Three AM 911 call, 9 AM salesman | Hacker News Reader

Three AM 911 call, 9 AM salesman

a.wholelottanothing.org

171 pointswawayanda83 comments

"Through this incident I've learned people should instead contact their home insurance company and get an approved list of vendors to choose from."

I don't agree with this. Never contact your insurance company unless you plan on filing a claim, just asking for this list is equivalent to a claim.

If you have a valid claim, your insurance can't force you to use a list of vendors. You can choose any vendor you want to. The vendors work/cost must be appropriate.

I dunno, if you need one of these companies, it's often better to just let the insurance company send who they want.

I wouldn't call pre-emptively though, no.

These companies often have bad customer service, so that isn't always the answer either.

See your policy - there may be limits on what vendors you are allowed to use. There is typically a large choice, but it isn't everyone.

I agree though, don't call unless you are sure you will file a claim. If the item is regular maintenance don't file a claim if you can. That is if you need to replace your roof and discover hail damage you could then claim and get a replacement roof, but your insurance will go up. Insurance is for major issues where you wouldn't expect to pay that price but it might happen (fire..), hail is borderline - a roof that is almost new that needs to be replaced makes the costs (a second time in 5 years...) unreasonable, but if the roof is already 20 years old it should be normal to pay to replace it even if without the hail you might have got 10 more years.

This can be a sleazy industry. Servpro is the big corporate side, but the New York Times reported a few years ago about actual criminal intimidation in the industry (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/nyregion/fire-truck-chase...)

So if I understand this correctly, this company gets certain information about 911 calls, and then sells it to third parties?

I wonder how much information they get, because this could get a lot darker. Imagine if calls to the police reporting domestic violence resulted in advertising material from divorce lawyers. (A domestic violence victim might well want a divorce lawyer, but unsolicited material showing up in their mailbox may put them at risk by enraging their already-violent spouse.)

"Imagine if calls to the police reporting domestic violence resulted in advertising material from divorce lawyers."

While not nearly as cryptic, Target had to adjust their advertising a few years ago because they were accurately predicting women's pregnancies through their analytics. Women received targeted mailings. In many cases probably not problematic, but there's potential for that data to be horribly misused.

IIRC one of these women was a teenager who hadn't told her parents about her pregnancy

There is a lot of doubt as to weather that story is real. The story supposedly happened in 2009 when the online Target store was hosted and run by Amazon. Even now Amazon's (or anyone else's) recommendations are not anywhere close to that despite having a decade more experience building recommendations systems. (Yes, Amazon, I want to buy another TV after ordering one yesterday)

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnan...

I had something like this once.

I was in a car crash on a Sat. night and flew to Boston for work the next day. I got weird calls from out of state the following days telling me I had to call the impound lot who had my crashed car and fax a release form.

Wondering why I had to do this, I called the impound lot who explained that there was a shady company that would make off with your crashed car if they could talk you into releasing it, which then they could strongarm you into repairs with them or they would get the totaled vehicle if insurance went that way. That has got to be illegal, so I contacted the local PD and they simply did not care.

Shady people get rich in businesses where the police do not care. Anything car related seems to be filled with bad behavior.

I highly doubt Matt Haughey is correct about pulsepoint being the source of this information. The source was almost certainly services that scan the public radio broadcast of emergency communications. As a first correction, pulsepoint isn’t a company. It is a nonprofit. Obviously nonprofits can sell data, but it is clear Haughey didn’t go very deep in his research to get such a basic item wrong.

It seems like it would be very, very easy to make these Servpro salespeople unreasonably busy undertaking sales calls that do not have a worthwhile rate of return.

What, by burning down your neighborhood?

Making a bunch of emergency calls to attract these guys would be much worse than having slightly predatory sales practices.

It's illegal to make false calls to 911; I know in California it's a misdemeanor at least along with a multi-thousand dollar fine.

A class 1 misd here. Also: dangerous, stupid, and anti-social.

But it happens all day long; sometimes people actually get killed; and misuse of public safety emergency responders is a serious vulnerability that very few seem to take seriously.

