https://medium.com/@davonlarson/digital-health-report-139312e04103

Over the course of the semester, we identified a number of areas from the internet ecosystem where users didn’t have enough information to make informed decisions about the services they use. We designed a browser extension, called Digital Health Report, that helps users understand how they could be impacted by using the service before they sign up. Digital Health Report aims to give users much needed information about a digital service based on its propensity for addiction, privacy, security issues, and it’s terms of service, among other metrics. Much of the work we produced for the class concentrated on the addiction aspect. This is because it’s the least explored category and is a crucial part of the attention economy that underlies much of the internet. Our goal in exploring addiction was to determine how to best categorize addictive design elements in order to grade them. In addition to the deep dive into tech addiction, we have created top level designs and a prototype that illustrates how we might work with available APIs relevant to security and terms of service.

The attention economy is at the heart of many problems we encounter online and has disincentivized companies such as Google and Facebook to create healthier, less addictive platforms. The impact of the attention economy can been seen in the lax privacy rules and disenfranchising terms of service contracts that digital services force users to agree to, the pervasiveness of social bubbles, and the erosion of traditional news media. While the attention economy may have originally been understood broadly as the commodification of attention, it now refers to the hyper-efficient and extremely personalized targeted ad ecosystem of the internet. It is by far the biggest economic force online and increasing bleeds into many other aspects of our lives.