Top brass from Facebook, Twitter, and Google stopped by Stanford Law School Thursday to participate in a conversation about the challenges social media companies face in regulating free speech and protecting democracies. The panel showed the companies are much better at identifying problems than actually solving them.

If no one reads the terms and conditions, how can they continue to be the legal backbone of the internet?

Week 6: Blocking them all

Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it’s anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is.

Last night in Glendale, after hearing Jared Spool give an extraordinary talk about the growth of a new domain for design from screens and…

I’m writing a book on the ubiquitous influence of design on our everyday lives and the systems that sustain the planet. It looks at how…

A year ago I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. There were four designers on stage, and two of them worked…

The problem isn't kids owning smartphones. But when daily use exceeds two hours a day, mental health issues start to crop up.

Tech companies are beginning to recognise that there is an ethical dimension to their work, and that they have some responsibility for the well-being of their users.

Fake news threatens our democracy. Fake medical news threatens our lives.

To truly achieve inclusiveness, we need to first look at who we’re excluding.

NYU professor Natasha Iskander argues that design thinking only serves to uphold the status quo.

Speed often improves life. But the recent techlash has been driven in a fundamental way by the grim side effects of this acceleration.

Users hate them. They’re bad for business. So why do they persist?

Developers of platforms such as Facebook have admitted that they were designed to be addictive. Should we be following the executives’ example and going cold turkey – and is it even possible for mere mortals?

Salesforce chief Marc Benioff is latest tech insider to raise alarm over social media’s effect on society with comments at Davos

The infamous “trolley problem” was put to millions of people in a global study, revealing how much ethics diverge across cultures

newsletter #26 | 18-Jul-2017

Algorithms were supposed to free us from our unconscious mistakes. But now there’s a new set of problems to solve.

On August 8 I launched dickpiclocator.com, a service that invites you to upload an unsolicited dick pic and find out the exact location…

Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple collectively make products that we love, products that we hate (but can’t stop using), and products that dictate how we communicate and how we are seen. Their devices and services make our lives easier than they’ve ever been before, yet more complicated in unforeseen ways. They are so ubiquitous and fundamental to our lives that their offerings have replaced core functions of our brains. We’re now realizing it’s as possible to get addicted to these buttons, clicks, screens, and scrolls as it is to get hooked on nicotine or heroin. Who, after al...

Here’s what that means for VCs and entrepreneurs.

Algorithms are best at pursuing a single mathematical objective—but humans often want multiple incompatible things.

When technology is complicated, opaque, changing, and absolutely vital to the health of a patient, how do we make sure it works as promised?

Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, is determined to find the answer.

In the last few months I’ve had a lot of designers ask me “Where can I do good work?”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean…

One way to improve democracy is for more people to appreciate its complex technological underpinnings.

Jared M. Spool explains design as "the rendering of intent." Simply put, this is when the designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

What can we do to prepare? We need to set up pre-emptive standards, think tanks, regulations, and private-public partnerships.

Neil Pawley offers a different perspective on Steve Krug's industry-defining Don't Make Me Think.