If you realize you called 911 by mistake just stay on the line and explain. Operators are understanding of mistakes, they will do some checks to make sure it really was a mistake as opposed to a real thing but you know the attacker is listening and then tell you bye. Don't make mistakes often, if it happens often they will look up the laws and throw fines at your for wasting their time, but for a rare thing it isn't a big deal.

If things are borderline and so you are not sure if this is 911 or maybe you can lookup some non-emergency number: just call 911 and explain. They will figure it out - better to call 911 when you didn't need to than call the non-emergency number and not get the help you need.

If you don't live in the US you may have some other emergency number. Know what it is. Generally the same rules as above apply.

I've called 911 twice for borderline issues and it played out both times just like you said - I said what I was seeing and to let me know if I should call a different line, they confirmed the issues were emergencies, and the rest played out like any other 911 call. Let the dispatcher decide.

On a related note, the valid reasons to call 911 are:

1. A danger to life, property or the environment

2. A crime in progress

3. Someone having a medical emergency who needs immediate assistance

4. A fire

> That's a sleazy business model but it's not illegal

I feel bad for folks who live in countries without a GDPR equivalent.

The ICO's guidance says "You can rely on legitimate interests for marketing activities if you can show that how you use people’s data is proportionate, has a minimal privacy impact, and people would not be surprised or likely to object"

I refuse to believe people would not be surprised or likely to object to this sort of marketing. It's creepy and invasive, and preying on people who may have lost their possessions or the house they've lived in for decades. I would be completely outraged if I received a visit of this nature after making a call to the _emergency services_. That's completely insane!

Without being able to rely on legitimate interests, there would not be an opportunity for data to be legally shared and processed in this way. None of the other lawful bases would apply, in my view.

“ 911 calls are mostly public information since they involve public services who all need to communicate with one another.” Umm not in Europe. First of all Tetra/Dimetra calls are E2E encrypted (with some famous vulnerabilities) then there’s privacy laws etc. It’s surprising that in the US where you have the right to protect your home and privacy even with lethal means, the same measures don’t extend cybernetically.

that’s because those lethal means have been written into the amendments and people have been brainwashed by the NRA to care about those amendments, especially the one to bear arms.

This lethal defense thing has been all about pushing more and more guns on people for financial profit, if there was a way to sell internet guns you have to use to shield your privacy, they would, their number 1. focus is money, everything else is number 2.

> This lethal defense thing has been all about pushing more and more guns on people for financial profit

The American firearms/ammo/accessories market is only about 1/3rd the size of the American cosmetics market.

Americans just really like guns - there's no shadowy profit motive here. There's simply not enough profit on the table for that.

Should we stop caring about all the amendments or just the ones you don't like?

> It’s surprising that in the US where you have the right to protect your home and privacy even with lethal means, the same measures don’t extend cybernetically.

Americans do have a constitutionally protected right to use cryptography. You don't have the right to force someone else to use it.

It's about having transparency. If the public can't monitor what 911 centers and police are doing, how can the public trust them?

That should have some corner cases. If criminals can monitor what police are doing - how the police can fight crime?

You can listen in to police/emergency radio chatter, and there's any multiple phone apps that let you pick a location to listen to.

> It’s surprising that in the US where you have the right to protect your home and privacy even with lethal means

What do you mean by protect your privacy (with lethal means)? You certainly do not have a right to lethally protect your privacy from a neighbor pointing a camera at your house, or similar, for example. You do have a right to protect yourself and your property using lethal means in my state (Texas). But they most certainly had better be both clearly on/in your property and an active threat to your personhood/possessions(property)--extra points for it being nighttime and/or you are female. I am not sure how protecting your physical things or self from an imminent threat is suppose to translate to a space where boundaries and jurisdiction are not as clear cut as your physical self/home.

*Had to take a class (for a concealed carry permit) that laid out in no uncertain terms when the use of lethal force is protected. And it is not as wanton & broad as people like to make it out to be.

