Title: Is technology bad for us? | Internet | The Guardian
Headings: Is technology bad for us?
The Eva Wiseman column Internet
Is technology bad for us?
Eva Wiseman

Content: In no other transaction is there ever this murkiness, a contract hidden in small print. Much of the internet – the bits that make money – is designed to be addictive, to yank the most time and cash from us, and as so much of it is hidden, it gets away with things we wouldn't tolerate elsewhere. So instead of switching off the internet, the conversation should be about how to change it. How to clarify what we're giving for what we take. And the responsibility should not be with young people, in their WiFi-reliant worlds – it should be with the massive corporations that profit from them. As with cigarette packets (their photos of messy lungs a stark reminder of the choice you're making), so should the internet be required to advertise its risks, to alert you to where your data is being held. Because this is not just somewhere we play. The internet is where we live. A woman last week described on Salon the experience of her photo going viral and how she clawed back control, first by reining in her privacy settings and then by sending copyright violation notices to sites that had shared her picture. It was "tedious, like pulling weeds out of the planet's largest garden," she says, but ultimately fulfilling.