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Comment by wmt | Hacker News Reader

A man is in Spain and calls his mother in US for help, and mother then calls an US company for help, who refuse to hand out client information for random people who call and claim that the client is doing a crime?

Instructing to call the police was definitely the best possible course of action, and the mistake they made was to hand out a local number for the police of Madrid instead of instructing the mother to instruct his son to call the emergency number of the country he's in, 112 in Europe. Had AirBnB sent someone visit the place, he would arrive there much later than the police could, and would still be unable to do anything but to calm the emergency number that he can't get in and a customer's mother in the US claims there's a crime going on.

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I agreed with you up until "Instructing to call the police was definitely the best possible course of action". I really think AirBnB should have called the police, instead of shifting that responsibility. The article even says that they'll be making sure all staff know to contact the police directly in future cases like this.

The person in the apartment is absolutely the best person to call the police.

When he dials the emergency number he gets put through to the local handlers who will send a car quickly.

Calling his mother, who then calls AirBnB, who then call some other AirBnB office, who then call the police introduces a bunch of delay and missed information.

We don't want people to think that calling a private company is the right thing to do here, where a crime is being committed.

It would certainly have been better if the guy in the apartment had called the police, but airbnb should have called them anyway.

AirBnB certainly need better protocols for this kind of thing.

It's only hinted at inthe article, but a few people die by suicide in hotel rooms. AirBnB staff need to know how to respond better.

> I really think AirBnB should have called the police

I can see that quickly becoming a new form of SWATTING

Unlike a hotel which has to maintain security staff, and often a hotel doctor aren't Airbnb shifting the burden of their own business costs onto society?

In this case the mother and or police?

>> the emergency number of the country he's in, 112 in Europe

There are some exceptions so its worth checking before you travel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_telephone_nu...

On a cellphone it doesn't matter whether you type 112 or 911 or press the "emergency services" button. They all do the same, there is a special emergency signal that it sends to the network. That signal makes it a priority call (it even works when the network is overloaded and also works through roaming / other networks that you would normally not be allowed to use), the entered number doesn't matter because the network will automatically connect such emergency calls to the appropriate local emergency services.

Did you read the article? In some countries 112 will get you police. In others it will get you fire. In most, but not all, it'll get you to the emrgency call handling centre.

The article talks about the son messaging his mother, and then says "by the time his mother realized that Airbnb would not give her his address and that she had to get it from him, he said, his host had cut off Internet access".

At a guess, I'd say the son didn't have roaming, and had connected to the host's wifi to send messages. The article also said "Mr. Lopez did not realize his phone would allow him to call and said he would have been scared to speak out loud into the phone in any event".

The son could even have been using an ipad/ipod to send messages, so it wasn't unreasonable to think a phone call might not have been possible at all.

You should be able to call 112 even without a SIM card, not to mention roaming.

In Germany, not any more since 2009 due to massive amounts of abuse (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Kein-Notruf-ohne-SIM-...).

Heh, if I were to commit a bank or casino robbery, I'd just have ten or twenty guys reporting fake hostage, rape and murder cases at the same time so that the police is spread too thin to come for aid.

You used to be able to make emergency calls in the UK without a valid SIM card, but it's been required since 2009 [1][2] (apparently to cut down on untraceable hoax calls).

There is a technical difference though, between 'Roaming' and using another network in the same country. I have roaming enabled on my Vodafone account, but I can't connect to O2's UK network when Vodafone is out of range, because the other UK networks are on a list of not-permitted networks. The technical solution is called LSS - "Limited Service State" (sometimes referred to as "Emergency Roaming", and that's what allows us to 'camp' on another network to make an emergency call, but it's a different technical implementation to roaming.

Here's a thought though…if someone visits the UK from abroad, and hasn't activated roaming, is their SIM card considered 'valid' enough for the sake of LSS/Emergency Roaming?

[1] http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Using-giffgaff/Emergency-Ro... (GiffGaff is a UK mobile operator, but the requirement stands for all UK operators).

[2] http://media.ofcom.org.uk/news/2009/next-steps-to-ensure-ava... (Ofcom is the UK regulator for communications industries).

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