I'd guess most municipalities in the US still use unencrypted analog radio, so all you need is a guy with a scanner. You don't even need a scanner where I live, they have a live feed available on the county website. When we had a house fire about 20 years ago, guys showed up to sell "board up" and restoration services before the fire trucks had left. It's a sleazy business. We went with the restoration company our insurance co. recommended, they were clear we could go with whoever we wanted but their preferred one guaranteed the insurance payout would fully cover the work. They were fine to work with and did a good job. There are also companies (at least in California where we lived at the time) that offer to take a cut of your payout to catalog your stuff and negotiate a claim with your insurance company. They make grand promises and seemed super sketchy.

Thank you for sharing. I particularly enjoyed the call out where you highlight what you learned from the incident. Took the post from fear-brain to information-brain for me (don't mind my curiosity haha).

I had a much less intrusive incident but equally "alarming" ;). The apartment I live in has hard wired smoke/carbon monoxide alarms (with backup battery). One night, ~2am 1 of them starts beeping that the battery is dead. I confirm the breaker didn't flip or anything...finally decided to complete disassemble it and get some sleep. 4 of these in the apartment. Head hits the pillow and a second one goes off! Take all 4 down and live dangerously for an evening.

In the morning I do my research - turns out these things just start doing that after 10 years. "Get a new one!" it peeps incessantly.

Shame me please - as I bought replacements. I'll save this post for myself in 10 years so at least I can be the one to say "I told you so".

10 years, you're lucky, one of mine just started doing it after 4 years, it comes with a 5 year guarantee but of course I don't have the receipt and even if I did I don't have the will to fight for a replacement. I think these new alarms are designed to fail early I've never had one fail before but after checking up on different makes and models they all seem to fail randomly.

This is by design, and it's for a good reason. The carbon monoxide sensor chemically degrades over time. Good CO detectors will perform self-tests periodically, and will go into an end-of-life mode when those tests fail, or when the sensor's expected lifetime has expired.

I have a plug-in CO detector that's probably 30 years old. Has never given any "end of life" alerts but maybe they didn't have them back then. Guess I should replace it.

You definitely should. 30 years is almost certainly beyond the useful life of the sensor.

Yep, and that's a big reason why combined Smoke + CO detectors are a bad idea. The smoke detector side doesn't wear out, the CO detector side does.

The beep patterns for "dead battery" and "detector worn out" are usually different. Generally they're printed somewhere on the unit, in a tiny font that's hard to see bleary-eyed at 3AM when it inevitably starts.

Smoke detectors usually have something like a 10-year usable life, and should have a sticker to that effect along with its manufacture date.

I've had a couple that when they aged out, went straight to full-on alarm beeping.

True, this does depend on the detector type. Photoelectric detectors last pretty much indefinitely, but ionization smoke detectors do age. And you ideally want both, since they detect different sorts of combustion. Also there are smoke detectors you can buy with a 10-year life lithium primary cell, so no need to change batteries. These are perhaps a bit wasteful (the cell isn't replaceable and the rest of the detector could be fine) but also don't require throwing away lots of 9V batteries.

Oh, true enough. Or at least, by the time the battery gets low, the whole thing should be replaced anyway. As you say, depending on detector.

FWIW some smoke alarms have a manufacture date printed on the side, so a receipt might not be necessary.

How would you prove it came from a certain store?

But... you have to go to a shop to get the replacement. I suppose you could mail it by yourself to the manufacturer, though I must admit I never tried that. It requires too much effort, contacting manufacturer, describing the problem, etc. Do people do this?

Two in the same night? I wouldn't have been so quick to dismiss it as "it just happens". Scary.

Hmmmm, we had two cheap quartz wristwatches with a drift of +/- 15 seconds per month, and they were allowed to run for 5 years, drifting in opposite directions, we might expect a difference between them of 0.5 hours.

So having two of these detectors going wonky with "just" a 4-hour difference doesn't seem too far outside the capabilities of some kind of "replace me" timer circuit.

Obviously it could also be Invisible Evil Gas Traces, and the impact of being wrong is severe, so I wouldn't blithely dismiss the alarms as planned obsolescence either.

> Obviously it could also be Invisible Evil Gas Traces, and the impact of being wrong is severe, so I wouldn't blithely dismiss the alarms as planned obsolescence either.

And that is why I only buy CO alarms which display the ppm they measure.

"I'm out of sensor lifetime / battery, please replace me" is a very different level of priority than 300ppm CO. And how I react to 300ppm is very different from how I would react to 3200ppm.

