My Own Apathy Terrifies Me

I need to lay down a little background first. I work in the AVL Industry (Automatic Vehicle Location) and I love my job a hysterical amount. I get to play with big data all day long. With a few clicks or a quick keystroke I can tell you how many times a bus was late somewhere and on average if it’s worth keeping that bus running. The power to do that is fantastic. What you can do with a few coordinates and a time would blow your mind.

It’s also terrifying. I mean, it doesn’t matter for buses. There’s no personal data. Nothing like that; my data makes sure people get to school, work, or dates on time. It’s pretty nifty like that.

But you know, I also have this little bugger:

Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, a smartphone packed with features such as texting, facebook, sending my location to some satellite somewhere in who-knows-where, and occasionally allowing me to make a phone call.

I totally have a GPS device in my pocket 24/7. I don’t even know who gets the data and I don’t have a clue as to who can read it. I don’t know how much data I’m giving out just by walking down the street or going to buy water at the bodega downstairs. If I had access to my own GPS logs I could probably decipher where I’m supposed to be and when I’d be there.

I could totally spend some time analyzing that data and finding out when I’m most vulnerable to attacks, or when an advertisement would work best on me. If there’s a huge amount of variation at 1pm every day and I tend to go to any of a dozen different restaurants at that time it would only be reasonable to start getting advertisements at 12:30 about restaurants in my area.

I’m putting a lot of data out there somewhere, and that’s pretty scary.

What’s terrifying is that I honestly can’t get myself to give a damn about it. I can admit that there’s this terrifying problem, but I really won’t do anything about it. I trust, for now, that my data is in the hands of our benevolent overlords and not being too misused.

Google, the benevolent overlords of the world in regards to data, personal information; the kings of targeting ads and spinning profit. They also run a really nifty search engine and have some really pretty maps.

I work with this data, I know what it can do, and I don’t know if everyone’s as responsible as I am. It says a lot about my own personal apathy that I don’t really do anything about it. I know I’m in good company, too: I don’t know anyone that really does anything about their phone’s GPS’s. It’s just kind of faded into the back of our minds, or just become a constant. “Oh yeah, that’s just my GPS pinging a satellite somewhere every few seconds. Dunno which one. Dunno who gets the data. Whatevs.”

Maybe it’s because I have this fundamental hope embedded into the core of my personhood: I like to think that humans are essentially good, and that we’re intensely curious and that that’s why I love the data. I assume that everyone else is just as addicted to it, and that we’ll use it safely.

So I don’t care. I don’t do anything. I haven’t even turned off my phone in paranoia while writing this.

My apathy scares me. The apathy of my peers scares me. Yet the thing that which I am apathetic about, while terrifying in nature, does nothing to make me quake in my boots. It is most peculiar.

We humans are a confounding lot.