Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, decided to downgrade her tech two years ago. It has worked out, with paper and DVDs instead of the latest apps and gizmos.
“I find that many new technologies are actually far less efficient than the tools they attempt to replace,” said Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Via NYTimes, Featuring Pamela Paul
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, discussed the tech she’s using.
About two years ago, you wrote an article about how you downgraded all your tech. How did you downgrade? What do you love about having done that?
It’s easier than you might think because you can pretty effectively downgrade merely by neglecting to upgrade. You just naturally find yourself sliding backward. In my case, this shift has been deliberate, but more about making a mental adjustment than about deactivating existing technology. (Though I did permanently jettison the electric toothbrush.)
There’s a prevailing assumption that just because there’s a new high-tech version of something previously handled in a low-tech way, one should adopt that technology. I come at it from a different angle, which is to start with the need or problem and ask myself: Will this new technology substantively help? And if the upside is speed or information, my next question is: What’s the trade-off? What do I lose along with this gain, and on balance, do the gains outweigh the losses? (Possibly the only thing I learned from Econ 111.)
Quite often, I find that it doesn’t. What lands in the loss column may have to do with process, and the process of doing something can be just as valuable as the end result. I read this book last year, “Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.” I am in no way crafty, but this book had me yearning to thatch my own roof just to be in touch with the physical and attendant mental labor of putting something useful together. (That said, I haven’t lifted a finger.)
On the flip side, I find that many new technologies are actually far less efficient than the tools they attempt to replace. A Nook or a Kindle or iPad is, for my purposes, unequivocally worse than a printed book. You can’t flip back and forth to the photo inserts or skim easily through the index; you have no sense of page count (percentages, really?). You lose the design of the product, which is often beautiful, down to the weight of the paper and the choice of typeface. You’d have to pay me a very fancy salary to give up print for a year.
The vast majority of reviewers do, too, she said. Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Same thing with paper calendars; they’re just better. I get irrationally impatient with the slowness with which people tap meetings into their calendars on the phone. It is at least 30 seconds faster to write it in an old-timey agenda (Levenger here). My Google calendar will always play second fiddle to this far more detailed agenda, supplemented by Post-its and a Moleskine to-do list. I trace this obsession with efficiency to the children’s book “Cheaper by the Dozen,” about a couple of efficiency experts and their brood, which I took way too literally.
Given all this, what does your tech setup look like for doing your work?
My personal life, techwise, operates in sharp contrast to and in part as ballast against my professional life. Despite working on what one might consider the most low-tech of beats, we are in a tech-oriented workplace, and our content is delivered through high-tech platforms to tech-savvy readers.
That means doing everything I can while at work to understand, adopt and assess the same tools our newsroom colleagues and our readers are using, and figure out how they can materially enhance our journalism. We were actually the first desk to have a podcast (now in its 15th year) and are part of the pilot program for Alexa, which adapts our audio content for voice users. While at work, I have 12 windows and tabs open, toggling madly between laptop and phone like every other digital drone.
As an aside: I have the ugliest but best low-tech phone case for klutzes like me who drop their phones all the time. It costs 3 euros from Ale-Hop in Madrid, and you can order it online. You will look ridiculous carrying it around but triumphant picking it up.
Ale-Hop makes “the ugliest but best low-tech phone case for klutzes like me.” Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
What’s your advice for others who want to downgrade their tech?
In general, when I hear the phrase “There’s an app for that,” my first question is, “Does there need to be?” The vast majority of new technologies are developed with a profit motive. So each new form of tech raises the question: Is this something I’m willing to pay for, whether the cost is in terms of dollars or privacy? Like many people, I chafe at the notion of my personal life being monetized.
How has the book industry’s shift toward digital publishing changed the way that The Times reviews books? And what hasn’t changed?
Strictly in terms of review process, our desk hasn’t changed much — because the vast majority of our editors and reviewers prefer to work in print.
It’s easier for an editor to assess a book without reading it in its entirety by dipping in and out. Reviewers like to mark up their galleys, which are early review copies.
That said, PDFs make fact-checking far easier and speed our process for embargoed books. We can also see early editions of visual books that aren’t available in galleys (the printing costs are too high) without having to wait for finished physical copies. And we can more readily get access to audiobooks digitally than we ever could with CDs.
“You’d have to pay me a very fancy salary to give up print for a year,” Ms. Paul said. Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Outside of work, what low-tech product are you currently obsessed with?
I am fairly confident that I’m the last DVD subscriber to what was once called Netflix and is now DVD.com, and my queue is maxed to the 500. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, nor does our television have an antenna set up for network TV.
This makes my decision around what to watch really easy: There are only four choices. When I go somewhere with multiple streaming subscriptions, there’s actually nothing I want to watch. As Barry Schwartz wrote in his persuasive 2004 book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,” we become easily overwhelmed and paralyzed when faced with too many possibilities (at least I do). It’s also easier to find old and foreign movies on DVD.
I do, however, like tech that narrows choice down. One app we recently used with much success was Happy Cow, which locates vegan dining options. It was seriously useful while traveling in Germany last summer with our 13-year-old vegan daughter.
I still regret uploading all my CDs at the behest of my husband, who is far techier than I am. Recently, I bought portable CD players for two of my kids. I think about digging out the vinyl again. Maybe I’ll pick up a “new” record player one of these days.
Pamela Paul is the editor of the Book Review and oversees books coverage at The Times. She is the author of five books, “By the Book,” “Parenting, Inc.,” “Pornified,” “The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony” and most recently, “My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.”
I am not an avid YouTuber, which leaves me fraught with conflict about why I haven’t taken advantage of it. Because there’s money to be made out there with material as written about here, that honestly, I find dumbfounding. But, no more dumbfounding than a million other sites, and postings that are just as puzzling.
Having spent so many years in advertising, sales and marketing, I have an instinctive belief to how these things seed, grow, and take shape for popular consumption. As always, as it was then, that is entirely what the money goal is about. Its not so much about memberships, or paid views. its about advertising revenue. Eyes, Minds, Pocketbooks, Wallets, and today, selling off your privacy as well.