Fixed lifetime suggests ionization rather than optical sensor? If so yeah, they have a specific lifetime, it's just physics. There's an Americium-241 source, a tiny, tiny amount of radioctive material in a sensor which is decaying constantly, and once it has decayed a certain amount too bad, buy a new smoke detector.

There are arguments for or against both types, but ultimately "Make sure you replace it every ten years" doesn't feel like a huge problem. If you really can't do that, then the optical sensors don't have this property - they will still need new batteries, but of course you can just swap those out on a schedule when it suits you, they're typically a cheap household 9volt battery (yes even for a mains smoke alarm, fires don't magically stop when the power goes out)

I installed some gas sensors like this a while back. It says in the manual that some date after installation they trigger and stay that way permanently.

No, but you'd think they could charge a battery/capacitor during the good times and use that charge during the outage.

> Fixed lifetime suggests ionization rather than optical sensor?

Not at all. The 10 year lifetime is something that was set by people concerned by the lifetime of the electronics. The half life of the isotope in smoke detectors allow them to last well beyond 10 years. (The half life is 432.2 years)

I was aware that the half-life was much longer but I'd assumed the 10 years was based on the fact that nevertheless we're talking a degraded sensor performance over time, however it does seem like it's actually 10 years because they're worried the electronics will crap out, so you're right.

same thing happened to me at about 3 am one morning. I'm thinking the house is burning down. Eventually find out there is no fire. Get the ladder, take down the smoke alarm. Go to remove the battery. On the back it says "non replaceable battery, unit can not be serviced". So sledge hammer + trash can it is!

The next day I tell my landlord I destroyed the thing and need a new one. His reply was that I had vandalized his property.

I would love the wired ones to just have a built in super capacitor; enough to give it 5-10 min (minimum) runtime during a power outage. No Battery. ONLY alarm loudly for sensor detects possible smoke (known positive detection), very softly for sensor broken (failed self test).

The battery isn’t for incidental power outages. It’s for when a fire starts somewhere in the building while you are asleep and melts some wiring, knocking out the power to the smoke alarm. An hour later you wake up in a house full of smoke and die.

That’s why smoke alarms have batteries.

That is also why smoke alarms have interconnects, and there should be smoke detectors all over. The fire should be detected and sound an alarm long before it melts wiring.

Though smoke detectors only detect 40-50% of all fires in time to get out (dual sensor detectors can do much better!). A lot better than nothing, but still not very good.

ServPro is actually one of the less bad ones. BELFOR are even pushier, and take advantage of the fact that building owners and building renters tend to have different priorities in fire cases to gain unlawful access to damaged units. I had Belfor people in my smoke-damaged home without my knowledge constantly, and they made off with a bit of valuable stuff during that unsupervised time. I was renting back then, and of course my say meant nothing to these people.

Very scummy industry overall, everyone we interacted with in the wake of that fire left a bad taste in our mouths. ServPro was the original company on the job before Belfor somehow took the contract from em, and they were at least professional and understanding of the awful circumstance people were in.

If my heater goes out, while its below freezing outside, and a salesman offering to fix it shows up at my door two hours later, whether or not its sleezy/ethically wrong is entirely dependent on how much they're charging for their services. I understand the angle that it could be interpreted as exploiting someone in a tough spot, but that's a no-more-valid interpretation than helping someone out of a dire, potentially life-threatening situation; it just comes down to how much they're charging.

The angle that they're finding clients by ambulance chasing public 911 records is interesting, but ethically neutral.

he wasn't offering to repair the HVAC.

Servpro doesn't fix heaters, they mitigate fire damage. They came expecting to fix fire damage, not a heater.

How do you feel about roofers knocking on your door claiming your roof needs to be replaced? That’s a fairly common scenario and one where even legitimate roofers who aren’t lying do it. But most people I know hate it.

It is repugnant that this is able to happen at all. To the extent that the government contracts with a third party, the legal requirements should be none of the data is shared without a warrant.

Something similar happened to me. A piece of cardboard packing material fell in to the furnace when they were installing it, and it just sat on top of the heat exchanger slowly carbonizing until one day it decided to start smoking. The firefighters spotted the source right away with an IR camera and extinguished it with a shot of CO2, then the furnace guy came and got it out.

