Last week, I opened my credit card bill and got a shock: $909 in charges from the App store that I didn’t recognise. First, I thought I’d been hacked. Then I discovered my 10-year-old son had racked up these charges buying virtual footballers to play in online games.
His devices have since been confiscated and passwords revoked, but according to Tristan Harris, a former Googler who has become an evangelist against the power of Big Tech, my son is not the only one who deserves time on the naughty stool.
Mr Harris is a graduate of Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab who once engineered the kind of behaviour modification software that keeps people clicking on everything from games to Tinder dates to fake news. He believes we have reached a tipping point in which the interests of the largest tech firms — from Google to Facebook — and the customers they supposedly serve are no longer aligned.