Considering the demographic of most hyper active Youtuber viewers (not producers), I woudl venture to guess, they have either no clue about how much they give up of their privacy, or they just don’t care, waving it off as part of their life culture, as if its some type of generational badge of their moment in time. Sort of like saying, “we can’t beat’em, so lets join’em, stop being suspicious and paranoid, and assume the best for our interests is in the hands of every advertiser, and exploitative entity that has our info. Its rosy, but naiive to the nth degree.
The story below on A.S.M.R reflects one of many more similar stories in our current technoculture. I read it in full, decided it was a fad, an opportunity to make money based on the strange traction things of little importance can pick up today. But, as often happens after reading articles and reporting of quality depth and observation, I came away with two paragraphs that stuck with me, and made the whole effort worthwhile.
They are highlighted below, they are my takeaway:
Intimacy is a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
(If online link is restricted to subscribers, full text is pasted below.) Also, some YouTube samples are included below.
How A.S.M.R. Became a Sensation
The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.
Via NYTimes Magazine, By Jamie Lauren Keiles
April 2019
When Jennifer Allen watched videos of space, she sometimes felt this peculiar sensation: a tingling that spread through her scalp as the camera pulled back to show the marble of the earth. It came in a wave, like a warm effervescence, making its way down the length of her spine and leaving behind a sense of gratitude and wholeness. Allen loved this feeling, but she didn’t know what caused it. It was totally distinct from anything she’d experienced before. Every two years or so she’d take to Google. She tried searching things like “tingling head and spine” or “brain orgasm.” For nine years, the search didn’t turn up anything.
Then, around 2009, it did. As always, Allen typed her phrases into Google, but this time she got a result on a message board called SteadyHealth. The post was titled WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD:
i get this sensation sometimes. theres no real trigger for it. it just happens randomly. its been happening since i was a kid and i’m 21 now. some examples of what it seems has caused it to happen before are as a child while watching a puppet show and when i was being read a story to. as a teenager when a classmate did me a favor and when a friend drew on the palm of my hand with markers. sometimes it happens for no reason at all
The poster went on to demand an explanation. In the discussion, nobody had one, but many described a similar feeling — a “silvery sparkle” inside the head, a euphoric “brain-gasm” or a feeling like goose bumps in the scalp that faded “in and out in waves of heightened intensity.” Many people agreed that the sensation was euphoric. (“Aside from an actual orgasm, it’s probably the most enjoyable sensation possible,” one user wrote.) Its triggers were as varied as watching someone fill out a form, listening to whispering sounds or seeing Bob Ross paint landscapes on TV.
Allen scrolled through pages and pages of discussion.
Oh my gosh, she remembers thinking. These people are talking about exactly what I experience.
In time, that post begot a second post: WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD – PART 2. As discourse on the unnamed feeling evolved, users shared accidental triggers found online — a man unlocking a damaged padlock, someone brushing her hair. These videos had a gentleness in common that many of the users found hard to describe. Some spoke of the need for a research group to better understand the sensation. Still others expressed fear over social repercussions: Were they perverts? Were they sick? Were they indigo children? Pleasure is rarely consequence-free.
“People had been told they were on drugs or that they had lice — things like that,” Allen says. “And then there was the factor of people calling it a ‘brain orgasm’ and it sounding like some sort of erotic fetish kind of thing.”
Allen had invested a lot in the discussion, even expressing interest in the fledgling research effort. She saw how the feeling had improved her sense of calm, but she worried that the subtext of a “tingling sensation” would hold the group back from legitimacy. The whole thing sounded too hokey — or too horny. If they wanted to generate scientific interest, they needed a more scientific-sounding name.
And so in February 2010, she sat down to brainstorm some ideas. Others had tried to describe the weird sensation, but spacey nicknames like “attention-induced head orgasm” had never quite caught on. Allen felt a debt to the feeling’s New Age fans, but she also saw the usefulness of more clinical language. When no existing term could meet both conditions, she made up a new one: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or A.S.M.R. She started with “autonomous” because it was a feeling from within; “sensory” was self-explanatory. “Meridian” worked triple duty, suggesting peak but also orgasm and the energy pathways of traditional Chinese medicine. “Response” was just to say that it was not a constant state; it happened in reaction to a set of stimuli, like whispering, gum chewing and tapping.
“I wish I’d made it a little shorter,” Allen says. But at least it sounded better than “brain-gasm.”
She debuted the new name on the SteadyHealth board by announcing the “ASMR Group” she had registered on Facebook. Discussion-board users migrated en masse, and soon membership spanned six continents: a blogger in South Africa, an artist in Detroit, an ethnobotany researcher working in Australia. They started sharing links to videos again — not the accidental triggers of before but a new genre created for the express purpose of inducing A.S.M.R. These videos often featured anonymous women delivering soft-spoken voice-over narration. According to message-board lore, the first of this type was a video titled “Whisper 1 – hello!” It was posted in 2009 but languished in the algorithmic scrap heap of YouTube on account of its weak, unsearchable title. Now, under the search-engine-friendly banner of A.S.M.R., this new genre offered an on-demand way to trigger the once-serendipitous sensation. A new crop of YouTube creators emerged to serve up the feeling to those who knew they felt it — at that point, a small but growing subset of the public.
Around the time when Allen found SteadyHealth, there were, by one count, 12 whispering channels on YouTube; three years later, that number had more than tripled. Soon a hard-won Wikipedia page would further extend the reach of the term — and further enshrine the new video genre. By 2015, the ASMR Group had made itself irrelevant. When Allen set out to name the weird sensation, she thought she was simply describing what she felt. She couldn’t foresee that her term would enable a whole new form of entertainment — or possibly something that transcended entertainment — born of the kismet of algorithmic fate as it brushed up against the crossed wires of the brain.
