Yes, You Can Be an Ethical Tech Consumer. Here’s How.

The author queries “But how can you be more conscious of your actions when technology is so confusing in the first place?” but fails to address the underlying problem of consumerism. Instead of simply consuming anything, we need to ask ourselves why are we going to do this and what will it’s implications be for both self and the planet as a whole. The Iroquois law of seven generations asks us to contemplate the effects of our actions on the next seven generations, yet today people tend to think of nothing but style / what is cool. Under certain calculations, a new smartphone is fully 1/4 of a persons carbon allowance for a year. A round trip from N. Y. to Paris - in economy class -is one years. Yet people think nothing of “upgrading” yearly, flying for a long weekend. Until we stop living to satisfy our egos and start living with meaning and intention, we will continue to run towards the cliff of environmental destruction.

Oh how wicked! I never embraced Facebook so I had no idea that you could control others' access to the data of those "friends" connected to you at any level. As Lawrence of Arabia said, "my name is for my friends" - for me, my name and my likes, dislikes and personal preference are for friends in real life.

Mr. Chen complains about Google but never publicizes alternative search engines that do not track you, like DuckDuckGo, which works perfectly well. Why?

@ Edward Unfortunately technology is about to deliver on the first thing you say you were promised. We will soon have smart robots who will make human labor by and large unnecessary. The upheaval and damage this will cause far overshadow the (very real) negative effects of social media. Be careful what you wish for.

I stopped upgrading software on my Mac four years ago after a series of related indignities by the audio recording giant, Avid, made me realize I was being played for a chump. Apple released a new OS, which, when installed caused Protools software to stop showing some key menus. Ten years earlier, Avid would have quickly released a free update that corrected this simple display issue. This time they decided to release an expensive update that fixed the menu issue, but justifying the significant cost by promoting a rather useless feature that only a few major recording studios would ever use. I solved the problem by loading an older apple OS onto a built-in second hard drive then installing my older Protools on the same hard drive. This move has proven to be a huge savings of money and time because, a few years later, Avid stopped letting customers own a continuous license to Protools. Now you have to the company month by month to use the software. I also made the same re-install to older Adobe software when I got word that Adobe, as well, would start charging on a monthly subscription. Those old copies of Adobe and Avid software, still do everything I need in my work.

The simplest approach is to install an ad-blocker and then privilege the browser over apps, which are outside its reach. You don't block the harvesting of your information that way, but remove the monetary incentive. Results will eventually follow. Immediately, you drastically improve your web experience with less screen clutter, much higher speed and reduced data costs. I recommend ublock origin, a true grass-root effort with no conflicted business models, which works on several desktop browsers and firefox on mobile. Of course you need to be willing to pay for your services, which I am, when given the option. The other path of blocking the surveillance machinery is worth investigating but harder. Since I asked google not to keep extensive histories of my browsing and location, its services have degraded to the point that it refuses to store my home address! There is no technical reason for that limitation: it's just retribution for not allowing full surveillance. Please join me in starving the beast: together we can win!

Companies (and workers) legally and willingly provide the products and services the author describes. Consumers are free to choose those they prefer for their own reasons. THIS is the ideal world, not one where some cultural or economic elite decides for everyone what is "ethical" or not. How is it ethical to destroy the livelihoods of people at the bottom of the economic ladder just because some at the top believe the work is "beneath" them. Perhaps it is beneath the elites, but it is often the ONLY rung many can reach, and without it, they have no shot. See the minimum wage as exhibit A.

Thank you Brian for including a reminder to fight planned obsolescence by maintaining devices. So many times ethical discussions surrounding tech leave out its material footprint all together. A mass of chemicals 630 times the weight of the final product is required to produce a single microchip, without which no one would be logging onto Facebook in the first place. This hardware manufacturing process done from Vermont to California (and abroad) effects the health of entire towns and ecosystems and can also create a difficult work environment with long hours and prolonged exposure to carcinogens. Towns like Endicott, NY, the birthplace of IBM, are now superfund sites. Just another facet to consider in our complex relationship to technology, consumerism, and convenience. "I don't have an iphone, luckily everyone else has an iphone" Fran Lebowitz

People behave ethically only until it interferes with their convenience. Then ethics be damned. So while I support your premise, I do not hold my breath.

I quit facebook two weeks ago. Admittedly, I had to wean myself off slowly by encouraging my friends to move back to texting, leaving groups to see how much I would miss them and removing people and organizations from my news feed. To my surprise, the people I really wanted to keep up with (relatives and family) were mostly using facebook for the one thing we used to hate about email - forwarding junk! cat videos, news articles, opinion pieces (like this one?) and old pictures. My friends and family almost never published photos of family news on there in the past year and I was able to skip out on Facebook without a qualm. This is a big change since picture sharing was the one reason we all loved the site but apparently we no longer feel comfortable giving FB pics of our kids? Anyway, this is a good article but there is NOTHING out there that replaces facebook. And I am glad. I have found hours of free time and the ability to focus on things uninterrupted by unimportant rubbish. It can be done.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter aren't technology. They are monetized surveillance. Technology is improvement in productivity. Technology is research in genetics to lead to real cures for individual people. Technology is research in battery design to enable energy independence. Considering Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to be technology is just like thinking it's an achievement to have a spy device turn on your lights for you.

You have a Twitter button and a Facebook button at the top of the article. And if I didn't use an ad-blocker, this page would be crawling with ads for luxury products. So maybe the NYT should stop preaching and take a look at your own practices?

First, and foremost, accept that technology has become a form of addiction like opioids and you have an addiction problem. If the CEO of Google declares that "technology cannot solve humanity's problems" in a NY Times article, it should alarm us all for technology is INDEED finding ways of solving humanity's problems. Unless, of course, it has become a problem just before our eyes we are not willing to see. "OK, Google, Alexa, one of you turn on the lights so I can see" for I want to feel the rush of having commanded a tech device and this is not an addiction!