The Ethics of Deep Pockets

There was a news story last week about a family that is suing Apple for damages after a driver who was apparently distracted by a call on Face Time slammed into the back of their car. They are claiming that Apple should have known that people would make Face Time video calls while driving, and should have made some modification to the software that would prevent people from doing so. Leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether or not that’s even technically possible, it seems as though it would be more appropriate for them to sue the distracted driver. After all, Apple didn’t tell him to video chat with someone while driving, and even if Face Time never existed, he could still have been texting, reading a book, or just not paying attention…

I will again remind my readers (assuming I have readers) not to take legal advice from scruffy bloggers without legal qualifications, but it doesn’t take a great deal of training to understand the concept that there are limits to how much money you can obtain by suing an individual, particularly if he or she doesn’t have much of it. By the same token, it doesn’t take a degree in accounting to understand that Apple can be expected to earn more money in the time it is taking you to read this blog post than the average person will make in his or her entire lifetime. This type of action is sometimes called a “Deep Pockets” lawsuit, and is obviously completely legal, but I can help wondering about the ethics of the situation. I thought we should take a closer look...

On the one hand, we could dismiss the family’s lawsuit as simple greed. A good attorney should be able to play upon the sympathies of a jury, considering that the crash in question resulted in the death of a five-year-old girl, and wring a large amount of money from the huge company that put the loaded smartphone into the offending driver’s hand. Millions of dollars (or possibly tens of millions) won’t bring anyone back, but even a token settlement might help bring closure to the family. Alternately, an admission from Apple that their bad product design was at least partly to blame for the tragedy might help some of the people involved deal with their various kinds of guilt. But what if there’s more to it than that?

Since the crash happened, several reporters have confirmed that Apple has patented technology that would allow the company to disable apps on your iPhone if it detects that you are driving a car – you can read the Forbes article here if you want to. If the company really could have prevented the accident, but hadn’t bothered to implement the changes that would have done so, then they might actually have some amount of responsibility for what happened. There’s also the public awareness aspect – people might not pay attention to a single distracted-driving accident, and it’s doubtful that Apple would take notice of one. A huge product-liability case is far more likely to attract attention, however, possibly resulting in product changes or even new laws against operating a videoconferencing app while driving, while at the same time reminding more people about the dangers of distracted driving in the first place…

There’s no way to tell if the technology would actually help, of course – how would your iPhone know that you were driving a car instead of riding in one, for example? And given the number of texting-while-driving accidents that occur each year, and the number of people who are killed in one, it’s not clear if any additional examples would be any more helpful in raising public awareness. But it still begs the question: Does a company have an ethical responsibility to try to prevent people from using their products in idiotic and potentially fatal ways? Do they have an obligation to compensate innocent bystanders who are injured when someone does use one of their products in such a manner? Or is it acceptable for them to sell a product, complete with warnings against doing things that even a small child would know are idiotic, and then absolve themselves from the stupidity of their customers?

It’s worth thinking about…