Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls
wpri.com
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A few weeks ago, I was awarded one of the highest civilian public awards from the Commandant of the US Coast Guard in DC for my volunteer web mapping work during Harvey. That work helped coordinate 700 helicopter sorties and save 1700 lives.
I’ve been thinking — and talking with Emergency Responders — about what an up to date 911 would look like. Location is a huge part of it. Texting, sending images and videos would also be on the timeline.
Consider how much real-time location info — and live HD video streams — can 1 mobile phone produce, and how close to none of that is available in an emergency situation.
Consider how 911 is but one service, and that this is a worldwide problem. And that smartphones are worldwide too, and that there’s hundreds of millions of them.
I’m starting to plan out next steps. Connecting smartphones and emergency responders. Being a worldwide emergency digital-first dispatch service.
Imagine!
See https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/ and the 112 (the EU’s 911) work on AML. That service, piggybacking on SMS to send location, is supported by both Android and iOS but is only available in a few countries.
We are experiencing this very thing with regards to Fire dispatch, with all manner of fireman 'apps'. All of which are different with different protocols. So much so, that we now refuse to support any of them.
As stated in a comment above, I think that this should be a global nonprofit. Mapping tools should be made for free to emergency responders. That’s one way to go around the financial question.
I think the trouble you'll run into is the various agencies involved (since it's been quite a while I don't really remember), e.g. the Sheriff's departments run the PSAPs and I believe the State requires reporting for funding. And since these are government contracts you have to deal with getting those contracts and whatever contracts they already have with incumbents.
Not only that but there's a ton of different equipment out there, and everybody is using different stuff.
Anyway not saying it can't be done and that it can't be done efficiently (because believe me it can), but it's 100% government so you're gonna need some patience, good sales guys, and lobbyists.
edit: congrats on the award BTW, that sounds like you did some great work.
My plan is to do this as a nonprofit. Build great mapping tools and offer them for free to all worldwide emergency responders.
PSAPs have a role in this, of course, but I am also wondering how much smartphone emergency requests could be routed directly to responders. Think of the Coast Guard’s VHF 16 emergency channel. It doesn’t go to 911 — it goes straight to the Coast Guard.
For those who can read/understand (or are learning) French, here’s a recent radio interview (there’s a photo of the medal as well in the article):
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/premiere/emissions/medium-large/...
The challenge for any private company is that the solution needs to be completely integrated into both the device and behavioral patterns need to be re-learned. For most people (in the US), calling 9-11 has been engrained since they were a child. In a moment of panic, it's the first or second reaction... not loading a 3rd party app. While not impossible, convincing Apple or Google to let you own "SOS+" capabilities would be a tall order...
Spot has succeed in the adventure market by owning the device and behavior change being easy to manage with no cell service. Just about everyone I know who has a mountain home, sailboat, or frequently travels to remote places – has purchased Spot.
If I was a VC, I would be interested in a roll-up strategy... GEOS and Spot aren't the only solutions.
While getting Apple and Google on board may seem like a tall order (I’m sure it is), both have implemented 112’s AML spec natively. Google is also driving this with their Android ELS efforts.
Having emergency responders, and public opinion, on the side of this happening should convince both A and G to look into this.
... and yes, replace the SOS dialpad (!) with something better.
I am, and it scares the hell out of me. If I have to choose between having emergency responders possibly not being able to locate me, and having the government be able to track my every move along with everyone else's, it's not even a hard choice: I'll take the former as by far the lesser of the two evils.
Being able to reliably hide my location is every bit as important to personal freedom as being able to encrypt my communications. If that means I have to take some additional steps to summon help in an emergency, so be it. It's a price I'll happily pay. Life's quality metric is a vector, and safety is not the only dimension.
Right or wrong, I think you're in the extreme minority here.
Edit: I'm not necessarily speaking for myself here, but then I'm in a low-risk area and demographic, so am not especially likely to need 911. But I think the average "man on the street" would not give a second thought about it.
I don't think that's true as often as our pessimistic sides would assume:
People risk their lives for freedom, in fighting wars, in challenging oppressors, in trying to escape. To say it more dramatically: A few people once agreed to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their honor for liberty, not the other way around.
Yes, but in the past that's required a warrant. Has that changed?
It’s only about sending your location when you specifically ask for help in an emergency situation.
—
That being said, mobile phones are inherently trackable by mobile carriers using triangulation. I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth considering that staying untrackable with a mobile is, as far as I understand, fundamentally impossible.
No, it's not. Go back and re-read the comment I was responding to. Pay particular attention to the following passages:
> Consider how much real-time location info — and live HD video streams — can 1 mobile phone produce, and how close to none of that is available in an emergency situation.
> Consider how 911 is but one service, and that this is a worldwide problem. And that smartphones are worldwide too, and that there’s hundreds of millions of them.
The GP is specifically talking about expanding the capability beyond just location and beyond just 911, and talking about this as if it were a foregone conclusion that this will be an unalloyed good. That is what scares me.
I apologize if my original comment was not clear, or could leave itself open to a different interpretation.
I really did mean that when someone in an emergency situation needs help, presently, they do not have the ability to send their location, a text message, an image or a video.
That’s it — I was only referring to emergency situations, and anything that I am discussing would be user-initiated.
Oh, sorry, I didn't see that. (This thread has grown a lot of tentacles.)
> I was only referring to emergency situations
That was very unclear. When you wrote:
> Consider how 911 is but one service
that sure sounded to me like you were advocating making this information available very broadly.