This sorta thing could happen without the API integration, police radio calls happen on the public radio waves, anyone can listen and go to the address too. If the police encrypt their radio, they usually rebroadcast with a delay, in the interest of transparency, so it’s still possible.

Servpro charged me $35,000 for work they never completed, then did $30,000 of damage to my house, then threatened to sue me

Never, ever under any circumstances

Things like this are pretty much why I don't answer my front door anymore unless I'm expecting someone. Too many ads.

Is it really that hard to say "Selling something? Not interested, have a nice day!"? I'm fairly anxious and introverted and don't love having to do this, but once a month or something is very manageable. Gotta be brave and interact with the world sometimes.

>Is it really that hard to say "Selling something? Not interested, have a nice day!"?

I shouldn't have to, so I don't, and they eventually do leave.

>Gotta be brave and interact with the world sometimes. reply

Telling a salesperson "fuck off" doesn't take more bravery than I have, it takes more effort than I am willing to expend on advertising.

I feel like not answering the door is actually the harder thing for some people to do as it can feel like you're being rude or otherwise not doing this thing you feel wired to be doing. I think it's actually a great exercise to do that and experience that there's no consequences to having respect for your own time.

I have a no soliciting sign and those who ignore it (basically all of them according to camera events) are 100% in the wrong, are being rude, and do not deserve a wave-off.

This has nothing to do with bravery.

For people who have debilitating social anxiety, yes, it does.

You're right. In that context, it can definitely be bravery.

However, in general, the decision to answer or not answer a salesperson at your door is not about bravery. It is primarily about effort and annoyance.

The combination of "Is it really that hard to say "Selling something? Not interested, have a nice day!"?" and a condescending "Gotta be brave and interact with the world sometimes." rubbed me the wrong way.

>rubbed me the wrong way

It did me, as well. It smelled of someone projecting their insecurity onto the general public.

For me it does require bravery. I wasn't intended to be condescending. I really do have to remind myself of that.

Fair enough! The downside of text conversation is that it loses most of the nuance, and I obviously read something into it that you didn't intend. Thanks for the clarification.

I happened to be seated behind some people on an aircraft who were in the business of doing these sales pitches and discussing it without shame. But in their case, they were targeting people who called the police regarding property crime, and then trying to sell them alarm systems.

Nothing they said was illegal, but it felt immoral and like they were taking advantage of people in vulnerable situations. Although I feel like we aren't meant to discuss morality when there is money to be made, if it is capitalism and business, then anything and everything is fair game -- even this.

This reminds me of the recent "service" that somehow front-runs police reports and tries to sell them to car accident victims who are motivated to get their insurance claim going.

That said, I don't think the API is to blame here. You could accomplish the same thing by listening to the FD on a scanner and converting the voice to text.

I recently got my car totaled by a distracted driver. Somehow, within the week, I had 4 different law firms cold-call me and ask if I needed representation. Some were more unscrupulous than others, but I got pretty livid that something or someone shared my information with them.

Even worse, after I bought a new vehicle I've received 4+ "extended warranty" junk mail letters that look very official. It comes off as very predatory and leaves a generally bad taste in my mouth with how bad data protections are.

> 911 calls are mostly public information since they involve public services who all need to communicate with one another

What? No...

the European mind can not comprehend this high level of capitalism

Meta but why are there seemingly random full-size images inserted every few paragraphs in the article?

Idk, but to me it seemed like a fun expression of the author's feelings.

Is the sign with the cougar a suggestion on how to treat salesmen?

If so, I dig it.

That's my interpretation.

Since you brought up the topic--in the snow picture, is the red vehicle on the right an older 4Runner with some kind of pickup truck cap on it? Something that turns it into a Chevy Avalanche configuration.

I used to do freelance writing. We did this as a way to break up large blocks of text, it makes the post more digestible.

That was a blogging standard late 90s/early 00s. Loads of pretty unrelated photos -- usually personal photos as everyone is a photographer -- intermixed with content. For some reason I always think of Philip Greenspun when I see that style of content.

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