates of security issues in most countries - that is, people who use smartphones are either more likely to report concerns about their phone being stolen or about identity theft than non-smartphone users, or they are more likely to currently share a device because their last device was stolen, lost or broken.

Younger adults ages 18 to 29 experience higher levels of connectivity issues like poor service or problems charging their devices in several countries.

Those who can read some English face fewer language-related issues with mobile phones in most countries, including difficulties finding online content in their preferred language or feeling there were no apps or websites in their native language.

Those living in lower-income households face more financial hurdles.

Wide range of opinions on whether non-users would like a device

Despite these issues, a share of those who do not use phones in some of these emerging economies would like to do so. That is not universally the case, however. A median of 47% of non-users say they would like to have a mobile phone. That sentiment among non-users ranges from 86% of non-users in Venezuela to 9% in Lebanon.

It is possible that the people who report wanting to get a phone in the future desire to do so in part because they believe mobile phones have been beneficial to their societies. Indeed, in six of the seven countries for which this analysis is possible, majorities of mobile phone owners and nonowners alike say mobile phones have mostly been a good thing for their society.

These are among the major findings from a Pew Research Center survey conducted among 28,122 adults in 11 countries from Sept. 7 to Dec. 7, 2018. It is part of a series of reports about the mobile landscape in emerging economies. Previous reports have covered the benefits and drawbacks people feel mobile connectivity has brought to them and their societies, perceptions about the impact of mobile phones on politics and information and the broader social networks of smartphone and social media users in these countries.

In addition to the survey, the Center conducted focus groups with diverse groups of participants in Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines and Tunisia in March 2018, and their comments are included throughout the report (see Appendix A for more information).

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As ownership of mobile phones, especially smartphones, spreads rapidly across the globe, there are still notable numbers of people in emerging economies who don't have access to mobile phones. And even phone owners struggle with connectivity, costs and security issues.

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Reaction from young twitter user turning their disapproval of the Gucci meme campaign into a meme itself about dads being 'hip and cool'.

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Gucci marketing campaign uses meme culture [and fails]

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Gucci marketing campaign uses meme culture [and fails]

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Luxury fashion brand Gucci has played a risky game by referencing the in-flux and volatile world of memes in a campaign promoting its line of watches.

The #tfwgucci campaign, 'a collaborative meme project' saw Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele commission artists to adapt memes to feature its watches in a bold ad campaign that dared to embrace internet culture.

Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame mantra arguably applies to meme culture with Salt Bae, Tiny Trump, Cash Me Ousside, Howbow Dah? and Roll Safe, already being usurped by more recent memes despite landing only earlier this year.

This domain the fashion brand has chosen to embrace has proven dangerous for other brands - a notable example being House of Fraser's Emojinal campaign.

The work proved divisive online - but is far reaching - having been created to expand the reach of Gucci timepieces into a new audience "a wider creative community than that which traditionally locates around the world of fashion."

Below is just some of the posts - they can all be viewed here.

#TFWGucci Sebastian Tribbie Matheson @Youvegotnomale is a ruthless meme maker. The snark starts with his account's name. In between taking selfies and posting them to his 40,000 followers on Instagram, he creates images that take aim at popular fashion and social culture. No target is safe, from ordering on Seamless to cliché emoji usage. Here, Sebastian uses the starter pack meme, in which a group of images and objects are clustered together to represent the stereotype of a particular style or personality. For #TFWGucci he takes on Gucci, adopting the brand's recent hallmarks, like embroidery, patches, and 70s glasses. @harinef and @petrafcollins make appearances, as does the #LeMarchédesMerveilles timepiece. Gucci = owned. - Text by @kchayka. Read more through link in bio.
A post shared by Gucci (@gucci) on

An opinion column published in Fashionista addressed when brands adopt memes, critical of Gucci's efforts: "When big businesses try to attract younger customers (we see you, Gen Z) in order to make a profit, it comes off as cringe-worthy, awkward and, to be honest, a lot less fun."

There's been a degree of backlash from social media users, here's some of the negativity leveraged towards the campaign on Twitter - where Gucci also pushed it.

