You are allowed to ignore us

If you need our apps, use them. If they help you, we are glad. If you do not need them, you are allowed to carry on with your life.

You do not owe us a daily visit. You do not owe us a response to a campaign. You do not owe us an explanation for choosing something else.

This sounds like a small courtesy. We think it should be a principle of software design.

An interruption can cost something before you click

In a 2015 experiment, Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert found that receiving phone notifications could impair performance on a sustained-attention task even when participants did not interact with their phones. It was a laboratory study of calls and messages, not a measurement of the effect of every advertisement. It demonstrates something narrower and useful: leaving the phone untouched does not always remove the cost of the interruption. 1

An earlier experiment by Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke adds another piece. In a simulated work task with 48 participants, interrupted workers compensated by working faster, while reporting more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. Productivity measured only as task completion can miss part of the experience. 2

Your concentration and peace of mind are worth protecting. The cost of an interruption matters even when it never appears on the sender’s balance sheet.

A useful question for any notification is simple: whose intention does this message serve?

An alert you asked for can help you do something important. A prompt whose purpose is to manufacture another visit should have to justify the interruption it creates.

The advertising profile behind the message

Attention and data can be connected by the same commercial incentive.

In its September 2024 report on nine large social media and video streaming companies, FTC staff described extensive data collection and the incentives that targeted advertising created for many of the firms studied. The investigation principally covered practices from 2019–2020, including information collected about users and non-users, activity beyond the platforms and data obtained from brokers. The findings were aggregated and did not apply identically to every company. 3

Our objection is to the relationship this can create. A person opens a service to accomplish something. The service sees an opportunity to learn how to reach them again, influence another decision or make their attention more valuable to someone else.

At Fair Ninja, the information about your work should help you. Your charts should explain your time to you. Your tasks should help you organise your life. We do not want those things to become an advertising profile.

Our promise includes your right to say no

The rules we are building Fair Ninja around are straightforward:

• We will not chase you around the internet with ads.

• We will not bombard you with marketing emails.

• We will not sell your personal data.

• We want you to use a tool because you find it useful, and to stop when you do not.

There is room for communication that you choose: reading an article, following product news or asking for help. The purpose is to give you something you wanted to know.

The distinction matters to us because consent should survive beyond the first interaction. Visiting a page should not be treated as a claim on the rest of your day.

Nor should inactivity automatically be treated as a failure. Perhaps you finished your work. Perhaps you went outside. Perhaps a person in the room deserved your attention more than an application did.

For a tool designed to help you live, those are perfectly good outcomes.

Getting out of the machine

We believe people can reclaim control over whom they give their time to. We want to be part of that change.

The “Matrix” we want to leave is the habit of treating human life as a collection of conversion opportunities: every hesitation a problem to overcome, every quiet period a missed chance to re-engage, every friendship a possible acquisition route.

Our alternative begins with ordinary dignity. You can be uninterested. You can change your mind. You can enjoy something without wanting more of it. You can decide that enough is enough.

A business should be able to hear those decisions without designing a campaign to reverse them.

We want a world in which useful tools become easier to find and easier to put down. A world in which progress gives people more room to think, work, share and rest.

A small practical contribution

Fair Ninja starts with everyday apps. Local use gives you a way to work without a connection. Control over your data gives you a way to keep your work. Optional paid services give the business an understandable way to earn money.

These are practical decisions made in service of the same belief: software should increase your independence.

We will be happy if you choose us. We also want you to feel free not to.

You do not have to live inside someone else’s growth strategy.

Sources

1. Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert, The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41(4), 2015, pp. 893–897. Author’s explanation of the study, methods and limits; DOI 10.1037/xhp0000100.

2. Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke, The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress, CHI 2008, pp. 107–110. Full paper.

3. Federal Trade Commission, A Look Behind the Screens, September 2024. Staff report. The study’s principal reference period is 2019–2020; it is not a census of all current internet advertising.