Danielle RalstonFounder, How Capacity Works · Founder of ND Hive | Building the productivity hub where work actually gets done | Execution spaces, body doubling & community accountability

The Dark Side of Targeted Apps #AppAwareness #NeurodivergentProtection #staysafeonline

15 Nov 2024 · 1 min

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1:00

In this monologue, the speaker warns that a wide range of digital products—coaching, organization, productivity apps, and even games—are deliberately targeting disability, parent, and especially neurodivergent communities (including children) as a lucrative market. The speaker critiques the lack of community vetting, noting that within any small group of neurodivergent individuals, someone has likely already tried a given app. To avoid falling prey to endless subscriptions and hidden fees, the speaker shares practical financial safeguards: creating a personal budget for app trials, using a dedicated disposable payment card for these purchases, and actively canceling subscriptions. The overall message is a call for consumer awareness, community‑based app evaluation, and proactive budgeting to protect neurodivergent users from exploitative monetization tactics.

Chapters

And unfortunately, there are coaching apps that do that. There are organization apps that do it, productivity apps that do it, games, all of these things that are out there and targeting the disability community, the parent community, kids. Kids are targeted highly with apps and stuff like that. But how many are we being targeted with, especially in the neurodivergent community, because we are the new trendy cash cow, when we could have just asked in our community and said, hey, has anybody tried this app yet? Yeah. I will guarantee you somebody in a community of at least 10 people, somebody has tried the app, especially if there are ADHD coaches in there. We all try the new apps that come out because, because somebody's gonna ask me, somebody's gonna ask. Someone's gonna ask. I actually have a budget for those because I have to create a budget for myself. Otherwise I would get every single shiny new thing that I see and I would forget to cancel them as well. But this way I have a specific card that they go on and it's a disposable card.