Todaythe action of A.S.M.R. plays out almost exclusively on YouTube, where legions of (mostly female) creators release, by my count, around 500 new videos each day. Over the course of reporting this article, I spent at least 200 hours on the site, watching women chewgum, swallow octopus sashimi, simulate eyeexams, turn pages ofbooks and peel dried glue off artificial ears. I watched a teenage girl role-play as a 14th-century nun, treating me for the bubonic plague. I watched a two-hour recording of hair-dryer sounds.
In the A.S.M.R. scene, new trends evolve quickly, driven by the spirit of innovation, corporate product-placement deals and a process of human-algorithm interaction that pushes the best new material to the top. Any trigger that starts to find fans is endlessly taken up and reperformed — ripped off by different channels for ad dollars — at least until the next trigger takes its spot. One month, cranial nerve exams are in. The next month, creators are all shaving bars of soap, chewing bricks of raw honeycomb or eating buckets of KFC. The feeling that fuels this growth is little understood, like the dark energy pushing our universe outward.
The internet is vast, but it brings like minds together. At its best, it serves to unite kinky freaks, dissidents of oppressive regimes and sufferers of obscure diseases. At the same time, this tendency can serve the cruel or misinformed — giving shared language to Nazis and incels and other bleak dopes who were once kept mercifully isolated from one another. This feature of the internet is, at best, value-neutral; in any case, A.S.M.R. tests its limits. The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.
Thinkers since ancient Greece, if not before, have found themselves obsessed with the true nature of the senses; even modern philosophers get tripped up discussing qualia, the irreducible stuff of consciousness. Subjectivity is hard to isolate, by definition, and examples of new metaphysical sensations are not exactly a regular occurrence. Synesthesia, often experienced as associating numbers with colors, is one of the rare examples. Though individuals since at least the 19th century have reported tasting words, seeing sound or hearing colors, it took until the 1980s for scientists to prove that the shared experience actually correlated with real, observable activity in the brain.
Thanks to the internet, A.S.M.R. seems to have leapfrogged the science entirely. Like synesthesia, it was first discovered by way of individual reports. Unlike synesthesia, it has not depended on brain imaging for cultural acceptance. Our foremost “proof” of A.S.M.R. comes from some people searching for the term and others making videos to populate those searches. All these YouTube users may be right that the feeling is real, but the scientific research still lags far behind.
Craig Richard, a professor of physiology at Shenandoah University in Virginia, first heard the term in 2013, on a podcast. “I’m listening to the beginning of this episode thinking, ‘This is a bunch of woo-woo bunk!’ ” he told me. Just as he went to turn the podcast off, the subject changed to the painter Bob Ross — by then, a well known A.S.M.R. trigger. Richard’s eyes lit up. In childhood, he spent afternoons watching Ross paint landscapes on TV. He remembered caring more about the painter than the painting. “It was his demeanor. It was the sounds he made and the way he talked — the way he looked in the camera.”
When the episode was over, Richard went to his computer to look up the research on A.S.M.R. At that point, he found nothing academic — only websites and forums that led him to the Facebook group. He reached out to Allen, and in collaboration with a graduate student and member of the community named Karissa Burnett, they conducted an informal online survey that, over time, has received more than 25,000 voluntary responses. (Where do you feel tingles? Head, neck, arm? Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel aroused?) Richard also started ASMR University, an online archive that today remains a useful clearinghouse of research on the topic.
Still, scientific understanding has moved slowly. Funding for A.S.M.R. research is hard to justify, and the diverse nature of A.S.M.R. triggers can lead to “noisy” data. To date, ASMR University lists just 10 peer-reviewed papers. More than half of these were published in author-pay journals. The most rigorous studies use f.M.R.I. to map the activity of blood flow in the brain as participants report feeling the tingles. Outcomes have suggested, in very small samples, that A.S.M.R. might have something to do with socially bonding “affiliative behaviors,” known to release feel-good hormones like oxytocin.
Richard, for his part, considers these outcomes from an evolutionary-biology perspective. He believes that the tingles of A.S.M.R. are meant to assist in reproduction and survival, and points out that triggers like grooming, whispering and eye gazing all bear strong resemblance to the ways that humans soothe infants. In adulthood, a range of similar behaviors contribute to intimacy between mates. This may be the case, but our current understanding still leaves behind more questions than answers: If A.S.M.R. plays (or played) a key survival role, why does it seem that only some people can feel it? Why should it come to our attention only now?
It does not seem very likely that the pace and scope of research will ever catch up to the cycle of new content. For now, our chief authorities on A.S.M.R. are women and girls, alone at their computers, manipulating objects for a faceless, growing public.
Around the time that “Whisper 1 – hello!” was picking up speed in Allen’s Facebook group, Gibi — today one of YouTube’s top “A.S.M.R.tists” — was a sophomore in high school. (I’ve withheld her last name here for below-explained reasons.) Like many teenagers these days, she often had trouble falling asleep. Sometimes she would sneak her phone into her room and watch YouTube videos to relax her mind. This habit evolved by a haphazard process, led by the whims of an infinite sidebar. Makeup tutorials segued to massage, which soon gave way to A.S.M.R.
Since that fateful discovery, Gibi has watched A.S.M.R. videos every single night. The ritual followed her off to college, where the videos became a kind of white noise while she studied. A.S.M.R. was, by that point, not just for those who experienced the tingles. The genre had begun to find broader appeal as a sleep aid, an alternative to guided meditation and a drug-free, online version of Xanax. The medium had developed its own microstars, women with handles like Gentle Whispering ASMR and ASMRrequests, who filmed themselves crinkling paper, tapping their nails on large wooden bowls, dealing cards, brushing hair and pouring cold milk into bowls of Cocoa Krispies. One of Gibi’s favorites, Heather Feather ASMR, went beyond mere sound effects, performing full-scale role-play scenes infused with attentive, deliberate sound. In one, Heather administered a colorblindness test, tapping her wand on a laminated chart. In another, she played as a tattoo artist, trying on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Watching Heather’s videos made Gibi feel as if her “brain was swimming, in a good way.” She played the same scenes over on repeat, returning to parts that gave her the tingles.
