Great technology should improve life, not distract from it
I can&#x27;t tell you how excited I am about this announcement. The fact that Google are finally acknowledging that they have a role to play to help their users use their technology in a healthy rather than unhealthy way is extremely promising.<p>Take for example, the feature that allows you to set a limit on the time you spend on YouTube per day and the fact that it works across both mobile and desktop. This would seem to be in conflict with all the efforts they have made up until now with the auto-play and related videos features to keep you on YouTube. Some how, someone at Google has finally recognised that perhaps the person who spends their entire day watching one video after another is actually not as valuable a user to them as the one that watches a healthier 1-2 hours per day is amazing to me.<p>Edit: I should add that while my hope is that ultimately Google&#x27;s &#x27;wellbeing&#x27; algorithm will align with my own internal one, I can see that the initial implementation doesn&#x27;t quite go far enough. For example, I have a cronjob on my laptop that shuts it down every day at midnight. Google&#x27;s equivalent is that the screen simply goes greyscale. I would prefer that my phone simply turns off no questions asked (I know that you can schedule your phone to turn off at a particular time but it gives a 30 second warning which is too easy to dismiss - and when you do dismiss it, no more shut down attempts are made). Hopefully, Google will open enough access to these features to developers so that users can have the kind of control over their own technology that they need.