IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020 - 8

customers in return for the benefits
that the service-provider derived from
aggregating their data; and so on).
In comparatively few years, the
technological innovation of the
"SmartPhone," in conjunction with
the potential of statistical machine
learning and a deep understanding of the human psyche, has corrupted even a pretense at loyalty
and replaced it by a dependency
relationship, creating digital dependence. For application-level gatekeepers, their vision of the future is
not a boot stamping on a human
fa c e forever: instead they w ill
come for you with a like, a smiley
emoji, and a gaslight, with one hand
clamped on your throat and the
other hand deep in your pocket.
In the short-term, the only way to
bring about meaningful change is
by regulation, putting boundaries
on political advertising, psychological manipulation, and willful misinformation. In the long term, a more
structural approach is required,
perhaps starting with an identification of the factors that together
determine the scale and nature of
the possible harm caused by digital dependence: for example the
mental and physical harm caused
to individual users; the legitimacy
of the intent to induce dependence,
on a spectrum from habituation to

addiction; and the deleterious effect
of digital dependence on communities and societies.
Unfor tunately, digital dependence seems to ma ke people
susceptible to voting for strange
things, least of all their own better interests.

data breach," The Guardian, Mar. 17, 2018;
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/
mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence
-us-election.
[9] R. Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary
Way to Influence and Persuade. Simon &
Schuster, 2016.
[10] N. Dow-Schüll, Addiction by Design:
Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012.
[11] C. Winstanley, P. Cocker, and R. Rogers,
"Dopamine modulates reward expectancy during performance of a slot machine task in rats:
evidence for a 'near-miss' effect," Neuropsychopharmacology, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 913925, 2011.
[12] J. Robbins, "If technology is a parasite masquerading as a symbiont - Are we the host?,"
IEEE Technology & Society Mag., vol. 38,
no. 3, pp. 24-33, 2019.
[13] M. Busby, "Loot boxes increasingly common
in video games despite addiction concerns,"
The Guardian, Nov. 22, 2019; https://www
.theguardian.com/games/2019/nov/22/loot
-boxes-increasingly-common-in-video-games
-despite-addiction-concerns.
[14] B. Hoanca, "The human connection drug:
Should addiction to social media be legislated
out?," IEEE Technology & Society Mag., vol.
39, no. 1, 2020.
[15] N. Eyal, Hooked: A Guide to Building
Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio/Penguin,
2014.
[16]. A. Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Penguin, 2017.
[17] A. Deb, "Phantom vibration and phantom
ringing among mobile phone users: A systematic
review of literature," Asia Pac Psychiatry, vol.
7, no. 3, pp. 231-239, 2014.
[18] J. Radesky and M. Moreno, "How to consider
screen time limits...for parents," JAMA Pediatr.,
vol. 172, no. 10, p. 996, 2018.
[19] J. Ronson, So You've Been Publicly
Shamed. Riverhead, 2015.

References
[1] J. Pitt, Y. Arafa, G. Dionisi, S. Martin and
M. Witkowski, "Creating loyalty in e-commerce
using agent technology," in E-Business: Key
Issues, Applications and Technologies,
B. Stanford Smith and P. Kidd, Eds. IOS, 2000,
pp. 803-809.
[2] S. Marsh, "Trust in distributed artificial intelligence," in Proc. European Workshop on
Modelling Autonomous Agents in a MultiAgent World (MAAMAW'92), Springer, 1994,
pp. 94-112.
[3] P. Andras, L. Esterle, and M. Guckert, The
Anh Han, P. Lewis, K. Milanovic, T. Payne, C. Perret, J. Pitt, S. Powers N. Urquhart, and S. Wells,
"Trusting Intelligent Machines: Deepening
Trust Within Socio-Technical Systems," IEEE
Technology and Society Mag., vol. 37, no.
4, pp. 76-83, 2018.
[4] S. McDougal, "Is the browser part of the operating system?," Feb. 26, 2005; http://world.std
.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/browser.html.
[5] M. Teerlink, S. Gragg, and M. Bisgaard-Bohr,
"Beyond Consumerism: Know your customer's needs, before they do," CRM Forum White
Papers, 1999.
[6] Special Report, "The story of the Internet is all
about layers," The Economist, June 2018.
[7] S. Lansley, "Inequality and instability: Why more
equal societies have more stable economies,"
U.K. Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) Poverty J., vol. 142, pp. 10-13, 2012.
[8] C. Cadwalladr and E. Graham-Harrison,
"Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles
harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major

CORRECTION

D

ue to a proofreading error, the list of authors on page 45 of the December 2019
issue of IEEE Technology and Society
Magazine was incorrect. The list of au-

thors for the article "Building Trust in Social Robotics: A
Pilot Study" should have read:
Laura Leondina Campanozzi, Eugenio Guglielmelli,
Eleonora Cella, Giampaolo Ghilardi, Mirta Michilli, Alfonso Molina, Massimo Ciccozzi, and Vittoradolfo Tambone.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.2967484
Date of current version: 2 March 2020

8

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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MARCH 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/international https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/nov/22/loot-boxes-increasingly-common-in-video-games-despite-addiction-concerns https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/nov/22/loot-boxes-increasingly-common-in-video-games-despite-addiction-concerns http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/browser.html http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/browser.html

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020

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