It's an emergency, you are calling an emergency line. That line should have priority access to information while you are calling for help.
Don't want any of that?... Well I guess don't call the emergency line... or whatever...
Your argument is very similar to the argument advanced by the government for key escrow and other backdoors in encryption systems: this mechanism will only be used with proper legal safeguards to catch "bad guys". Don't you want that?
No, I don't. I really don't.
I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.
I can't.
> I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.
I didn't say that it's completely unacceptable. What I said was that talking about expanding this kind of data sharing is if there were a consensus that only good things could result scares me.
The reason I'm OK with my cell phone today is that the default assumption today is that my location is private, or at least under my control. There could be a back door, but that is a risk I'm willing to take.
What scares me is that we seem to be oozing slowly towards bringing up a whole generation who have never known privacy, and so have no idea what its value is.
Is that assumption accurate? Cell providers are already tracking your location and providing the data to resellers.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...
Yes. That's why 1) the story you linked to describes how users are prompted for consent and 2) the leakage of this data is sufficiently scandalous to be newsworthy.
I'm reminded a bit of the sanctuary city debate. Sanctuary cities are doing their best to let anyone call for help without worrying about whether immigration will be the first responders.
Anyway, I think there's some excessive paranoia in this discussion, but there is nonetheless a kernel of a valid point.
If you're emitting any sort of signal, the government can track you. That ship sailed about 70 years ago.
I led a Hacking 4 Defence style problem solving sessions that saw the development of an idea that included:
open source review of native app source code
partnering with national carriers to embed app on device at point of sale
provide Humanitarian and Disaster Relief(HADR) “ground truth” immediately overlayed on a heat map to reduce disaster reconnaissance needs(ie Haiti)
everyone in the 3rd world has a smartphone.
tie the app into semiautomatic mesh network functionality(we saw mobile cell towers fail in power outages here in Christchurch, Nz in 2011 Earthquake).
tie the app into emergency HADR network(tethered dirigible with suspended coms/retrans)
*tie the app into an emergency mobile network consisting of coms/retrains in every next generation first responders vehicle.
So many opportunities to leverage off the shelf tech for first responder & disaster management intelligence gathering and dissemination done in an appropriate way with high public trust.
Mobile CAD and RMS are catching on as well so in many departments, first responders can see and hear everything going on in dispatch from their tablets or laptops if they want. They can see what calls are active, what units are assigned to them, and actually interact with the caller if it is allowed. Again, this isn't always that useful. Staff in dispatch almost always have a better understanding of what is going on big picture wise and are already on top of allocating resources and clearing information. Going around them is not all that helpful. Silent dispatch is nice for beat work. It's great when CAD automatically creates incidents in RMS that LE can easily pull into reports... including recordings of the 911 calls etc.
There are popular smartphone apps like active 911, Bryx911, edispatch ,and iamresponding that are great for first responders, especially volunteers. These apps sync with the CAD system in dispatch and offer alert/response, mapping, and messaging features.
The space changes slowly, but it is very much changing and adapting to the smartphone era. FirstNet will probably accelerate these kinds of changes, which is a good thing... but I am sure it will introduce its own set of problems.
I recently witnessed an intoxicated man collapse on the street in front of me, so I was first on scene and had to call our local version of 911 (I live in Australia). Of course I am asked where I am, the address and street, and I had no idea. I was at the bus stop I walk to everyday, surrounded by building with names I couldn't read very well at night, and no street signs near me. I was eventually able to work it out, but that was precious moments we lost that could have made things significantly worse in a different case.
The man was passed out cold (he had hit his head very hard when he fell) and had a very weak pulse and weak breathing, I performed CPR until the ambulance arrived and he started to regain consciousness. The ambulance took a very long time to arrive and then find us, I had to get other bystanders to stand out in the street to wave and shout. When the ambulance left he was fully conscious and able to converse with the officers.
This whole thing of course seemed absurd, as we were all carrying smartphones equipped with HD cameras, GPS, and radios.
In another case, during the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, I was lucky to be involved in a volunteer group which started offering free support services to those on the ground. We ran a text information service where people could text in questions, including asking for the nearest help center based on their location (which they had to provide via text). We would likewise respond over text. We were able to help people find the help they needed, by making it available over text we also were able to reduce the already overloaded cellular services (voice calls are much more expensive than text). We helped dispatch appropriate emergency services to people in need, but it was still very much copying address information as text between various jury rigged systems (written by us during the incident).
I hope we can improve these systems in the coming years, it is especially important to improve them to be redundant to things such as cellular system overload (which is very common during major crisis).
Anyway, it's a great initiative, and one where the possible privacy implications seem to have been mitigated, while providing a massive benefit.
[1] https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/new-emergency-11...
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sp0n.citizen&h...
Simultaneously, get it in to small rescue outfits (For example, a 26 mile lake close to my home has a volunteer boat rescue service) for free and promote it around closed communities (Hillwalkers, climbers, or in my case, marina members) where it can easily spread.
Building the software upfront for 911 integration means when the big boys finally take notice, you're ready to get involved with them asap, before anyone else can
Its a risky upfront strategy but it helps with what others have discussed in this thread - When you need Apple to support you to integrate further with them, you're the one holding the cards and presenting an easier option than building out their own alternative.
Chew the world up one city at a time
Just FYI, if you are ever in Oakland and have trouble, DO NOT CALL 911. Call the police directly at 510-777-3333
This Oakland 911 problem is, I think, the biggest single technical problem with Oakland as a whole, and it's been this way for 20 years...