At that point, in June 2016, many A.S.M.R.tists treated YouTube like a hobby. Across channels, production value varied wildly. A creator might post the perfect tapping video, then disappear from the site forever. Gibi thought that maybe, with regular effort, she could produce a better product — a quality channel with a regular schedule that tested out new, creative triggers on a regular basis. And so, in the summer before her senior year, she started her own channel, Gibi ASMR. Six months after graduation, she was earning enough in ad revenue to treat it as her full-time job. Today she has about 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
I first met Gibi in Los Angeles at Daiso, the kind of Japanese discount store that sells lots of things that you didn’t know you needed. Our plan was to shop for some tingly props — any little odd or end that might yield good, recordable sound. Gibi was in town for a public appearance. That day, a video from her account was trending globally on YouTube, a role-play called “The ASMR Sleep Clinic | Tingle Experiment.” She scrolled through the trending tab on her phone, rifling through the other clips in the Top 10:
“… Ellen DeGeneres, bowling ball-versus-bulletproof glass, ramen, iPhone stuff. …”
If most entertainment aims to shock or delight, then A.S.M.R. is barely entertainment at all. It’s more like a massage for the mind. Gibi’s main goal is to relax her fans.
“If you fall asleep during my video, that’s a compliment,” she said. Sleeping fans tend to leave videos running — a boon on a platform that pays dividends for view length. In this way, for Gibi, the most valuable engagement is actually a near-total lack of engagement. Even when viewers stay awake, straightforward entertainment remains somewhat beside the point. On Gibi’s channel, some of the most-requested content is not a character or joke but the sound of fingers tapping on a bread-shaped piece of cork. Fans request the “toaster coaster” by name — the closest thing A.S.M.R. has to “Free Bird.” That day, she was searching for similar objects, made of soft, dull wood or thick glass. We entered the store to the whir of air-conditioning. Gibi made a beeline toward a rack of piggy banks.
“Whenever I pick something up, I’m always listening to it,” she said, tapping her nails on a piggy bank’s candy-coated glaze. The lacquer made a dainty, plinking sound, like the loose filament of a shaken, burned-out light bulb. She moved on to rustle a strand of orange tinsel, then brushed her hand against the grain of a vellum birthday card. We turned down an aisle of fake plastic swords.
“When I hit 300,000 subscribers, I did a 300 role play, of Queen Gorgo, Leonidas’s wife,” she recalled. “That one was really cool, but people were kind of like, ‘What is going on here?’ Sometimes I’m like, Why do I even try to put effort into a big role-play, or something like that, when I can pick something up and be like, ‘O.K., here’s an hour of me tapping,’ and I’ll get like, three million views?”
Gibi is the LeBron James of touching stuff. She touches things professionally. As she paused to fondle a makeup brush, I heard the grip of her finger pads reluctant to give up the cellophane wrapper. When she smoothed the fleece of a microfiber towel, I cringed at the drag of rough callus against terry cloth. Gibi moves with the demonstrative intent of a former high school theater kid. (She is one.) She is hot in the way of a friend’s older sister, projecting an air of humble self-assuredness.
“I think a lot of what has to do with why my channel has become popular is because I do put a lot of my personality — oh, my God!” She stopped to interrupt herself and crinkled a plastic package of pens. “I put a lot of my personality into my videos,” she said.
For those who watch her at home, this apparent emotional availability can foster a range of attachments. Gibi says that most of her viewers are kind and effusive. Under her videos, they leave thousands of comments, appreciating the sound of her voice and its power to alleviate their insomnia, anxiety and P.T.S.D. (“SHE CAN M AKE ADS RELAXING!” one fan delighted.) For others, the tender tone can be misleading.
Unloading her shopping basket at the till, she told me the story of one obsessive fan who believed she was talking directly to him. He sent her tens of thousands of messages, she said, and she filed a police report. Other fans have pried into her past, digging up old records from high school. Creepiness and harassment are widespread problems for the young female creators of the A.S.M.R. world. Gibi takes extreme precautions to protect her own privacy. She doesn’t share her last name, or her relationship status, or even what city she lives in. When she films in an airport, she is careful to choose an unplaceable background. If she happens to meet a fan on the street near her house, she pretends that she’s there on vacation.
“I’ve learned a lot about cybersecurity,” she said. “If you ever want to start a YouTube channel, delete everything, and then go back and delete more. Make everything private. Act like you have five million subscribers when you’re starting, because you can’t go back.”
Outside the store, Gibi laid her purchases out on the pavement. We surveyed the haul: the ceramic piggy bank, the strand of orange tinsel, a thick glass jar with a plastic lid, a stress ball shaped like a bakery bun and a random assortment of candy and snacks. Gibi unwrapped a pack of Hi-Chews and popped a fruit-flavored cube in her mouth.
“People are naturally curious,” she said, deforming it against the hollow of her cheek. The suction made a spitty sound. When she livestreams, she went on, she even gets nervous about the weather giving away her location. “They can look up if it’s raining where I am.”
“That’s scary,” I said.
“It’s scary,” she agreed, but all I could hear was the sound of her tongue, working the last bit of taffy from her teeth.
Intimacyis a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
It’s hard to talk about A.S.M.R. without nuanced language for the things that come near sex. In the absence of such terms, the genre seems doomed to appear sexual — a suspect jumble of tingles and pleasure and subservient women you watch alone at your computer. Who, in our time, can look at a video of a young woman doing anything and not wonder who else is watching — and why? Are those who feel the tingles just a bunch of repressed weirdos? Questions like these have plagued A.S.M.R. ever since Jennifer Allen first cringed at the word “brain-gasm.”
“A lot of the visuals you might see” in A.S.M.R. videos “relate to how you might visualize what happens during healthy foreplay,” Craig Richard says. “People talking gently to each other, people touching each other lightly, gazing into each other’s eyes, expressing physical or vocal care for each other — making the other person feel safe.” If A.S.M.R. is not sexual itself, then Richard believes it might still belong to a general complex of safety, caring, connectedness and trust. “It could heighten a sexual moment, in a way the same way that massage oil can heighten a sexual moment, but oil by itself is not sexual,” he says. “We get most of our nutrition from our food, but we may supplement with vitamin pills. That’s how I view A.S.M.R. videos. There are very few people that are probably going to substitute real-world relationships.”
