What3Words: App used by emergency services under scrutiny | Hacker News Reader

What3Words: App used by emergency services under scrutiny

bbc.com

17 pointspseudolus14 comments

I find it sad that What3words were used widely at all in government services, given that this is a proprietary service with single point of failure with many open alternatives available.

It's not ideal, but I'd rather something like this get adopted from the bottom up (actual rescuers taking initiative) rather than the alternative, where an overly complex, expensive, and barely working attempted solution is implemented by bureaucrats.

I mean you already need a working phone and gps. Why would there ever have been an alternative

I don't know, I'm not a rescuer. I assume having someone communicate "49,9842159, 10,1134713" over a staticy radio signal is harder than using something like this.

That's a huge false equivalency since that number of decimal places gives your location to 1cm accuracy

I don't think anyone says we should have the coordinates -- there are many other systems which are open and not patent encumbered.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words lists all the problems with the system as well as provides some alternatives.

I personally like "plus codes": for your location it would be X4M7+M9 . Over a noisy channel, "xray four mike seven" is much easier to recognize correctly than difference between "steak" and "stake", especially if the person is not a native english speaker.

Plenty of people don't know how to show their grid coordinates on their phone, outside of dropping a google maps 'pin', which doesn't work great offline.

There was a website called something like whatthreewordssucks.com which laid out all the many problems with it. The fact that it's actually been adopted by emergency services proves to me that the world is insane. There is no upside to this system.

I couldn't find a site like that but did come across Terence Eden's post from 2019, "Why Bother With What Three Words?", that covers some of those problems [1][2].

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917

According to the SAR people I follow on twitter, What3Words is worse in every way than simple Lat/Long.

It sure does seem like two more steps complicated than lat/long with the only advantage that it's easier to say to someone else. Maybe if you're on a marine radio in a storm it's better? But with a smart phone, surely pressing the 'send gps coords' button is easier.

> So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 2km apart along the River Thames.

> And just over 50km apart in Sheffield and Leeds are stream.rivers.abode and steam.rivers.abode.

IMO they should have used smaller wordlists (they have 25k or 40k). Using 4 words would have the same level of detail using a word list of only 2k words.

Open location codes (plus codes) are just as good and non-proprietary. Sad if actual emergency services have been persuaded to use a proprietary system.

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