That said, I'd never feel safe living somewhere where 911 didn't answer immediately and have an average response time within a few minutes.
Can you share any insight into how things got so bad? What failure of politics or market forces led to this situation? What needs to change before everyone who needs help can get it when they need it?
The recent fury directed at the handful of police officers who did not enter this or that school with an active shooter comes to mind. People have the expectation that police officers are required to die for us. Imagine being told by someone who already hates you, that you are supposed to die for them.
It feels like we are awfully entitled when it comes to the police. We expect them to serve us with the highest integrity, kindness, & selflessness, while offering them mediocre pay, disgust, & hatred in exchange.
The body cam of that man in the hotel corridor being just one of the latest.
I can't say I blame would-be "good cop" cadets deciding not to join the force to be associated with these acts; the willingness to protect bad cops by leadership seems, from the outside, to mean the entire system is rotten and impossible to change from within.
The reason "the narrative" exists, I think, is that there's a widespread perception that regardless of the circumstances of the shooting -- even if the evidence clearly shows the police shot an unarmed victim in the back multiple times, for instance -- the police tend to get off on the grounds that they "felt threatened." This contributes to a feeling that the police are held to a lesser standard than non-police suspects, rather than the same standard.
People in minority communities around the U.S. have said for generations that the police abused them; I give that some serious credibility. Also, there is much more to abuse than killings; there are many reports on widespread abuses by police departments, such as Baltimore and New Orleans.
I will add that in at least some other countries police do their job and shoot hardly anyone; I think in Scotland it's on the order of one per decade.
If any of the people in this thread wish to have a go at that, try here: http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2018
Pick a year, note how many police shootings are listed there for that year, then generate 20 random numbers in the range [1, N] where N is the number of said shootings, and look at the corresponding killings. That should give some reasonable insights.
In my home area 911 picks up immediately and police and EMS would have been there in under 15 minutes.
This story below (headline about how the shooter subsequently died) explains that there were two alterations. My friend (the victim) called 911 during the first altercation, 40 minutes before the second altercation where he was subsequently shot. He stayed alive for long enough to call 911 a second time. Sadly they didn't make it there in time. When the police arrived they couldn't get anyone to answer the door so they left. Matthew was found by a friend.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/06/15/oakland-slaying-suspe...
I recommend that whatever city you are in, you have a shortcut to the police on your home screen (perhaps buried a little, so you don't accidentally butt dial it).
In one city, the mayor threatened to put a checklist on the ballot so people could decide which types of emergencies would be responded to, and the top vote-getters would be funded.
In another, a city council member publicly told his constituents "the police are not here to protect you. If you want to be safe, get a gun and a dog."
In Las Vegas for several years recently, the police department stopped responding to traffic crashes unless someone was killed. The insurance companies put pressure on the city to reverse that.
Unfortunately, it seems that all of the "homeland security" money that the feds send to the locals goes into military-grade weapons, and not into basic services like 911 and police patrols.
I would like to see a city sell the tanks it gets from the feds and use the money for 911, and other needed services.
Your post and example is right on the money. This is incredibly scary and seems to be happening more and more as governments aren't allocating funds to do critical functions.
This is one of the great aporias of civic discord.
In Las Vegas? Really?
I'd like for my fellow citizens to agree to fund the police properly, as well as the schools. I know "taxes" are a bad word, but either we agree to pay for these things or they will underperform.
I know there is inefficiency and corruption, but if the budget is $100m and $20m is lost to inefficiency, cutting the budget to $60m won't cure the inefficiency, it will only cut the available funding to from $80m to $48m. (Also, I'm not convinced that government is so inefficient relative to other large organizations, such as every large company; politicians promising 'more efficiency' seems like a promise of hand-wavy magic that will get something (more resources) for nothing.)
Well, they aren't there to protect you (at least not in the US). There is no protection requirement for police. Police are there to investigate crimes and catch criminals.
"The Supreme Court ruled [...] that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband [...]"
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
The device might send a Geocode, but reverse geo-coding (turning a long/lat into a human readable place) is a highly inaccurate thing. Secondly, most responders have no means of turning a long/lat into a point on the map, short of using their personal phone. Next, altitude is not factored in. Imagine being in a downtown office building. If nobody is downstairs to guide responders, or if the caller was unable to speak, they will have a really difficult time determining just which building/floor you are in.
Its all gotten much worse with the advent of mobile/VOIP and now, WIFI phone systems where your phone can move. Its a system ill equipped to handle it.
Three words for you ...
Sure, it doesn't help with altitude, although maybe a fourth word could be added for that, and "what floor are you on?" is a simple question to ask and understand the answer to anyways.
If people can be dispatched to a location, getting the altitude a few minutes later is still a good use of time. Not to mention, if you're in a tall building you've also probably got extra coworkers or neighbors to go to the elevator or go to the ground floor to help the responders get to the victim quickly.
Also, phones could be configured to automatically and quickly read the 3 words as soon as they connect to 911 so if they're calling a 911 call center that has not adopted any location technology the information can still be transmitted quickly, accurately and automatically in under 2 seconds to any phone without proprietary software on the receiving end.
Why? That sure seems like it should be trivial.
> altitude is not factored in
Why not? GPS can tell you your altitude.
Initially, the providers send the location of the tower they are on and the triangulation data with the call. A couple of seconds later they will send more accurate GPS coordinates for most calls, which are usually pretty good.
