Time well spent

[Bloomberg] [Fully Charged]( From [Bloomberg](   [FOLLOW US [Facebook Share]]( [Twitter Share]( [SUBSCRIBE [Subscribe]](  Hi all, it's Eric. Television channels are not in the business of telling you to turn off the TV. Most video games don’t feel the need to remind you that it would be a good idea to take a walk outside. And if you watch Netflix for long enough, eventually the streaming service checks in to make sure that you’re at least maintaining the semi-conscious state necessary to select “yes I’ll keep bingeing The Office even though I’ve reached post-Steve Carell mediocrity.” Social media companies, though, are increasingly being asked to do be better stewards of our time. Facebook and Instagram [announced earlier this month]( that they were going to give users the tools to monitor how many minutes they were plowing into the apps. And this week, Twitter began experimenting with a feature that suggests people that you might want to unfollow. There are predictable limits to how well these features will work, though. For Facebook and Instagram, it's a matter of how much users are encouraged to actually use the time-monitoring features. Giving the number of notifications I get from both apps, it's hard to imagine the company is willing to let me disengage. And Twitter's decision to suggest people to unfollow—besides leaving the nominees to ponder what they've done wrong after the inevitable screenshots make the rounds—generally seems more targeted at improving the user experience than limiting consumption. Facebook has made a big fuss about how it plans to emphasize an internal measure of "time well spent." Right now, people tend to tell researchers that they look back on their time using Facebook and regret it. That's bad news for both Facebook’s political standing and its long-term engagement. The company says it wants to deliver a fundamentally satisfying experience, but so far still specializes in delivering hits of social connection that are ultimately fleeting. Only Apple seems to be making moves that will truly help users limit digital their time. The company has announced features that let you track how many minutes you’ve devoted to different apps. But Apple, which mostly makes money because people pay for its hardware, has different incentives. The company is able to fight for privacy because it’s not monetizing your data at nearly the same rate as, say, Google. So it can use privacy as another brand-building vector. Although Apple does profit from engagement, it's not desperate for you to use your phone more than you want to. It's already sold it to you. It’s troubling to see Amazon move further into an advertising-based business. Historically, the company has been oriented around serving the customer, which has meant driving down costs and putting service at a premium. It's easy to see how shifting its focus to advertisers instead could lead to incentives that are even more perverse than social media companies'. Ultimately, a business's actions will reflect its business model. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are designed to sell ads and monopolize attention—until their incentives change, neither will their behavior. You can say the same thing for TV stations, video games and streaming, too, of course. But at least with Netflix you get to find out what happened to Jim and Pam.—[Eric Newcomer](mailto:enewcomer@bloomberg.net)  And here’s what you need to know in global technology news San Francisco is getting its scooters back—just not the same ones. [Starting in October](, Scoot and Skip will each get to release 625 scooters onto the city's streets. Their larger competitors Bird, Lime, Uber and Lyft were shut out of the deal.   Google bought transaction data from Mastercard in a [secret program]( that tracked the efficacy of its ads.  Apps like Snapchat and the Weather Channel temporarily [labeled New York City as "Jewtopia,"]( on Thursday in an incident that highlighted the fallibility of crowd-sourced data. A "system failure" at the startup Mapbox was the source of the problem.   Join the smartest minds in tech and investing at Bloomberg’s Sooner Than You Think, a special event on October 16 at the William Vale in New York City. Learn how artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and blockchain are reshaping how we spend, save and invest. [Register now with code BBGNEWS](.  Fully Charged will be off on Monday. Enjoy the holiday weekend!   Sponsored Content by Velocity Black Readers, the next-generation of travel is here. GQ described it as “the coolest app we have ever seen”. 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