I'm sure it sounded dope while brainstorming but Guccis meme campaign is one of the lamest things I've ever seen. Catch this L Gucci pic.twitter.com/QS9ear1xqL

- Muchi4TheKids (@Sipho_Says) March 21, 2017

Didn't realise Gucci became a fckin meme account pic.twitter.com/fcMh7ThoGE

- saz (@saraalisa_) March 17, 2017

gucci posting a meme on insta and then explaining the meme in the caption is the weirdest thing i have seen recently tbh pic.twitter.com/TsO3AWMbMJ

- maureen (@mowietecha) March 22, 2017

@gucci using memes as a marketing tool are like dads who try to be hip and cool to bond with their kids

- (@MiltMiltLu) March 19, 2017

Gucci is appropriating our sacred internet culture by capitalizing off of memes. what a time to be alive™ https://t.co/YdXdxnGHXo

- Kelsey Steck (@kelseysteck) March 19, 2017

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Gucci takes a dip into the ever-dangerous world of memes to promote its watches

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Luxury fashion brand Gucci has played a risky game by referencing the in-flux and volatile world of memes in a campaign promoting its line of watches. The #tfwgucci campaign, 'a collaborative meme project' saw Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele commission artists to adapt memes to feature its watches in a bold ad campaign that dared to embrace internet culture.

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26 hours into my digital detox, and having spent the first 20 hours in constant presence of humans, outdoors, eating, drinking and dancing and enjoying the freedom of no technology... I have found myself on Lonely Island. I restricted myself to only communicating through email; but no one checks their emails to organise coffee dates or ask what time they'll be home for dinner! I have even found myself procrastinating work by scrolling through news websites or academic sources (totally irrelevant to my deadlines) just to entertain myself. Hopefully someone answers their email soon...

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Digital Detox Resources, Research and Retreats | Time To Log Off

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We’re the home of digital detox. We collect facts & research, run events & publish books, including ‘My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open’.

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Smart phones work the same way as slot machines; in the attention economy.

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Smart phones work the same way as slot machines; in the attention economy.

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Silicon Valley insider on why smartphones are "slot machines"

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"When you multi-task, production of the stress hormone cortisol and the fight or flight hormone adrenaline increases, which over-stimulates your brain, makes you feel more anxious and uses up a lot of energy"

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The cognitive cost of distraction When you multi-task, production of the stress hormone cortisol and the fight or flight hormone adrenaline increases, which over-stimulates your b

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Now almost 10 years outdated, this 2010 article emphasises the authors anger towards the term 'lol' calling for it to be left behind in search of a more genuine way of expressing humour and laughter online. It explores the way the use of 'lol' has evolved over time and become a way to indicate irony specifically. 10 years later and 'lol' is still prevalent in digital culture... surely for a reason?

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Social behavior on the internet is so wildly different from 'irl' that it took connected populations a number of years to adapt, levying frequent complaints about how 'tone' doesn't necessarily translate, how it can be difficult to judge an individual's 'irl' demeanor by their fashion of conducting themselves in an IM window, et cetera.

Given the sheer necessity of connected communication to the leading tiers of culture and industry in nations like the U.S., it is often surprising when an otherwise intelligent and reasonable person reveals themselves to be less than adept at communicating effectively online or via text message. To offer a more specific example, there still exist people who are incapable of participating in or responding correctly to discourse containing multiple elements of information: You send a txt to your bro being like 'Do you want to see that movie tonight, if you're free you can come over when you finish work or if you're working late I can meet you in Union Square at 7' and then 30-40 minutes later you receive a text that says only 'ya.'

At other times there are massively disconcerting contextual disconnects; your bro IMs you being like 'sup' and you respond 'hang on, I'm in the middle of something at work' and they reply 'lol.' Or you get an IM like 'how are you,' and you go 'I'm okay, sick of the rain' and they reply 'lol,' or you say 'I'm good' and they say 'lol.'

There are very few instances in which 'lol' is an appropriate response to simple items of factual information such as 'I am at work' or 'I am not happy today' or 'there is a new White Fence MP3.' As historians of modern culture will be able to recount, 'lol' is an acronym developed in the early to mid 90s specifically for the growing medium of internet-enabled text-based communication. It stands for 'laughing out loud' and presumably grew into popularity because typing 'haha' made people feel unnatural and because 'early adopters' of internet culture desired to have some kind of internal lexicon to feel futuristic/demonstrate that they were 'ahead of the curve.'

In fact, it is quite difficult to recall a time when it was patently uncool not to know what 'lol' means, like someone's mom reading your chat logs to make sure you were not communicating with serial killers or internet predators [similarly dated is the fear that everyone online is a serial killer or internet predator] and the mom going "What is 'ell oh ell'" and you kind of rolling your eyes and turning your Live CD up louder and going 'mom, it's an internet thing' and like giggling.