Sometimes there are issues where a provider will send a call to the wrong PSAP because the users location is unclear. This is usually fixed if the 911 operator rebids the call... it will be routed correctly almost 100% the second time and is generally quicker than a manual attended transfer.
I am not saying that they couldn't do better, but this article insinuates there is some kind of major problem where there isn't.
All that being said, people with specific risk situations (an elderly parent they care for or a disabled child for example) should call the business line for your local 911 public safety answering point and have them add specific information to the file associated with your number.
That's great that where you are it seems to work well, but it's a big country and Apple is in a much better position to know if meaningful improvements can be made nationwide (and it sounds like they're not going for "pretty good", but for "best possible"). Also, RapidSOS seems to be targeting urban areas where GPS is notoriously spotty.
I wish my day-to-day GPS initialised and obtained an initial fix that quickly. Usually it needs at least five minutes, sometimes over an hour.
From an earlier job I vaguely remember that a NavStar cold-fix requires two or three minutes at a minimum with optimal conditions.
Cellphones have Assisted-GPS where they get satellite orbit information and accurate time from the cellular network, and sometimes can offload computation to it, so they can get faster locks.
Apparently it was developed for 911 reasons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS
It’s a tangent, but I’ve been trying to find the answer to this question for a while, and it seems that you are one of the few people with the expertise to answer it:
Would an MNVO be able to offer a meaningfully different privacy policy to the carrier it is buying wholesale from?
The context is the recent stories of telcos being caught selling location data to cops via AGPS requests for-sale, outside of the E911 system. If, say T-Mobile sold AGPS requests on telephone numbers via an API, could an MNVO on the T-Mobile network protect its customers? Is there a particular part of infrastructure which an MNVO would need to control to ensure this?
“Look at this awesome life saving feature that only works in wealthy parts of the US!”
Aren't emergency services pretty clearly the government's job? You already pay a fee on your cell bill specifically to cover the cost of 911 services to your local and state governments.
Yes, large device manufacturers should help fund the infrastructure they build product support into their products for. You might disagree with my opinion, but I don’t see the opinion as being wildly out of line.
If Apple doesn’t fund it, and per mobile line 911 taxes don’t cover it, everyone’s taxes have to go up to support Apples enhanced feature and the marketing goodwill they’ll receive. Does that seem fair?
If you want to argue that Apple et al should have to pay for their use of, e.g., GPS, I could understand that. (Not agree, but understand.) GPS has enabled high-value features to be built into Apple's products. On the other hand, Amber alert and 911 service support are literally mandated by the government. Apple cannot choose to not include them. (Though in this case, they could choose to not support RapidSOS, at least until it's mandated as well.)
Edit: And yes, it seems entirely fair that taxes could go up to enable additional government services.
It is, but everyone has been avoiding taxes, so here we are with a supposedly first world country with third world infrastructure. Hence, my suggestion.
You have to engineer for the world we have, not a perfect world.
Your argument is that Apple doesn't pay taxes, so they should be taxed to cover the cost of 911 upgrades.
If Apple is so good at "avoiding taxes", how would you possibly make them pay for the 911 upgrades anyway? If you are capable of crafting such an inescapable tax law, why not just apply that to general tax law?
> You have to engineer for the world we have, not a perfect world.
Nothing here is about engineering. This is a proposed cash grab. Apple is successful so we should just take their money, not with reasonable tax law, but with targeted asset seizure.
You say “cash grab”, I say “corporate responsibility”.
This viewpoint makes me sad. It's like someone built a house for a homeless family and then they get criticized for not covering the cost of utilities for the lifetime of the house.
Likewise, I see it as handing someone a good or service they desperately need with no thought to the recurring costs involved. Just because you believe you've done a good deed doesn't mean you've necessarily helped (see food aid in Africa that has ruined their ag markets).
Pushing too much of that onto a corporation who makes phones is just silly. It's bloody hard to make any kind of argument that it's even remotely their responsibility.
> If Apple doesn’t fund it, and per mobile line 911 taxes don’t cover it, everyone’s taxes have to go up to support Apples enhanced feature and the marketing goodwill they’ll receive. Does that seem fair?
If tax doesn't cover it, then it should simply not happen, and you stick with the current level of location services provided by the cell phone company. Not happy with that? You probably ought to start a petition to raise people's taxes to fund your local 911 operation better so they can do this.
Don't want to pay tax for it? Shit, who's going to pay for public services if that's your attitude?
If Apple starts subsidizing the cost of modern 911 (and building a feature into their mobile operating system to make 911 more accessible is surely subsidizing the cost of upgrading failing public safety infrastructure), they need to bear some responsibility for the system as a whole.
If richer areas see benefits from this and start to drop the amount they spend on something like a private, enterprise mobile 911 product, then other departments are going to follow suit, and suddenly you have less 911 support in poorer/more rural areas because that's where fewer people have iPhones, yet departments are still following national budgeting/spending trends.
What this implies is that everyone should do the bare minimum required by law, because if they do anything more they should expect to shoulder billions in infrastructure costs that would otherwise be correctly carried by the government.
> If richer areas see benefits from this and start to drop the amount they spend on something like a private, enterprise mobile 911 product, then other departments are going to follow suit, and suddenly you have less 911 support in poorer/more rural areas because that's where less people have iPhones, yet departments are still following national budgeting/spending trends.
You are arguing that lowered support costs will actually decrease support. This makes no sense.
Welcome to the world of government services, where it's literally, by definition, a different place than the capitalist business world.
>because Apple enables a feature that helps 911, they should cover he costs of 911 service.