Every activity has a threshold of acceptable intimacy. For most people in the United States, it is normal to express that you like having your hair shampooed in a salon. It is less normal to say that you derive pleasure from taking an eye test or by making eye contact with an inquisitive waitress. These affective norms can be counterintuitive, especially considering how many of our jobs require employees to feign loving attention. Still, they exist for a reason. It is one thing to ask someone to fit your shoes; it’s another to enlist them in your search for human comfort.
Part of the joy of A.S.M.R. is the way it allows us to invert the equation. In A.S.M.R. videos, people engage in regular tasks while drawing those second-order pleasures to the fore. The usual priorities of the eye test are distorted; now it’s less about nearsightedness and more about whispered instruction and warm light. A.S.M.R. combines the one-way sociality of podcasts with the outcome-driven imperative of porn. In an age defined by loneliness and dislocation, it’s a lot to ask someone to turn that away.
Nevertheless, the gender imbalance of performers seems suspect. The viewing pattern even looks similar to porn, but this perhaps goes beyond mere horniness. For much of human history, women have been cast into care-taking roles. With centuries of imbalance, it makes plenty of sense that our brains would find peace in these strange and gendered invocations of comfort. Is that healthy? Is that normal? Really, who can say? Sitting alone in front of a screen, nothing seems that weird anymore.
Here, I suppose is the place to come clean and admit that I’ve never felt A.S.M.R. In watching those hours of YouTube, I often felt calm (and I sometimes felt horny), but not even once did my brain let loose a tingle. By the end, I found myself feeling isolated — confusingly excluded from a mass phenomenon beloved for its success at assuaging loneliness. In a last-ditch attempt to feel it for myself, I flew up to Oakland to meet Melinda Lauw, co-creator of the service Whispers on Demand and a provider of one-on-one A.S.M.R. experiences.
Lauw grew up in Singapore and studied fine art and art history at Goldsmiths in London. She first got involved with A.S.M.R. through Whisperlodge, an immersive theater piece she produced with the playwright Andrew Hoepfner. Whispers on Demand grew out of that project — less theatrical, more therapeutic. Lauw’s clients were mostly women, many in the tech industry. The sessions cost $150 per hour.
Our meeting was held on a morning in September in a rent-by-the-hour conference room. I was invited to take off my shoes. In advance of the session, I’d filled out a form, confessing my tingle virginity. Lauw had arranged a pile of maybe-triggers in the style of a surgical instrument tray. The session began with us sitting side by side, and soon she was using each object on my body — rubbing the lavender oil on my wrist, crinkling the tissue paper near my head and pulsating my knee with the metal tuning fork.
I lay down on the couch, and she styled my hair with a wide cotton band, then let my hair down, then styled it again. She polished my ear with a ridged cotton swab. It felt nice to be touched, if just by way of a Q-tip, but only one time did I maybe feel a tingle. As the tip of a small, clean makeup brush outlined the greasy crease of my nose, I felt something creep on the side of my head, like a cold millipede crawling underneath my scalp — were these the famed tingles of A.S.M.R.?
Maybe so, but I pushed them away. I am not so libertine or well adjusted to make use of pleasures beyond a social script. Though Lauw was a calming and trustworthy guide, a few times I thought I might scream for no reason.
Soon enough, our session was over. We both stood up and walked to use the bathroom. Lauw waited for me outside the stall. When I was done, I leaned on the sink and offered a few words of thanks for the session. Lauw didn’t ask if I’d felt anything, and for this omission, I was grateful. Usually paid intimacy concludes with some kind of definitive transaction. I’d paid online, so I offered her a hug. We stood for a moment, embracing in the bathroom. Then I pulled away, thanked her again and returned to the noisy city streets, alone.
Read on to find out what you can do to protect whatever you can protect. Its not that difficult, but it does take time. You have to be willing to spend a few minutes. Okay, five, ten, fifteen, whatever. Privacy deserves attention. Does it not? And, by the way, this is not about having something to hide. Its about protecting your data, YOUR DATA, from companies who profit off of YOUR DATA, and offer nothing in return. They’re not giving away software. They are capitalized up the kazoo with billions.
There are plenty of switches in your iPhone settings, or other smartphones, that you can easily switch off and not even notice the loss. If you do, then you can switch them back on. try it. I have, and feel better for yet another thing, or group of things I can do to exert some kind of control on my personal life, that seems to be less and less valuable to the tech companies who are willing to exploit it at will.
The headquarters of Google in Manhattan. Credit: John Taggart for The New York Times
Google’s Sensorvault Is a Boon for Law Enforcement. This Is How It Works.
Investigators have been tapping into the tech giant’s enormous cache of location information in an effort to solve crimes. Here’s what this database is and what it does.
Law enforcement officials across the country have been seeking information from a Google database called Sensorvault — a trove of detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, The New York Times found.
Though the new technique can identify suspects near crimes, it runs the risk of sweeping up innocent bystanders, highlighting the impact that companies’ mass collection of data can have on people’s lives.
Why does Google have this data?
The Sensorvault database is connected to a Google service called Location History. The feature, begun in 2009, involves Android and Apple devices.
Location History is not on by default. Google prompts users to enable it when they are setting up certain services — traffic alerts in Google Maps, for example, or group images tied to location in Google Photos.
If you have Location History turned on, Google will collect your data as long as you are signed in to your account and have location-enabled Google apps on your phone. The company can collect the data even when you are not using your apps, if your phone settings allow that.
Google says it uses the data to target ads and measure how effective they are — checking, for instance, when people go into an advertiser’s store. The company also uses the information in an aggregated, anonymized form to figure out when stores are busy and to provide traffic estimates. And those who enable Location History can see a timeline of their activities and get recommendations based on where they have been. Google says it does not sell or share the data with advertisers or other companies.
Does Google collect other forms of location data?
