Rise in 'alert fatigue' risks phone users disabling news notifications
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Obviously they risk losing views and ad revenue, there's absolutely no "risk" to the public.
Personally I have all phone notifications off. There are a few I might like, but every single app abuses the privilege.
Notifications beyond that is very limited.
I'll read or listen to the news when it makes sense in my day to do so. I very much do not want to be interrupted because a national level politician did something. If it was important, it will still be important in a few hours when I go over the news.
My reserves of attention are limited and extremely important for accomplishing my own goals. Nobody gets to draw from the reservoir without my consent if I can help it.
And thank goodness tech still lets me help it! I just have to pray that nobody figures out how many hundreds of billions of dollars Google or Apple need to be paid to make it impossible for me to silence notifications.
But... iOS apps ask for permission to send notifications on first run. Just deny it then.
If attention has economic value AND if it is limited in supply, then taking it from a person without their consent is a form of theft.
Only calls are allowed on my phone, and it’s still often just robocall spam from unknown numbers. Technology is great.
It's precisely because they know what they are doing that there are of these suspicious lack of features, dark patterns, etc.
> When you receive many notifications within a short time, your device will lower its volume and minimize alerts for up to 1 minute. Calls, alarms and priority conversations are not affected.
> And God help you if you are in a group chat.
As my sibling comment says :)
I'll check for new messages when I'm taking a break thank you.
They do this because if you click no on the "official" window, Apple will not let the app request notifications again, but if you click no on the app's version, they can keep asking you again and again.
IMHO Apple needs to start cracking down on these shady notification UI's
But that doesn't prevent the app from having custom in-app dialogs about it. What are they supposed to do, use "AI" to censor them?
Can't Apple enforce it by store policy?
Not sure. For one they're already famous for their reviews being ... random.
For two, a spammer could just give Apple an account to test with for which the custom popups don't show.
News sites are websites I visit when I want, that's it.
2) On computers, so many notifications pop up and block elements of an interface. Popup that blocks what i'm reading. Popup that blocks system clock. Everything that piles up in bottom right. There are times where I have to close 2 things to get to the thing I want. I disable as many as I can.
3) Requests from websites about notification. I'm just about to read something and then all of a sudden i'm asked if I want to enable notifications.
4) Constantly asked to change default settings. This is not your default X, would you like to make it default X.
My god. I went back to non-smart watches, physical books, I unsubscribe and turn off notifications.
My news app is my browser. It gives me unified access to all (free) news outlets, of which there is an abundance. It also has a killer feature where it doesn't even offer to send notifications.
I ended up positioning myself near the TV that was showing college football news, because I have no rooting interests in college football and that was much easier to tune out.
But then again, sometimes I've lived in places with chemical plants, and they seem to behave in unexpected ways rather regularly.
What would be useful is to be able to set up my phone to keep low-priority notifications in a digest for later viewing with a buzz and an icon at set times of the day if there's anything in there.
No other “breaking news” has been relevant enough for me to reenable notifications. I check the news periodically enough as it is. That covers me wanting to know about anything interesting.
Steve Jobs once said that privacy is knowing what you sign up for. Feels like push notifications deserve the same treatment.
A program like Uber Eats has a bit less benefit to allowing such controls over what they send you. While they do still break down messages by type, their descriptions are a bit cryptic and after getting an unsolicited notification from it, I ended up disabling all of them.
It looks like they recently split it into "marketing" and "transactional", which is probably good enough.
The one AI thing I'd like my phone to do is reliably decide when I would like to be told about any given notification using an on-device model.
Did you die in the middle of writing your sentence?
If you go to Ireland, best not to accuse them of dying if they end their sentences with "so" :-)
Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.
My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!
But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.†
†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
The other example that comes to mind is, I was in Toronto a few years back and got a “Nuclear incident emergency alert” stating that there was NO problem at the nearby power plant and NO abnormal release of radiation. Equally uninformative, hugely more alarming (and relevant).
I’m sorry but in an environment where everyone requires you to install a separate app, is it really acceptable to send 10 notifications a day? Just a single notification a day per app would end up resulting in 40-50 notifications for a user.
Most of these news outlet can be accessed from a single app: a web browser of your choice. I find that's a better experience anyway; it's easier to block ads and annoyances.
Having constant news alerts sounds like a sure away to live in perpetual state of anxiety and live in whatever "manufactured consent" bubble that news outlet is pedaling. It's hard to believe people do that to themselves. But, again people engage in self-destructive behaviors, so overall it's not surprising if we think that at level.
> “If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster.
Is it a disaster? I'd call that a win for people! Maybe the answer is to trick these news app to drastically increase their notification rate, to nudge people to uninstall them? /s