Yes, there are services where our society has decided that the public government is more appropriate to manage that service, generally because competition motives would cause disadvantaged groups to receive proportionally less service.
If Apple is going to wade into one of these areas, they need to play by the rules of that public service, they can't just treat it like another business metric to compete with.
>What this implies is that everyone should do the bare minimum required by law, because if they do anything more they should expect to shoulder billions in infrastructure costs that would otherwise be correctly carried by the government.
Yes, I believe this is the correct (ethical) way to think about these motivations, because it removes some amount of capitalist competition from the equation, again, in an area that is not appropriate for private competition in this manner.
>You are arguing that lowered support costs will actually decrease support.
Yes, do you understand how budgeting works in government?
> If Apple is going to wade into one of these areas, they need to play by the rules of that public service, they can't just treat it like another business metric to compete with.
Apple is not attempting to get in the business of running 911 call centers. They're sending an extra bit of data that call centers can choose to access. That's all. There is no "private competition" with the public service. This is no different than Apple supporting the Amber Alert system or AT&T providing your location to 911 services when they are able to.
> Yes, do you understand how budgeting works in government?
Do you? You're proposing that urban centers will see a drop in cost for 911 support (an outcome which by the way would be nice but is not supported by anything other than wild guesswork on your part) and then rural areas who have not experienced a drop in cost will lower their own budgets for some random reason.
Why do imagine Bumblefuck, Arkansas is looking at New York City's 911 costs instead of their own?
Because I work in police software tech, and this is how they think, as nonsensical as it is.
Consumers loved plastics, stores loved plastics, everybody loved plastics when it arrived because it was a tremendous improvement upon what existed before, which was mainly cardboard, paper, and glass containers. But trash companies had NO way to handle the quantities other than with landfills. The companies that used the most plastics saw the writing on the wall, they were going to be charged tremendous amounts for the plastic they were putting out. This is what created the recycling programs as we know it: "In order to avoid regulation and the banning of plastic products they used, the beverage and packaging industry pushed municipal recycling programs."[1] Impressive marketing work by pepsi/coke/fritolay to pass the buck.
Apple isn't doing the same thing, because they aren't literally trashing the world, this 911 feature does not create anywhere near such a negative externality, but to say that "we already pay our government for this" doesn't mean that the the corporation is off the hook, "we did our part, now you handle the 99% of effort and costs of getting this feature we are promoting to work, oh and you will need to assume the blame if and when things don't work". I don't think it should work that way...
[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/recycling-my...
This is tangential, but I'm not sure I buy this. It's not as if glass, cardboard, paper, and metal containers were evaporating into thin air. Pre-recycling, these were also all headed to landfills with few exceptions (e.g. glass Coke bottles).
> Apple isn't doing the same thing, because they aren't literally trashing the world, this 911 feature does not create anywhere near such a negative externality, but to say that "we already pay our government for this" doesn't mean that the the corporation is off the hook, "we did our part, now you handle the 99% of effort and costs of getting this feature we are promoting to work, oh and you will need to assume the blame if and when things don't work". I don't think it should work that way...
As you noted, this situation is far different. It creates no negative externality, because call centers can simply not upgrade and there is no change for them. Or they can upgrade and realistically that will involve paying a fee and they'll be done. The call centers are not bearing "99% of the effort and costs".
Off topic: if you're often bored while driving, learn the NATO phonetic alphabet using license plates around you. It helps me four or five times a year when reading off things to people in customer service. The beauty of it is that people who don't know it can still understand it when said to them.
F for what? S? F is now Frank and S is now Sugar, because Foxtrot and Sierra often just get "was that s or f? What is Soxtrot?" it's ridiculous. I think everyone should be taught the NATO phonetic alphabet in school. When I'm talking to someone on the phone, I don't want to have to resort to Apple Banana Chocolate like we're all 5.
Also, I live just down the road from Guelph and worked in Guelph for a while :)
So, the solution to not wanting to feel self conscious while saying decidedly simple and inoffensive words, and for task simple enough that people could probably be given a simple sentence or two instruction (choose a word that doesn't sound like another one) and could come up with valid examples (like you just did), is to force them to learn a semi-universal and generic set of mostly nonsense words and names?
I did tech support for years, and any time I had to have someone type out a specific set of characters, it was not hard to just rely on common names, animals, or other extremely common words. The amount of wasted man-years in teaching and testing a phonetic alphabet for such little benefit would be mind boggling. The military has very specific requirements which change the cost benefit analysis greatly (verbal communication during battle conditions, for one), but those don't really apply to most people. It's trivial to come up with something that works well on the fly.
The NATO alphabet isn't just used by NATO, it's used worldwide by civil and commercial aviation personnel (pilots & ATC). There's a reason for this: these words were carefully selected because they're unique and won't be confused with other words.
It absolutely should be taught in school; it's not hard at all, and everyone has problems spelling words out on noisy communication channels (like cellphones).
Why does this seem like it should be wrong? XD
I'm now imagining 5 year olds field stripping, cleaning and re-assembling semi-automatic rifles like miniature Marine snipers, hahahaha.
I was field stripping and re-assembling AKM in school (just like everyone else in the class), on the clock, under watchful eye of a real war veteran. And shooting .22 rifles in school's basement. Not a big deal. Admittedly we were older than 5 years, but not by much.
The problem is when an improvised phonetic alphabet is being used because the speaker doesn't know a standardized phonetic alphabet. These people almost never take care to pick words that don't sound like other words. They think they're being helpful but often they're being less intelligible than if they weren't trying to use any phonetic alphabet at all. That is where the real benefit lies in teaching people to do it properly. It doesn't take long at all to teach a child the NATO phoenetic alphabet; your objection to the time it takes reeks of anti-intellectualism.