Yes. Google can also gather location information when you conduct searches or use Google apps that have location enabled. If you are signed in, this data is associated with your account.
The Associated Press reported last year that this data, called Web & App Activity, is collected even if you do not have Location History turned on. It is kept in a different database from Sensorvault, Google says.
How can I see what data Google has on me?
To see some of the information in your Location History, you can look at your timeline. This map of your travels does not include all of your Sensorvault data, however.
Raw location data from mobile devices can be messy and sometimes incorrect. But computers can make good guesses about your likely path, and about which locations are most important. This is what you see on your timeline. To review all of your Location History, you can download your data from Google. To do that, go to Takeout.Google.com and select Location History. You can follow a similar procedure to download your Web & App Activity on that page.
Your Location History data will appear in computer code. If you can’t read code, you can select the “JSON” format and put the file into a text editor to see what it looks like.
Can I disable the data collection?
Yes. The process varies depending on whether you are on a phone or computer. In its Help Center, Google provides instructions on disabling or deleting Location History and Web & App Activity.
How is law enforcement using the data?
For years, police detectives have given Google warrants seeking location data tied to specific users’ accounts.
But the new warrants, often called “geofence” requests, instead specify an area near a crime. Google looks in Sensorvault for any devices that were there at the right time and provides that information to the police.
Google first labels the devices with anonymous ID numbers, and detectives look at locations and movement patterns to see if any appear relevant to the crime. Once they narrow the field to a few devices, Google reveals information such as names and email addresses.
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries is a reporter on the investigative team, specializing in technology coverage. Before joining The Times, she worked at The Wall Street Journal and helped to launch the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. @jenvalentino
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Google’s Sensorvault: Here’s How It Works. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
I’m sorry but this is not a convincing essay on plastering yourself to a smartphone excessively. Samantha Irby writes “…maybe it’s worth it.” Ok, fine. She’s a comedian, so this is supposed to be…funny? Not sure here. I think she’s into her phone big time, and this is more genuine than sarcastic. But then she doesn’t make any real case for that statement. It’s all glibness. So is this just a joke essay/opinion. Hmm. Its not funny.
She’s “…staring down the barrel of 40 yrs old!” So this is all about an existential conflict now? Wow. That better be a joke. But, its not funny. So…
As I wrote in an earlier post here, the problem with children and teens getting addicted into this vacuum of screen after screen after screen lies first with the adults around them that are addicted in front of them. Meet one right here…
Sure, electronic eyes are spying. But look at everything this pocket computer can do!
By Samantha Irby, Via NYTimes
My phone is my favorite possession. I wish I could pretend it has been some torrid courtship, that after much cat-and-mousing the two of us succumbed to our mutual attraction and decided to settle down and make an honest go of it, but I can’t: I am in breathless pursuit, hustling to keep her updated and paid for, wooing her with expensive protective cases and as many off-brand charging cords as there are outlets in my home. She acknowledges this attention with occasional notifications, blinking on the screen, reminders to update, so many needs. That makes me want her even more.
I know that having her carelessly bouncing around the bottom of my bag all day and on the nightstand inches from my sleeping face, readily available for when I need to look up “recipes for morons” or “the best way to wash a cat,” is putting my precious information at risk. My phone is always listening, and through a series of bloops and bleeps I do not understand, the data I have spewed into the universe gets sold and fed back to me in a targeted Instagram ad for whatever it is I now urgently need.
I don’t know how thrilled I am to be giving up my secrets, but it’s foolish to think I have any control over them, and ultimately I don’t care. I love convenience and entertainment too much to worry about how much information I cannot control is being leaked to marketers, retailers, the government and whatever Chinese intelligence agency controls the barrage of ads for $13 dresses that saturate my feed.
Maybe it’s because I got in the smartphone game late and have a real memory of how inconvenient life used to be.
I’m staring down the barrel of my 40th year, and the first computer I bought for myself was six or seven years ago. I didn’t get my first iPhone until they’d been around for years, partly because I was like: “Who needs that? I prefer to live in the real world!” but mostly because the idea of walking around with a $500 computer in my pocket seemed dangerous. And the idea that I could somehow scrape together the money to purchase said pocket computer while also maintaining a roof over my head (read: partying all the time and paying for cable) was hilarious and unrealistic. I was the last dinosaur at the club sending multi-tap texts on a Nokia E51 with no camera.
When I finally upgraded, I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. O.K., sure, this glowing rectangle in my bag can tell me the weather anywhere in the world at this exact moment, but who cares? Wait, it can also figure out exactly what wrong street I’m turning down and steer me back in the right direction? And it counted how many steps I took? While also storing all the passwords I can never remember? Please excuse me while I build this shrine to the new most important thing in my life.
That is how it gets you. I was a skeptic and then I was a convert almost immediately. I have long understood that I am a tiny, powerless cog in the wheel of modern America, plus I’m not a hacker, so what do I even know about keeping things hidden? Is it even possible for me, a regular person who cannot figure out how to program the television remote, to circumvent the eyes of all of the faceless technology corporations analyzing my information? What am I going to do, cheat Amazon? Outsmart Google? No, I’m going to do what everyone else does: enter my credit card information when prompted and get that thing I need two days from when I decided I needed it.
A few months ago I went to dinner with the kind of people whose idea of fun is to correct your pronunciation of “niçoise,” and they boldly suggested that we all put our phones face down in the center of the table for the entirety of the meal and what felt like a needlessly lingering discussion afterward.
Now, I didn’t die. But I also didn’t know what time it was. Or if anyone had texted me. And I’m not really a “post a picture of my fancy meal” kind of person, but I could tell that other people wanted to. The air was heavy with missed opportunity. And you know what we talked about while cringing internally as the carafe of still water we actually had to pay for came perilously close to splashing on our helpless devices every time it was passed?
TV shows, which you can watch on a phone. Books, which, if your eyes haven’t already burned through the back of your skull from being on your phone all the time, you can read on your phone. Murder podcasts, which are specifically made to be listened to on a phone.
