I've spent the better part of the last few days staring at a little blue arrow driving around the Southeast.
When I’m road-tripping, Waze becomes less an app and more a travel companion. It tells you where traffic is backing up, where construction crews are making life difficult, and where police officers are apparently conducting scientific studies on how fast people drive through rural Georgia. I pass the phone to my wife to report stopped cars and police ahead. After enough hours behind the wheel, I started wondering what exactly Waze knows about me.
The answer has to be “a lot”. It knows where I started. It knows where I ended. It knows the route I chose. It probably knows the routes I ignored because I looked at them and thought, "There is absolutely no chance I'm taking a 3-mile detour on an unpaved road through a town with three buildings and a Dollar General."
That curiosity eventually led me down a Reddit rabbit hole, per usual. People were asking whether the police can see your speed through Waze. Whether law enforcement can tell you're using Waze while driving. Whether Waze shares your location. Whether somebody, somewhere, can pull up a dashboard and watch your little blue arrow moving around in real time.
I don't actually know if most people want answers to those questions. I think what they're really asking is: who gets to see the story my phone is telling about me?
That got me reflecting on when Pokémon Go was really popular and thinking about whether people were attempting to “drive and play Pokémon Go”. It did bring up a notification that you were driving too fast and said, “I’m the passenger.” At the time, the conversation was mostly about safety. People walking into fountains. People are crossing roads without looking. People are somehow managing to drive and catch Pokémon simultaneously. But looking back on it now, I wonder what all of that movement looked like from the application's perspective. Millions of users voluntarily carry location trackers while documenting exactly where they went, when they went there, how long they stayed, and what caught their attention.
What metadata was used from that application? Metadata is the fact that I stopped at Buc-ee's for twenty-seven minutes and somehow left with beef jerky, a cinnamon roll, and a decorative metal sign I absolutely did not need. The data that I searched for a restaurant- that I searched for five restaurants, read twelve reviews, drove past two of them, and eventually picked the one with the best parking lot. I’m sure it's just as particular and specific as we can imagine, if not more so…. It’s the information surrounding the information (hence the meta). And the more I thought about it while driving, the more I realized that modern applications might be built less on our actual content and more on the metadata surrounding it. Spotify doesn't just know what I listened to…. it knows what I skipped and builds what’s next in the DJ or suggestion queue for me.
Waze doesn't just know where I went- It knows how I got there. None of this really scares me. Honestly, convenience wins most of these battles for me. I like arriving at places faster. I like finding good restaurants. I like it when technology saves me from spending 30 minutes trying to remember an actor's name from a movie I watched 10 years ago. What I can't quite figure out is where the line exists…at what point does metadata stop belonging exclusively to the company collecting it? Is there a point at which applications are required to share it for public safety? To governments? Courts? Law enforcement? Researchers? Insurance companies? I genuinely don't know. The road-trip version of me suspects that most of us don't know either.
Thank you for sharing information about Waze. I was not aware of it. In my family, we use Google Maps. Waze sounds more efficient. I, too, would like to know where the digital trace we leave ends. I think it is meaningless until we become important to someone who wants to find out more about us. Frankly, I agree. The data from a driving app might be interesting for developers. But what about our health and personal information? Nowadays, all the doctors I see for myself or my family members use AI apps. Is that okay? Where does all that supposedly confidential information (under HIPAA) end up? Also, HIPAA seems to be rapidly becoming outdated. Where does it leave us as patients?
ReplyDeleteMaria, I wasn't super familiar with Waze until I literally heard my wife collecting points on a weekend trip. My reaction was, "Well, this looks more enticing than Google / Apple Maps". The only qualm I had with Waze was that it was struggling to update during some detours on I-95 and suggested the most efficient route. I was comparing Google Maps live with Waze, and it seemed like Google Maps updated more quickly, and it was also easy to change routes and see the differences in real time. Regarding the medical field... I think you're right to be concerned about confidentiality. I believe my family's HIPAA confidentiality has been breached at some point. Still, there's no pushback because it will ultimately be revised with a clause or something to justify the disclosure of the information.
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