There can be scenarios, I think, where we (society) do not want to deter someone from reporting an emergency due to fear of being identified. Off the top of my head, consider a situation involving organized crime taking place, where call centre staff (or law enforcement) may be compelled to leak the identity of a witness.
What global db do you envision that has everyone's accurate voice print?
If you want to report organized crime that involves the upper echelons of power, don't use cellphones at all.
I think that depends on which country you're in. In some places it's possible to buy a phone and SIM card with cash while wearing a baseball cap and hoody, and if you're prepared to pay huge pre-pay roaming charges you could use that phone in countries where it's not so easy to obtain a phone anonymously. Authorities will get a log of approximately where the phone was whenever it was switched on, so you'd only switch it on while calling from a crowded place. It's not perfect, but is it worse than restricting yourself to public telephones?
You're mentioning things like organized crime reporting, which are not emergencies. In that case, I'd expect someone to talk to someone in the police department in person, or through an intermediary lawyer - not 911.
edit: added the implied consent thought
I may have been unclear but I said crime "taking place", implying crime in progress. I think any serious crime in progress (theft, assault, murder, etc.) deserves urgent attention, regardless of it being undertaken by mafia or gangs or amateurs or professionals.
For other types of reports where you have the luxury of calling from an alternative location, you might call the local police or other services rather than the national emergency number (or at least that is how the emergency services are designed to operate in the UK)
However if anonymity is your primary concern then you're much better off using a burner or pay phone rather than your primary handset - regardless of the number you choose to dial.
911 will always get your phone number, to make call-backs possible.
How long until this information is available to law enforcement?
You don't understand, they aren't actively looking at the data so it's not spying. It's just being archived at our central servers for important future use, and any access is subject to warrants (for now). We are working with Google to bring this important life-saving terrorist-defeating child porn-detecting feature to Android. Think of the Children!
(I really hope it only sends out the information exactly while the phone is calling 911. Maybe in the future we'll have big debates about whether people should be able to "walk dark" without a mobile tracking device in the streets.)
Maybe in 30 years we figure out you are one of the undesirables of society, and we'll have an easy time getting rid of you and your kind. It's a great boon for society to preserve all data.
The context here is recording pertinent information when a person chooses to request emergency law enforcement, medical, and fire services.
This is a great feature given 911's notoriously poor ability to locate mobile callers, but let's be real: this shifts the Overton window.
There are a lot of non-obvious ways seemingly-innocent data can harm marginalized groups.
Correct. I'm not asking the private company "RapidSOS" to relay my location to the government. The endless string of leaks makes me distrust companies with data. Every party I depend on having good security is a new party that might screw up, or intentionally misuse the data.
The involuntary risk surface area is already large enough.
If your concern is specifically about the 3rd party getting the data because they're acting as intermediary, I can understand that. I don't agree, but understand.
This allows first responders to get the information from people calling 911. That’s a good thing!
The reality version involves multiple calls or working with a provider and can take up to an hour to get a "Stage 2" (accurate) location. It doesn't happen in real time. "Stage 1" data gives Dispatch a lat/long, with a confidence percentage.
- Your phone sends your broad location to your provider constantly, and your precise location (when enabled) to tons of applications. If you are worried about LEO having your location, 911 services is not the first battleground I would choose.
- There could be a legal argument, I assume, that calling 911 acts as consent of the precise tracking of location for the purposes of emergency response, while blanket collection without a warrant would be a violation of civil liberties.
Well in this case that's entirely the point, people are calling law enforcement. But if you were concerned that someone could just pull up your location at any time, their system only gets your location data when you call 911:
https://info.rapidsos.com/blog/bringing-apple-device-locatio...
> When this feature is made available later this year in an iOS software update, Apple phones will send fast and accurate device location to the NG911 Clearinghouse when a user dials 9-1-1.
That said, law enforcement can already look up where your phone is based on tower triangulation. This is just about getting more detailed information to first responders more quickly.
Not always. Sometimes it's a medical emergency, or a fire. Law enforcement's access to precise location information should be limited to strictly only emergency scenarios that require their involvement. Any other use should be protected behind a warrant, but it's not clear that this is the case. This is a big shiny object for them that would 'help' in a wide variety of non-emergency situations, so expect abuse.
> law enforcement can already look up where your phone is based on tower triangulation
Tower triangulation is not very accurate. This technology is about being able to locate someone within a handful of meters, not within a a few hundred km^2. It's orders of magnitude more powerful than the current technology they have.
Did you miss the part where I linked to and quoted that this data is only sent from your phone to the database when you call 911? In non-emergency situations no one will be able to search this database for your location because your location is not in the database.
Right, and there's no possibility for this system being abused in non-emergency situations? Oh please.
Automatically letting 911 know where you are when you call is something that saves lots of lives, trying to improve the speed and accuracy of that is a good thing that should not be controversial at all.
911 service has gone through a few different capability upgrades.
Basic 911: You communicate the nature of the emergency and it's location by voice.
Enhanced 911: The call center receives your landline phone number and looks up your address from a database.
E911 Phase 1: The call center receives the mobile phone number and the location of the cell tower taking the call.
E911 Phase 2: The call center receives the mobile phone number and the phone's location.
http://www.marioncoks.net/Departments/EmergencyCommunication...
Apple is simply implementing the new standard here.