Yes, your phone is potentially hazardous to whatever semblance of security you might have. Yes, there are many medical professionals who would attest to the deleterious effect modern technology has on the brains and interpersonal skills of adults. But hear me out: Maybe it’s worth it?
My phone knows so much about me. It knows where I am, how many steps I took to get there, the whisper of a thought I don’t remember even fully forming in my brain that somehow made its way to a search engine. It also knows I am addicted, which is why it doesn’t ever really have to worry about whether I’m creeped out by the digital eyes I can feel looking over my shoulder.
Not long ago, Apple put a screen-time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug it won’t stop selling me. I use the statistics it collects as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone. Only one hour and 37 minutes of social networking yesterday, you say? Let me put this informative book I was reading down and try to top that. But my phone already knows that’s what I’d want to do.
Samantha Irby (@wordscience) is the author of the essay collections “Meaty” and “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.”
“What you do with your spare time matters.” Love that. I like Aristotle’s thinking. Take the part “…true human flourishing requires activities like philosophizing that are pursued for no other reason than their intrinsic quality.” Beats in my heart, that one. There’s clearly an addiction problem. What makes it hard to address is that it affects young and old. How can teens and younger, improve their habits if the adults in the room don’t? At least these articles are still being written. But we have to read them, and respond.
Digital Addiction Getting You Down? Try an Analog Cure
Administering this cure isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort.
By Cal Newport, via NYTimes
Arnold Bennett was an early-20th-century British novelist, playwright and critic. He’s perhaps best known for his detail-oriented novels set around the Staffordshire Potteries. In 1931, during a trip to Paris, he ignored a waiter’s advice to avoid the restaurant’s tap water and soon died of typhoid.
So, yes: Mr. Bennett is not a name that typically comes to mind when seeking advice about our current high-tech moment. But he should be.
In 1905, Mr. Bennett stepped away from his traditional genres to produce a short but remarkable volume of self-help literature titled “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.” Targeted to the middle-class, white-collar workers who were filling in the growing London suburbs, Mr. Bennett argued that making the most of their leisure time was the key to cultivating a meaningful life. His suggestion for doing so was clear: rigorous intellectual self-improvement through reading and concentrated thought.
The specifics of this vision, in which the British “salaryman” scrutinizes Dante, are obviously dated. But there’s a deeper general truth lurking beneath the details: What you do with your spare time matters.
This idea, of course, is not new. In “The Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle argues that true human flourishing requires activities like philosophizing that are pursued for no other reason than their intrinsic quality. Seneca had similarly lofty visions for our time off, writing, “I am not sure that we cannot serve [the Commonwealth] better when we are at leisure to inquire into what virtue is.”
The wisdom of this timeless emphasis on quality leisure was made clear to me recently. Early last year, as part of the research process for my new book, “Digital Minimalism,” I asked for volunteers willing to spend January avoiding optional digital technologies in their personal life, including social media, online news, video games and streaming. Because this was a big sacrifice, I was expecting around a dozen brave souls to join me in this adventure. Instead, 1,600 people signed up.
Many of the participants in this digital declutter sent me reports about their experiences. One of the more striking findings was the degree to which low-quality, algorithmically optimized digital content had colonized their leisure time. When they powered down their devices, these declutterers were suddenly confronted with empty stretches that they had no idea how to fill.
Inspired by Mr. Bennett, I encouraged them to aggressively reintroduce high-value leisure activities that had nothing to do with glowing screens — even if these activities required more energy and commitment than clicking “next episode” or scrolling a Twitter feed. Many embraced my advice.
A graduate student named Unaiza replaced her habit of browsing Reddit at night with reading library books, finishing eight during her digital declutter.
“I could never have thought about doing that before,” she told me proudly.
Another volunteer, Melissa, revamped her social life, setting up dinners with friends and scheduling regular face-to-face time with her brother — who, to Melissa’s frustration, had a hard time looking up from his phone during their meetings. Yet another volunteer, Caleb, began journaling and listening to vinyl records from beginning to end. He told me the experience of listening to music is completely transformed when you lose the ability to tap “next” when you get antsy with the current song. An N.Y.U. student who wanted to stay informed during his declutter arranged to get a newspaper delivered to his dorm room, while a father named Tarald invested his reclaimed attention into remaining undistracted while with his children. He told me it felt “surreal” to be the only parent at the playground not looking down at an electronic device.
The positive effect of returning to these analog activities is so pronounced that I’ve come to think of this strategy like a magic pill of sorts for curing the low-grade anxiety and existential aimlessness that define our culture of constant connection. This effect seemed particularly powerful for young people who have never known life without an accompanying screen. Like sleep and exercise, this analog cure seems to have few downsides, and its benefits compound.
Administering this cure, however, isn’t an easy process.
Something that helps is recognizing the extent to which the digital stream has commandeered your attention. The articles that rank highly in your feeds were selected by algorithms that have studied your behavior and know with statistical certainty which headlines will keep you staring at your screen. Likes, photo tags, comments, favorites, retweets and other social approval indicators are engineered to make it nearly impossible to resist compulsively checking apps.
My advice to gain the upper hand in this struggle is to demobilize the digital stream. Remove from your phone any app that monetizes your time and attention, like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. You don’t have to quit these services; you can still access them from a browser. But you’ve removed their ability to follow you throughout your day, persuasively manipulating your attention toward their own ends.
It’s also important to prepare yourself for the difficulty of reintroducing high-quality analog pursuits into your life. It’s easy to swap tweets with your digital tribe, but organizing an activity in your real-world community might require annoying logistics and force you to confront uncomfortable moments and social complexities.
But as Sherry Turkle poignantly asks, “Who said that you never have to have a moment of friction with difficult people or difficult moments, when did that become the good life?” Prepare yourself for this friction. It’s worth pushing through.
Early in his 1905 guide, Mr. Bennett labels our time “the most precious of possessions.” This is an observation worth remembering when great fortunes are being made by diverting this precious possession toward screens, where it can be alchemized into quarterly revenue numbers.
