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Comment by williamcotton | Hacker News Reader

Dozens of false alarms seems worth even a single saved life so to actively punish Apple seems ludicrous.

  “We are absolutely diverting essential resources away from people who need it toward a feature on a phone,” Dummer said.

The journalist in question did not do any research towards how large of an effect this is. That quote does nothing but service the claim that this is a “problem” worth discussing, and more importantly, a “problem” worth sharing on commercial social media…

Also, from the article:

Grand County Sheriff Brett Schroetlin called the calls are “problematic and time-consuming,” but said they have not impacted dispatch operations.

Journalists are trained at extracting provocative statements that are conspicuously apt for misinterpretation. The above quote is a perfect example. The original conversation could be 3 minutes about how this is a nothingburger but then the Sheriff being badgered into conceding that in isolation the calls are problematic and time-consuming…

What? How is talking to the dispatchers inundated by false alarms failing to do research? That’s literally the people who would know.

The biggest danger of false alarm is alert fatigue. If your false to real ratio is ten to one you’ve seriously messed up. This sounds like exactly the case where false alarms are causing real harm to people in need.

Your stance shows a serious misunderstanding of incident response.

The article is from a local Colorado news outlet. They're supposed to do a nationwide study before publishing this story?

What’s the trade-off though? If an Apple Watch sends an emergency call every time a skier or snowboarder falls, that’s several calls per day. I would think that would be too much and we should hold Apple liable for that level of false alerts.

It’s an extreme example, but I want to make the argument that there is a balance to consider.

Why not hold the apple user responsible if anyone? Fall alert is an optional feature (that I think might be opt-in during setup). Once it detects a fall, you have a bit of time to respond to the watch to tell you are fine. Although this would obviously be difficult when you are fully bundled up.

But the best place to start would probably be the law enforcement officers working with the nearby ski resorts to educate their patrons about the apple watch feature with signage.

It is on by default.

Is it? I upgraded to a Watch 8 recently and it seems to be off by default (it could be that I opted out a million years ago on my old watch and it carried over).

Though I distinctly remember being asked about it when setting up my mom’s watch a few years ago so maybe it’s based on age?

It was an opt in thing on my watch as well. But it looks like it is on by default on the new iphone 14. Personally I think it should be opt-in during setup.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/manage-crash-detectio...

Everyone who's saying this has clearly never had a job that requires an on call rotation. At a certain point, you start treating these things as non-emergencies. Doesn't matter how much you initially care or want to do a good job, you can't respond to everything.

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