At eleven o’clock at night, my phone registered that my location had been shared. The notification arrived the way these notifications do—quietly, as a line of text, the system performing its designed function of informing me that information about me was moving somewhere I had not directed it.
In the morning I found a message.
Sorry about that I was showing a visitor how phones are tracked and turned off or set to erase from another device.
The apology arrived before the explanation.
This is the structure of the sorry-but-not-sorry—the apology as a positioning device, placed first to establish the register of contrition before the explanation dismantles it. The sorry is real in the sense that it is present in the text. It is not real in the sense that it addresses what occurred.
It addresses having been noticed.
What occurred was that someone I knew had, at eleven o’clock at night, shown a visitor my location on his phone. The visitor was unknown to me. The location was mine. Neither my knowledge nor my consent had been part of the transaction.
I asked the obvious question when I awoke. Why are you showing a stranger my location?
Not a stranger believe me. He don’t know nothing about you except that you have a green head. Ha ha.
Several things happen in this response simultaneously. The stranger is reclassified—not a stranger to him, therefore not a stranger. The reassurance is offered: the visitor knows nothing about me except that I have a green head, which is the detail my profile photograph supplies and which is, by his account, the limit of the exposure. The laughter is appended—ha ha—which performs lightness, the suggestion that this is not a serious matter, the invitation to agree that it is not a serious matter and move on.
I did not move on.
A stranger to me.
This is the distinction the response had worked to collapse. He knew the visitor. Therefore the visitor was known. The logic requires that my relationship with a person is transferable through his relationship with the same person—that his two weeks of acquaintance constitute a foundation on which my trust can be built without my knowledge or agreement. The logic does not hold. A person known to someone I trust is not thereby known to me. The trust does not transfer. The exposure does.
You’re safe. No ill intent meant. I knew not to touch those buttons.
Three claims in sequence, each one doing a specific kind of work.
You’re safe. This is a claim about a condition he cannot verify. He does not know whether I am safe. He knows that he did not intend harm. He knows that he himself did not touch the buttons that would have extended the exposure further. He does not know what the visitor did, is doing, or intends to do with the information he accessed. He cannot know this because he does not know the visitor well enough to know it, and because the actions available to someone who has been shown another person’s location on a phone are not fully visible to the person who did the showing.
Safety is not his to declare. He declared it anyway.
No ill intent meant. This is a statement about his interior experience, accurate as far as it goes, which is not far enough. He did not mean harm. The harm—the exposure of my location to an unknown person at eleven at night, without my knowledge—occurred regardless of what he meant. Intent is internal. Consequence is not. The notification on my phone did not arrive because he intended it to arrive. It arrived because he showed a stranger my location. The intention is his. The consequence is mine.
I knew not to touch those buttons. This is the most precise of the three claims and the most revealing, because it locates the limit of his competence at exactly the point where his competence runs out. He knew not to touch the buttons that would have extended the access further. He did not know—and this is his own admission, though he does not recognise it as an admission—what the visitor knew, or could do, or chose to do once the location was visible on the screen.
I tried to make this visible.
You may not but if you give someone else access, you do not know what you are doing. You might as well hand them my devices.
The devices are not the point, exactly, but they serve as a way of making the abstract concrete. When you show someone my location on your phone, you are not showing them a fact about a map. You are showing them a live feed from a device I carry. The device knows where I am. The device knows where I have been. The device, depending on what buttons the visitor chose to press while the screen was in front of him, can be made to know considerably more. The showing is not a static disclosure. It is an opening.
He did not understand this. This is not a character failing. It is a knowledge failing, common and understandable in a person who uses a phone without understanding what the phone makes available to people who understand it better than he does. He knew not to touch the buttons because he had been told not to touch the buttons. He did not know why. He did not know what would happen if someone else, who had not been told not to touch the buttons, chose to touch them.
I wouldn’t know how to give someone access. I don’t understand how to do this.
He offered this as a defence. It is the opposite of a defence. It is a precise description of the problem.
A person who does not understand a system cannot protect another person from the system’s risks. He could not give access because he did not know how. He therefore assumed that access could not be given—that his own ignorance of the mechanism was a limit on the mechanism itself. It is not. The mechanism operates independently of his understanding of it. A person who understands the mechanism can use it without his knowledge or assistance. The visitor, shown a live location feed on a phone, had access to whatever the phone makes available to a person who knows what to look for and how to look.
That is my point. You don’t need to know anything. The other person can do it all on their own. And how would you know?
He would not know. That is the answer to the question, and it is also the conclusion of the whole exchange. He would not know because he does not understand the system. He does not understand the system because he has never needed to. He has never needed to because, until this conversation, no one whose information he was sharing had asked him to account for what the sharing made possible.
The sorry at the beginning of the exchange was not an apology for the action. It was an apology for the notification—for the fact that the system had told me what happened, which introduced the requirement to account for it. Without the notification, there would have been no conversation. The location would have been shared, the visitor would have seen what he saw, and the exchange would have been complete without my awareness of it. The sorry addressed the breach in concealment rather than the breach in consent.
This is the structure of the sorry-but-not-sorry. The apology arrives not at the recognition of harm but at the recognition of visibility. The person who has done the thing is sorry that it has come to your attention. The sorry is genuine in the sense that they would prefer not to have the conversation they are now having. It is not genuine in the sense of acknowledging that the thing itself was wrong, or that wrong is even a category that applies.
The reassurances that follow—you’re safe, no ill intent meant, I knew not to touch those buttons—are not attempts to address my concern. They are attempts to close the conversation. Each one offers a reason why the concern is, on reflection, not warranted. Safety has been declared. Intent has been established as benign. Personal restraint has been demonstrated. What remains is my willingness to accept these offerings as sufficient and move on.
The conversation did not close because the concern was not addressed by the reassurances.
The reassurances addressed his experience of the event. Mine remained unaddressed throughout.
My location was shared at eleven at night with a person I do not know. The person I do not know saw where I was. He may have done nothing further with that information. He may have done something. The person who showed him my location does not know which, because he does not understand what showing someone a location makes available, and because he has not asked, and because asking would require him to acknowledge that the question is worth asking, which would require him to acknowledge that the action produced a consequence he cannot account for.
He cannot account for it. He declared me safe anyway.
Safety, in this formulation, means that he did not intend harm. It does not mean that harm did not occur or could not occur. It means that the frame he is using to assess the situation is his own intent, and his own intent was benign, and benign intent is the measure he is applying to an outcome he cannot see.
The sorry was about being caught. The safety was about not knowing. The intent was about closing the question without answering it.
The question was simple. Why are you showing a stranger my location?
It remains unanswered. The apology has been recorded. The conversation has been closed from his end.
I remain unknown to the visitor. The visitor remains unknown to me. What the visitor did with what he saw remains unknown to both of us.
That is not safety. It is the absence of information presented as reassurance.
They are not the same.
