False 911 Calls Increase During Festival as iOS Mistakes Dancing for Car Crashes

I'd put it in the car. Make it use the same sensor as airbag deployment.

This would require AGPS rather than just the less power-hungry IMU, but maybe that's the price for not DDOSing 911 infrastructure.

I wouldn’t - it’s not clear to me this feature is saving lives. Why not incorporate it into the car?

It's already done and mandated. Why design something new?

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...

If significant motion does not stop shortly after a candidate crash is identified then reject the candidate as a false positive.

Maybe also listen for voices. If you can detect people talking and they seem to be reasonably coherent that suggests that even if there was a crash there are people on site already who can take care of summoning emergency services if needed.

Or if the phone continually collects sensor data already for this feature, I’d just make sure the second preceding the supposed crash was consistent with traveling in a vehicle, not being in the same place. It won’t work when you are hit by something though in that case.

Pretty easy to filter all the car crashes coming from a grassy lawn somewhere.

If you want to prevent false positives—then, same as you’ve described, but only enable when either:

- phone is connected to Carplay via USB or bluetooth

- phone is connected to a bluetooth device known to be an auto (inferred by manufacturer ID, and configurable in bluetooth settings)

- GPS data for the last 5 minutes indicate you’re driving

And display an indicator on lockscreen that shows this feature is enabled.

Of course, consider that the downside of false positives don’t affect consumers or manufacturers—rather, they affect public utilities. Then, it’s easy to understand why this happens.

If it were g-forces alone that are confusing the phone there might be more stories about fall detection rather than just car crash detection. Even though the age cohort at festivals might be less likely to explicitly enable fall detection, I think it’s a default setting.

Really, this is effectively criminal under the statute iiuc

Keep state for a longer period of time.

Activate when you start driving and deactivate when parking.

Start could be triggered by gps detecting movement over longer period of time over roads.

That would avoid festival where you're stationary in a place where cars arent allowed.

Problem here is solved.

That is, be careful not to strawman this such that they can't have any false positives. Do keep on them to make it ever better, of course.

We have a piss-poor track record of holding 'job creators' accountable for direct harm to our communities, let alone two-steps removed indirect harm.

Where do you see that they rushed it?

It's crazy what large tech companies are allowed to do with public infrastructure. I bet you an app from a small developer would get cease and desisted within a month if it had false positives like these. At least put some of your own operators on the line first so you can verify that the emergency services are actually needed, and maybe don't even roll out the feature in areas that don't opt into receiving these automated alerts.

The G-forces in a crash are much higher than dancing.

Other implementations are better.

I carry an iPhone when I go biking, and I have a Garmin GPS. The Garmin crash detection works far better. The Garmin is tuned well enough to go off on a real crash mountain biking but won't go off if you have an accident that's not a full fall.

I have had a very "real" crash and seen the Garmin correctly identify it and the iPhone does not.

Apple currently checks your location periodically, so it can fulfill location-based reminder requests, so I honestly figured a similar tech was used for the crash detection. I’m pretty surprised that that’s not the case.

That excludes most human only activities. Of course roller-coasters and various other rides could still trigger it.

Security alarms require obtaining an alarm permit. Automated alarms notify the alarm company who call the customer. They ask if help is needed and what their security code is. If the customer says an actual emergency happened they then call 911. In my jurisdiction more than three false alarms results in a fine for the resident/business.

The police generally don't respond to an alarm signal unless a person on site calls it in. Although once in the 1990s someone at work didn't know the burglar alarm keypad code and the police did eventually respond with guns drawn. That was a hair raising experience.

If you've been standing in a field for the last 40 minutes, and haven't traveled more than 10 meters at a slow pace, and are surrounded by hundreds of other iphones that also have barely moved, you probably aren't suddenly in the middle of a car crash.

Maybe a difference is that people in the pit are more likely to have phone in pocket, whereas dancers are more likely to be holding phone in hand (cuz generally more likely to want it at the ready for selfies, etc?). I imagine that a phone’s accelerometer, when at the end of a moment arm (or literal arm in this scenario), is going to have a wilder experience than when held closer to the center of mass.

This happened day 1 (Thursday) of a 4-day festival. Even though they declined to have Apple come out you know they still sent a couple engineers out to gather data regardless.

On top of that, being proactive once it started happening and getting messaging out to attendees helped cut down the calls by ~50%, which definitely helped.

All you can do is continually refine it once you deploy it. A bit damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Notable that not a single story that has been reported has mentioned places getting overwhelmed with calls from this.

I have a feeling this creates more problems than they solve. A computer should never reach out to emergency calls without the user pressing something.

It's a massive nuisance unless someone gets on to say it was a mistake...and if someone didn't notice their phone buzzing before it made the call they aren't gonna pick up.

Just fine the person for negligent abuse of the system. The problem will get solved quickly enough if your badly configured phone calls 911 and you're not communicative, so they have to send an ambulance or whatever.