Phone makers could prevent drivers from texting but don’t
THE court filings paint a grisly picture: As Ashley Kubiak sped down a Texas highway in her Dodge Ram truck, she checked her iPhone for messages. Distracted, she crashed into a sport utility vehicle, killing its driver and a passenger and leaving a child paralysed.
With driving fatalities rising at levels not seen in 50 years, the growing incidence of distracted driving is getting part of the blame. Now a lawsuit related to that 2013 Texas crash is raising a question: Does Apple – or any cellphone maker or wireless company – have a responsibility to prevent devices from being used by drivers in illegal and dangerous ways?
The product liability lawsuit, filed against Apple by families of the victims, contends that Apple knew its phones would be used for texting and did not prevent Kubiak from texting dangerously. The suit is unlikely to succeed, legal experts said, and a Texas magistrate in August preliminarily recommended the case’s dismissal on grounds that it was unlikely that lawyers could prove that the use of the iPhone caused the accident.
Kubiak was convicted of negligent homicide and sentenced to five years on probation.
Her lawyer, Jason Cassel, said she now keeps her phone in the back seat.
“The mere fact she’s putting her phone in her back seat in her purse shows she realises how tempting it is to look down when we get a beep, chime, vibration,” Cassel said. “She never wants to be near the possibility” of being tempted to answer it.
The product liability case has brought to light a piece of evidence that legal and safety experts say puts Apple in a quandary – one it shares with other wireless companies. In Apple’s case, the evidence shows, the company has a patent for technology designed to prevent texting while driving, but it has not deployed it.
Apple, Verizon, AT&T and other companies caution about the risks of distracted driving – and they acknowledge that laws and public education aimed at curbing the behaviour are not working. It suggests to legal experts that they can foresee that their product can be used for illegal, dangerous and sometimes deadly activity.
AT&T even suggests that the behaviour has addictive qualities, meaning drivers cannot help themselves. But the companies – although they offer manual ways to shut down texting on the road – do not deploy technology that takes the decision out of drivers’ hands altogether.
“The technology exists; we just don’t have the stomach to implement it,” said Deborah Hersman, the president of the National Safety Council and the former chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
In 2012, the safety board sent a letter to the wireless industry association urging the companies to prevent drivers from using their phones while driving.
“Technology got us into this situation. Technology will get us out,” she said. However, she added, “We’re so afraid to tell people what they should do that you can kind of get away with murder under these conditions.”
Generally, firms have taken the position that text-blocking technology is embryonic and unreliable. They argue they cannot shut down a driver’s service without the potential of mistakenly shutting off a passenger’s phone or that of someone riding on a train or bus.
Instead, companies have taken the approach of simultaneously warning and enabling, a mixed message that underscores a complex swirl of economic, technological and social factors. Perhaps the most pointed question is this: Even if the technology worked to perfection, would people accept having their service blocked? After all, the idea of mobile phone service is to let people communicate on the go.
David Teater, formerly of the National Safety Council and now a consultant on road safety, who lost a son to a distracted driver, said companies clearly feared the consequences of cutting off service for their paying customers. It’s an industry, he said, in which one of the most frightening words is “churn” – meaning the loss of a customer to a competitor.