CHRONICLE CHATS

You’re on your phone in the grocery line, on the bus and on the treadmill. You have the television on while cooking dinner and as you go to sleep. When the morning alarm goes off, you roll over to Twitter, Facebook or your favorite e-newsletter.

It’s addicting. And almost all of us, all addicts, feed data mining by global megacorporations.

What the Center for Humane Technology has termed a “digital attention crisis” has implications beyond our ability to part with a smartphone for a few hours: Recent consequences include data breaches, filter bubbles and election meddling.

But does it have to be that way? That’s the focus of an upcoming Chronicle Chats event on Monday, Sept. 17, hosted by The Chronicle’s digital managing editor, Fernando Diaz.

The event features Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Earth Species Project and Center for Humane Technology; Renee DiResta, head of policy at Data for Democracy and staff associate at Columbia University Data Science Institute; and Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger, an open-source collaborative advancing blockchain technologies.

The evening will focus on what consumers can reasonably expect from companies whose business largely depends on harvesting our data to foster deeper addiction to their products.

Attendees can expect to hear strategies for curbing the intrusion of technology into our personal lives, and why one of the Center for Humane Technology’s most emphatic pieces of advice is to quit all social media.

The chat will be live-streamed at SFChronicle. com and The Chronicle’s Facebook page.

Chronicle Chats: “New Technology: Is It Time to Opt Out?”: 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 17. $30. Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F. www.cityboxoffice.com or www.sfchronicle.com/chroniclechats

Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle The Chronicle’s Fernando Diaz is hosting a Chronicle Chats event about data intrusion.