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Former Senior VP of Apple Tony Fadell Says Company Needs To Tackle Smartphone Addiction (wired.co.uk)
In an op-ed published on Wired, former SVP at Apple Tony Fadell argues that smartphone manufacturers -- Apple in particular -- need to do a better job of educating users about how often they use their mobile phones, and the resulting dangers that overuse might bring about. An excerpt: Take healthy eating as an analogy: we have advice from scientists and nutritionists on how much protein and carbohydrate we should include in our diet; we have standardised scales to measure our weight against; and we have norms for how much we should exercise. But when it comes to digital "nourishment", we don't know what a "vegetable", a "protein" or a "fat" is. What is "overweight" or "underweight"? What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like? I think that manufacturers and app developers need to take on this responsibility, before government regulators decide to step in -- as with nutritional labelling. Interestingly, we already have digital-detox clinics in the US. I have friends who have sent their children to them. But we need basic tools to help us before it comes to that. I believe that for Apple to maintain and even grow its customer base it can solve this problem at the platform level, by empowering users to understand more about how they use their devices. To do this, it should let people track their digital activity in detail and across all devices.
It's funny he chose protein and carbs as his example, because protein and sugar are the two things that food producers DON'T tell us how much we are eating. Go ahead, pick up the closest packaged food to you and look at the nutrition label. Protein and sugar are the only items that don't have a % daily value. Food producers don't put those numbers on there because they don't want their Snickers bars to have to say "3000%" recommended daily intake of sugar. Same with protein. Meat packers don't want to tell you that that steak you are eating has far more than the safe level of protein.
If they had to give consumers that information, consumers might make better choices.