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Comment by dalben | Hacker News Reader

Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.

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In the US, there’s a thing called the Opticom. It’s just an extra light that is installed along with the normal light bar, and the traffic light recognizes the strobe pattern, and changes. https://www.fedsig.com/product/opticom/

No app required.

But highly susceptible to unauthorized use. The app version can also alert drivers directly with an audible alert that an emergency vehicle is close by

Fixable by taking a picture of every opticom user?

Or by doing even a slight amount of encoding of the IR signal. Transmitting a single byte as a key (set by region, same as fire dept. elevator keys) would be enough to prevent people from using their TV remote controls or whatever to trip the preempt sensors.

That being said, this is kind of a non-issue already, I have heard a story about someone abusing the preempt sensors like 10 years ago and never since then. Maybe there already exists an encoding scheme.

Anecdotal of course, but in my 20 years of driving I've never once seen a vehicle activate the red light override sensors that wasn't obviously a legitimate emergency vehicle.

IMO a huge majority of people realize how illegal it would be to mess with these things, and the risk/reward is very low. Anyone who would take that risk would probably just run a red light instead.

It’s a pretty serious federal crime to impersonate an emergency vehicle at those. So definitely worth just running the red.

Long ago I used to read i-hacked.com with great interest. They had an article about a DIY "MIRT" which produced the right infrared signal to trigger these:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060317013200/http://www.i-hack...

Of course this article came with many disclaimers that to actually do this would be very illegal.

I was more than a little sad when I typed i-hacked.com into the browser and got redirected to some etsy page. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine, I guess.

Not really a real problem that actually happens, but you could fix it by only making it work with visible light pulses. Sure, people still might use it illegally, but you couldn’t be very subtle about it.

What are the privacy concerns relating to ambulances?

At least in the UK ambulance crews are extremely tightly monitored (mostly for good reasons) so surprised there would be any privacy concerns for crew on the clock.

The concern was related to being able to know where emergency vehicles were. If you build a system that announces to traffic light “I’m police/fire/EMS, coming through”, you also build an early warning system for criminals and terrorists who either want to avoid or target you.

That doesn't make any sense. How would criminals know even if the traffic light receives a signal like that?

I think these systems used RF before, so anything in the vicinity could listen in. That said, if this new system is a phone app, it'll just be using phone data instead, so it'd be hard for that to be intercepted.

No, it would be _easier_ for them to intercept, because now there's a central server you need to access to know about ALL units within the country.

If we are assuming terrorists that can get real time access to government servers, we should assume they will access the servers used by the dispatchers and so can find out when an emergency vehicle leaves and where its destination is.

That is probably more useful for planning an attack on emergency vehicles.

Although why even bother with servers? Just call in a fake emergency (or cause a real emergency) at a place of your choosing, and the government will send emergency vehicles to you.

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