Hasn't 911 location been shared via gps location in pretty much every cellphone for the past decade?
I remember shitty verizon kyocera clamshells advertising gps for 911 in like 2004.
> Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP.
> Code division multiple access (CDMA) networks tend to use handset-based radiolocation technologies, which are technically more similar to radionavigation.
> Mobile phone users may also have a selection to permit location information to be sent to non-emergency phone numbers or data networks, so that it can help people who are simply lost or want other location-based services.
Presumably Apple is going to share their Wifi-assisted data instead of raw GPS signal or radiolocation data.
Looking at my location in a dense urban zone, 300m would narrow my location down to roughly 300 houses. Good enough to get emergency services on the way, not nearly good enough to render assistance if the caller can't speak/doesn't know where they are.
What happens if "Location Services" has been disabled by MDM policy, or was never enabled since the device was setup?
On a new iOS11 device, if you decline to enable Location Services during setup, it stays disabled. Once enabled, it can no longer be disabled, and the system service "Share My Location" cannot be disabled, even if all other app and system services are blocked from accessing Location data.
device owner decides when to opt-out
device owner does not need to explain why
Just because something is technically possible with a lot of preparation, doesn't make it a continuously usable source of information, especially in retrospect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be wary, but we shouldn't practice all-or-nothing thinking.
Okay. It'll be high accuracy when you give the exact location to the dispatcher, though. Or are you using 911 for non-emergency calls? Keeping your location secret from the dispatcher in an emergency essentially means you're preventing an appropriate emergency response.
> it's not logged continuously.
Sure about that?
> And it's not readily available to anyone who wants it.
No change. Apple has not proposed posting your location on Twitter when you dial 911.
> And we are usually surrounded by others so things can't always be pinpointed to an individual.
Uh. You are wildly incorrect. Your cellphone is transmitting its location all the time. Assuming it can reasonably be called your cellphone, that location is definitely pinpointed to an individual.
Maybe your brain finds it convenient to shut off there, but not for many of us. We have experience reporting crime but don't want to be identified because the rest of the criminal's cronies could turn on us.
Without knowing how our information travels once it leaves our hands, retaliation from crooked government organizations, gangs, small time mobs, abusive family members is all too possible. And we all know how information wants to travel.
Providing the location has literally nothing to do with anonymity in this scenario. If your cell phone is not traceable to you, then it doesn't matter if your 911 call is accompanied by location info automatically. You're going to provide that same location info to the dispatcher anyway. And the criminals involved will also know the location because they are there committing the crime.
full stop
This trivially becomes a back door for malware that can initiate phone calls, by circumventing ordinary OS security and control.
Maybe there's a reason to intercept location data (e.g. cheating spouse), via a completed call that transmits a silent audio channel. So the software lands on the device, initiates a 911 call just to obtain the location of the device and send it to a botnet, and immediately hangs up.
Mission Accomplished: spouse is confirmed to be cheating. At the expense of an extra ring to 911.
This example is facetious. There are other reasons to snoop on a single individual's location data.
Now the calls are being triggered by remote software control, with your phone being hijacked as a proxy device, and who is left to blame?
I'm not saying that I don't think there is a use for this feature, but your claims are bordering on the absurd.
Why are you calling 911 if you don't want emergency services to know where you are?
Not saying this happens, but the only way it could happen is if the guy calling has some guarantee of not being identified.
I'd much prefer having a criminal get away and saving a life thanks to the 911 call than him getting away and letting someone die because he had no way to call 911 anonymously without disclosing his device's location.
What would the punishment be for a situation where you leave your phone unattended, and it gets misused?
I suppose it could work with some kind of low-speed acoustic modem combined with an "intents"-style protocol. You'd hear a short sequence of beeps, your phone would vibrate and show a dialog "Caller wants to know your GPS location", and when clicking OK, your phone would send back your location. In the other direction, when initiating a call with metadata, the receiving party would play a beep when ready (like a fax) and your phone would play off the metadata for the call -- this would basically be implemented like query string parameters on the phone number URL.
I have a large family and hotel pools are always a draw. After an hour or two at the pool, the kids started getting out and toweling off. Our three-year-old took his life jacket off to to dry himself and my wife and I started gathering our things. Some of the kids were still in the hot tub so we weren’t exactly in a rush.
After what felt like a very short period of time, my wife says “Where’s Zach?” in that motherly-urgent tone. Just as my eyes focused on the pool, I heard a shriek from my wife unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life. There is our three-year-old boy, face down in the pool, absolutely still.
I jumped in the pool and pulled him into my arms and set him on the deck on the opposite side of the pool. To this day I have no idea how I climbed out of that pool with him in my arms but I was in and out of that pool seconds. As I looked down at him - he was this awful, unnatural color and I knew we were in a very serious situation.
I’m not a trained medical professional. Like most, I’ve had training on how to handle various emergency situations here and there, but nothing extensive. As I looked down at my still and lifeless son, I realized that the decisions I made in the next minute may be the difference between life and death. And I didn’t really know what I was doing.
I’ve been in stressful situations before, but nothing like this. It was as if I was plucked from reality and placed into some type of metaphysical reality. I don’t know how to describe it. In some ways, I became incredibly focused. In other ways, I was completely dazed and confused.
