The Best of Guardian Tech

Is the ping of a text stealing our focus or do we just lack willpower? And could mindless scrolling ever be good for our brains? Elle Hunt unpacks some surprising truths

«Last year, writer Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus, decrying the “huge invasive forces” corroding our concentration and championing flow as a solution, was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Stolen Focus concludes by calling for an urgent societal “movement to reclaim our minds” – and, in the meantime chase that flow state. (Hari himself took a months-long “digital detox” on Cape Cod.)»

The long read: For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person

Elon Musk admits banning links to Twitter rival was a mistake

A new service offers a way to offset losses from NFTs during a grim crypto winter that saw demand for digital collectibles vanish

The company now known as Meta has spent staggering amounts on creating an immersive successor to the traditional 2D internet. But what has it got to show for it, apart from 11,000 job losses?

Privacy scandals and antitrust issues dogged Facebook and Google and Amazon saw a rise in employee organizing

Exclusive: investigation suggests Washington Post owner was targeted five months before murder of Jamal Khashoggi

Former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison among politicians and celebrities whose details were in sample of allegedly hacked data published online

Finance minister warns monetary sovereignty of governments could be at risk

Fingerprints, facial recognition and other personal information from Biostar 2 discovered on publicly accessible database

With facial recognition technology getting more sophisticated each year, technology editor Alex Hern explores the issue of privacy. Also today: Jamie Grierson on Sunday’s terrorism attack in south…

An artificial intelligence guessed the sexuality of people on a dating site with up to 91% accuracy, raising tricky ethical questions

Chinese-owned social media app bans such content even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal

Worried about the data collected about you? A new generation of startups is making apps to put your privacy settings straight

Reading through all this intimate information I realised the dating app knows me better than I do. But what happens if this data gets hacked – or worse, sold?

Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’

Inventor of web calls on governments and firms to safeguard it from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity

The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race…

«“the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”»

In an exclusive global series, the Guardian lays bare the revolution and the wreckage that is engulfing the welfare state worldwide

Tim Cook has made Apple the most valuable brand in the world – will this be a new success or a sign of the company’s problems?

Apple chief said in a letter HKmap.live was ‘used maliciously to target’ officers as claim was disputed by protesters on the ground

There are more than 100m Alexa-enabled devices in our homes. But are they fun time-savers or the beginning of an Orwellian nightmare

Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblower

As technology renders jobs obsolete, what will keep us busy? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari examines ‘the useless class’ and a new quest for purpose

The Long Read: All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed

A UCL study has found people around the world feel the same about their devices as they do about their homes

«Smartphone users have become “human snails carrying our homes in our pockets”, with a tendency to ignore friends and family in favour of their device, according to a landmark study.»

The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms. So how does it work and when will it be here?

Ducky toast tongs, candle sharpeners and an apple tree … our writers name one gadget, gizmo or thing they didn’t know they couldn’t live without