Responsibility is one of those things that a lot of people talk about but not a whole lot of people actually get real serious about. Just look around, there are a ton of people blaming everyone else for their problems. Yet, responsibility is about more than being personally accountable for making sure you don’t mess up your own life. It’s also about making sure that you don’t mess up someone else’s. Most people when they go through their daily lives don’t actively try to hurt anyone else. In fact, I’d go so far as to say most people will go out of their way to not inadvertently hurt anyone.
However, the more remote other people are, the less visible the consequences of our actions, the less likely people are to take responsibility for what they do. Just as an example, when I was a kid, my uncle was burning some tires and other stuff in his backyard. My dad called him out on the tires, pointing out that the tires are some pretty nasty things to be sending into the air. My uncle responded that it was just one or two. Almost sounds fair at first glance. What can two tires do versus the entire atmosphere? Not much. But as my dad responded, what if everyone burned just a couple? What then? Pretty sure my uncle never burned another tire.
What’s the point of the story? My uncle didn’t think he was doing anything bad, he didn’t think it mattered, not because he’s such a bad person but because he just didn’t think it through. It’s the out of sight, out of mind principle and it is very hard to fight against it. To do so requires really thinking a couple steps beyond what you are doing right now and how that might affect others far away in both time and space.
Let’s take a hypothetical situation. Imagine if someone were dumping candy bars in some remote African village. The people would almost certainly eat them. In fact, because the food is showing up for free with an apparently unlimited supply, they would probably eat a lot of them. The result would likely be a lot of overweight people suffering from diabetes and heart disease. Who is responsible for that outcome? Is it the people because they ate all the candy bars, or is it the person dumping the candy bars? I would say the primary responsibility is with the person dumping the candy bars. The villagers would very likely be unaware of the dangers of eating too many of the things. They would almost certainly have little to no experience with a sustained source of sugar like that and what it can do to the body. The person providing that source though likely would know and therefore would have the responsibility to educate the villagers as to the consequences of what they are eating.
A less hypothetical example and one that we can all relate to in some way is the modern app and its terms of service. The app itself is like the candy bars, it’s a bait pile, there to attract you. Then they say, ‘Here's our terms of service, just agree to these and you can use the app’. It’s as if the hypothetical villagers were given a detailed study of the effects of sugar, full of scientific jargon. They wouldn’t know what it means, just like most of us can’t translate the legal-ease of the TOS. But the lawyers and the app developers know full well what they are doing and how they plan to take full advantage of them.
I would argue that the app developers have a responsibility to make their terms clear. Much like the candy bar dumper should make it clear that too many of them will make you sick and kill you early, so the developers should just say ‘we are doing to sell your data’ or whatever it is they intend to do with it.
That is the beginning of responsibility, simply being open about your intentions and not lying to people. It sounds so simple doesn’t it?
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