A couple things came to mind. 1) Call 911. 2) Administer CPR. I yelled out to my oldest teenage daughter to call 911. I told her to call from the hotel phone. Again - in this moment my thoughts were very scattered but I remember thinking that would be the most certain way to relay our location automatically. I had no idea the address or even the street we were on. At that moment I sincerely couldn’t say for certain if we were at the Hyatt, Hilton, Holiday or Hampton. If it was the Hyatt was it the Grand Hyatt, Hyatt Place or just the regular Hyatt? In my mind at least this though was clear: call from a land line and tell them to come and they will come even if you can’t tell them where you are.
I began to administer CPR to my son. Was it breaths or then compressions, or the other way around? How many breaths? How many compressions? How long to I wait to see if he’s got a pulse? The adrenaline is so high there was no way I’d be able to distinguish a pulse with my shaking hands. I gave a couple breaths and started compressions. He was absolutely still. I hoped for the Hollywood-like water puke, cough. I got nothing. Repeat breaths, compressions. Nothing. Repeat. Nothing.
I don’t know how much time had passed, but it felt like an eternity. Why wasn’t he responding to my actions?? Desperation quickly settled in - I don’t know what I’m doing and he will probably die because of it. More than ever I felt a desperate need of help.
I look up and see my daughter scrambling around, still in the pool area. My wife is next to me, trying to help me administer. I scream out to my daughter in absolute desperation “you have to call 911 NOW!” My attention goes back to my son. Breaths. Compressions. Anything? No. Repeat.
The scene around me was absolute mayhem. My other children, of various ages, were letting out blood curdling screams and moans. Whenever I bring myself back to the moment, it brings tears to my eyes. The kids didn’t know exactly what was happening, but they knew this was very, very bad.
The daughter I had instructed to call 911 is very calculated, precise and responsible. I had told her to call 911 from a hotel phone because it was my thought that it was the best (only?) way to reliably provide our location to the responders. She was trying to do exactly that. But the problem was she was locked out of the hotel. She was fumbling through our towels and bags looking for the key card to her her back into the building. She couldn’t find it. It turns out it was in a very natural and obvious spot - my pocket - but in a moment like that, simple things are not always clear. I don’t realize it was in my pocket. She thought it was with our stuff and was digging to find it. In hindsight, I should have told her to call from her cell phone while looking for a hotel phone.
I’m desperate. Help is not coming. What I’m doing doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Every tick of the clock the situation is getting worse. Tunnel vision was setting in. I cannot property articulate the feeing of absolute terror and paralysis that was setting in. “This is actually happening.”
I don’t remember how, but eventually the key issue was resolved and my daughter got into the hotel and began her sprint to the front desk. She was met by the staff part way there. “911 is on the way”, they said. What? Why? We never called.
It turns out, an off duty airline pilot was summoned to the window of his room due to the screaming below. Observing the situation, he summoned help. Around the same time, a nurse was checking into the hotel and had been told her room was not ready. She later told me she was frustrated and decided to take a walk. She passed by the pool area and came to our attention and started helping while the ambulance was making its way to us. At his point, I heard a faint - oh so faint - whimper from my son. Details are fuzzy to me at this point, but 911 arrived and whisked him off to the nearby children’s hospital.
We spent a couple of days at the hospital. He made a full recovery and we were sent home with much gratitude, forever changed by the situation. I know these stories like this so often do not have a happy ending, and I am so, so sorry for the families and loved ones of those who experience other outcomes.
A few thoughts that came to my mind after this experience.
- A mobile phone has the ability to relay location very reliably, and more precisely than a phone registered to an address. A hotel is a big building - sure they might have guessed we were by the pool, but do the first responders know where in a massive hotel the pool is? Seconds matter. It sure would have been nice to know that all I had to do is call 911 from my mobile phone and say “please come” and they could respond with “we are on our way”. - I thought it would be helpful to have a 100% offline-capable, blazing fast, dead simple app with common emergency situations and what basic steps to take. In the state I was in, I’m not sure I would have thought to go to an app. But perhaps a bystander with such an app, even untrained, could use such an app to help coach a situation. - Why on earth was there no phone outside by the hotel pool? You won’t be surprised to know this particular hotel solved that problem. - This all unfolded within our “field of vision”. Our backs were not turned when our son went in the water. But we were focused on gathering our stuff, chatting with each other and just weren’t paying attention. We are different at pools now. - I’ve wondered if some type of device could be strapped to a toddler’s head that would sound off a close-by alarm if submerged for more than x seconds or of the device was removed. It would have to avoid going off with common splashes and quick dunks in the water. As I’ve carefully observed since, the forehead seems like a logical position for such a sensor. Little ones don’t go in below their forehead often for much longer than a few seconds, and in a drowning situation the forehead is always submerged. I fear that such a device, however, would provide aflame sense of security and perhaps would encourage worse supervision.
I am very much looking forward to the day when I can be confident my mobile phone can relay my precise location to emergency responders.
It gets worse/better(?)
Apple's upcoming 911 feature relies on technology from RapidSOS, a New York startup. The approach developed by Apple and RapidSOS sends location data from an iPhone to a "clearinghouse" accessible to emergency calling centers. Only the 911 calling centers will be able to see the data during the call, and none of it can be used for non-emergency purposes, according to Apple.
So Apple AND RapidSOS get to see my location when using 911? Cool cool.
This same argument is use to justify why we shouldn't allow encryption back doors. The reasons include: access will leak, law enforcement cannot be trusted.
I don't see anything in this announcement that addresses those concerns.
https://info.rapidsos.com/blog/bringing-apple-device-locatio...
> When this feature is made available later this year in an iOS software update, Apple phones will send fast and accurate device location to the NG911 Clearinghouse when a user dials 9-1-1.