Recall late night news broadcasts about 'Netiquette,' in which a half-amused, half-bewildered broadcaster would discuss in slow, child-like tones that it was actually becoming legitimately important for one to have control over one's 'tone' on the internet and explicate, via infographs, acronyms such as 'lol,' 'rotflmao' and 'brb' for those that had never heard them before. The broadcaster would also grasp awkwardly at demonstrations of 'emoticons,' explaining to old people who 'just didn't see it' - why a semicolon plus dash plus right parenthesis was a 'winky smiley face' and a colon plus dash plus left parenthesis was a 'sad face.'

'Emoticons' or 'emotes' as some people call them or 'emoji' because they wish they were Japanese/like to insert expressive icons using their iPhone have transitioned into the 'new millennium' [itself a woefully dated term] much more naturally than acronyms such as 'lol' and 'lmao.' One can only theorize at why this is the case. Seems like those accustomed to using the internet as a primary platform of communication do make some concession that it is necessary to indicate tone, especially since much of the humor that arises from text communication can be abrupt, harsh or extremely inappropriate out of context.

Consider that the proliferation of the casual use of the term 'fag' to mean someone who is behaving lamely or is weak or uncool [as opposed to an anti-gay slur that has caused numerous people an inordinate amount of pain] can take much credit from internet message boards, Photoshop threads and other cultures associated with the void of certain communication ethics that is created when people do not know each other and are not speaking face to face.

So it's likely that internet users, wishing for some inexplicable reason to call their friend a 'fag' via IM, become alarmed when the friend pauses too long on the other end of the conversation, and, wondering if the other user was perhaps legitimately offended by the casual hate-speech, need some way to remedy the situation. In that case, according to the metrics of appropriate internet culture, ":)" will suffice.

But 'lol' has not aged well. In fact, 'lol' is so aged that certain 'high-end' internet culturalists understand and embrace the ironic use of 'lol', employing it as a sarcastic response to a statement or event that is in fact not funny, or to indicate that an item intended to be amusing is perhaps 'mad dated.' However, this implementation of 'lol' is somewhat problematic, given that it requires both parties be 'versed' enough in internet culture to understand the usage as ironic. Otherwise, a user of 'lol' risks appearing as if they do not understand that 'lol' is mad dated, or risks encouraging anyone in conversation with them or in witness to their conversation to continue considering 'lol' as relevant.

With that in mind, this article should act as a formal proposal to retire the use of 'lol' from conversations both sincere and ironic. There are certain military and social conflicts throughout history that had badges, flags or other symbolic imagery associated with them; although the significance of those image symbols either evolved or evaporated in accordance with the progression of the conflicts with which they were associated, it is generally unwise to wear mad dated cultural symbols once their context has expired.

Even if you and perhaps even a narrow vertex of your cultural peers understand and approve of the context in which you are employing the mad dated symbol, you risk being viewed as backward or inappropriate by others [see also: people in the South displaying Confederate flags as an avatar of pride in their area of residence/adherence to a certain cultural ethos that may or may not inadvertently or with subtle intent associate itself with undertones of casual racism and/or specific political leanings, rather than an expression of an actual desire for secession, thereby creating a case when you don't know whether an individual is attempting to commit a progressive reappropriation or 'just being really fucking backward'].

Most importantly, despite the fact that most people have never wholly appreciated 'lol' or been entirely comfortable with its usage, 'lol' has become so prolific and permanent that it has lost its actual intent. Those who type 'lol' are most likely not, in fact, 'laughing out loud;' they are at best expressing approval of the humor under employ. Thus in situations where they literally vocalize their laughter - in fact being genuinely moved to 'laugh out loud' while at the computer or while holding their cell phone - the use of 'lol' does not quite suffice. It appears dismissive or perfunctory.

Here then, if we are to retire 'lol,' let us move to replace it with a new and effective acronym intended for use by those literally vocalizing their laughter. When someone finds something genuinely amusing in text-based communication, they are recommended to type 'lvml,' or 'literally vocalized my laughter,' which is both refreshing and truthful.

At best, we have a period of a year or two before the Nightly News catches on and holds a bewildered condescending guide to the 'new lvml internet phenomenon,' and at the very least, typing 'lvml' will not yet cause your IM client to replace, against your will, your acronym with a sunshine-yellow, red-mouthed and bug-eyed spastic 'happy face' and possibly emit a palsied bubble of chipmunk laughter that would hold sonic appeal only to internet child predators.

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Your bro IMs you being like 'sup' and you respond 'hang on, I'm in the middle of something at work' and they reply 'lol.' Or you get an IM like 'how are you,' and you go 'I'm okay, sick of the rain...