You can fight back. If you take whatever scraps of leisure your situation affords and commit them toward quality analog activity and away from dehumanizing digital consumption, you’ll take a strong stride away from simply existing and closer to actually living.
Another buzzkill reminder about modern life in a society with a government that seemingly doesn’t care enough to protect its people. Corporations that think nothing about its customers privacy as long as a dollar can be made selling it?
As much as I think the causes are clear, i.e, weak, indecisive, or, corrupt government, that doesn’t pass, nor enforce the laws, I do believe, we as citizens have a responsibility to at least stay as informed as possible, to be equipped to manage our privacy or data with some degree of effort. This is a responsibility with “us,” as users of technology, and seekers of knowledge.
I read a lot of articles such as these. Not just because I’m interested in technology and modern communication, but, because it is part of everyday life. I find that important to recognize and point out. Not everyone else does. Why not?
There is a meaty argument about literacy and educational levels having a direct impact on why, and how, so much apathy and passiveness pervades the masses in this country. Not just about politics, for instance (longstanding), but, modern issues such as this one. Virtually sanctioned invasion of our private lives by big business, or anyone else they sell it off to.
I’m not trying to veer to far afield on this, but, I believe that passiveness, apathy, and cynicism are the triumvirate at the core of what we have wrought on ourselves with technology today. It deserves a whole other essay to discuss.
I know it sounds bad, but, I believe there’s still enough people who are not handicapped by this paralysis to fight back, to make a difference. So why don’t we? Don’t we care…enough? Don’t we believe it…matters? Do we just move on, and conclude that these sorts of things are hopeless struggles against big business and corrupt governments?
It’s such an easy argument. It’s so easy to accept. But its a mistake.
Cynicism is not the foe of big business and bad government. It’s the friend of both. Cynicism does not inhibit and curtail more of the same behavior. It stimulates and grows more of it, because it breeds passivity. This is going to be a big battle, if it ever does come from the “people”. The real war from here on is not about brother against brother. That’s a mere distraction, a diversion to cultural coffee table feuds. The real war is right here in this article, multiplied by a hundred more that are written and acted out every day. Big money, big business, big tech, and a bought and paid for government. At some point, we all have to ask ourselves the famous question. Are we part of the solution, or part of the problem.
Wireless companies sell your location data. Federal regulators should stop them.
By Geoffrey Starks Mr. Starks is a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
April 2, 2019
When you signed up for cellphone service, I bet you didn’t expect that your exact location could be sold to anyone for a few hundred dollars. The truth is, your wireless carrier tracks you everywhere you go, whether you like it or not. When used appropriately, this tracking shouldn’t be a problem: location information allows emergency services to find you when you need them most.
But wireless carriers have been selling our data in ways that allows it to be resold for potentially dangerous purposes. For instance, stalkers and abusive domestic partners have used location data to track, threaten and attack victims. This industrywide practice facilitates “pay to track” schemes that appear to violate the law and Federal Communications Commission rules.
Companies are collecting and profiting from our private data in hidden ways that leave us vulnerable. As you carry your phone, your wireless carrier records its location so calls and texts can reach you. And you can’t opt out of sharing location data with your carrier, as you can with a mobile application. Your carrier needs this data to deliver service. But, according to recent news reports, this real-time phone location data has long been available to entities beyond your wireless carrier, for a price. In one alarming example, reported by Vice, a bounty hunter was able to pay to track a user’s location on a map accurate to within a few feet. In another case, a sheriff in Missouri used location data provided by carriers to inappropriately track a judge.
In other words, an ability that seems to come right out of a spy movie is now apparently available to just about anybody with your phone number and some cash. The pay-to-track industry has grown in the shadows, outside of the public eye and away from the watch of regulators.
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, first raised the alarm last year, sending a letter to the F.C.C. on May 8 demanding an investigation into abuses by the pay-to-track industry. The Times reported on the issue the same week. Senator Wyden also demanded answers from the major wireless carriers. After that, the top wireless companies said that bounty hunters and others would no longer have access to their customers’ locations.
But months later the reports continue. Other recent articles suggest that highly accurate GPS location information from our phones — which, according to F.C.C. rules, should be used to send help to 911 callers — is still available on a location-data black market. Since then, wireless companies have said they’ll stop selling our location information completely — eventually.
The misuse of this data is downright dangerous. The harms fall disproportionately upon people of color. According to the Pew Research Center, people of color rely more heavily on smartphones for internet access, so they create more of this data, which makes them more vulnerable to tracking. Researchers also know that location data can be used to target them with misinformation or voter suppression tactics. It can also lead to assumptions about a person’s race or income level, assumptions that can feed into discriminatory automated decision making.
What is the government doing to protect us? Congress passed laws years ago protecting this kind of information and entrusted the F.C.C. with the responsibility of enforcing them.
It is unquestionably the F.C.C.’s job to protect consumers and address risks to public safety. Our location information isn’t supposed to be used without our knowledge and consent and no chain of handoffs or contracts can eliminate the wireless company’s obligations. This is particularly true for the misuse and disclosure of GPS-based 911 location data — which is squarely against F.C.C. rules.
The F.C.C. says it is investigating. But nearly a year after the news first broke, the commission has yet to issue an enforcement action or fine those responsible. This passage of time is significant, as the agency usually has only one year to bring action to hold any wrongdoers accountable before the statute of limitations runs out. Some may argue that the F.C.C.’s authority to take action against wireless carriers for this activity has gotten weaker in recent years, with the repeal of consumer-focused privacy and net neutrality rules during the current administration. But I believe that the commission still has ample authority to address these egregious pay-to-track practices.
Federal action is long overdue. As a Democratic commissioner at the Republican-led agency, I can call for action, but the chairman sets the agenda, including deciding whether and how quickly to respond to pay-to-track schemes. The agency’s inaction despite these increasingly troubling reports speaks volumes and leaves our duty to the public unfulfilled. The F.C.C. must use its authority to protect consumers and promote public safety, and act swiftly and decisively to stop illegal and dangerous pay-to-track practices once and for all.
