14 ms·

Colorado ski town fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from iPhones

133 points by pxeboot 4y ago

pimlottc 4y ago
> Emergency dispatch centers fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from iPhones The submission title is missing vital context, original title: “Colorado ski town emergency dispatch centers fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from skier iPhones”
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Yeah. If it's too long, better to take out the "emergency dispatch centers." "Colorado town fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from skier iPhones"
- anonporridge 4y ago
  But that wouldn't generate as many clicks!
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  I think lots of us were able to assume that context from the title
  - strombofulous 4y ago
    My first thought was that more people were able to contact 911 because of the new satellite feature
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      This reminds me when I was younger my family would bring walkie talkies to talk to each other when skiing. But they didn't work well or at all if you were on different mountains, in a valley, etc. It's a wonder we were able to not get lost lol
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    I thought that there was some sort of natural disaster in the town, resulting in POTS phones and normal cell service being out, but some Apple feature (meshing perhaps) enabling the automated alerts to get through.
CGamesPlay 4y ago
> “Apple has validated sensor and algorithm performance using extensive real world and simulated car crashes, allowing the feature to detect as many severe crashes as possible, while minimizing false positives” Ah yes, the tried and true method of minimizing false positives: test on true positives.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Black swans everywhere.
maximilianroos 4y ago
Dozens!
- vsef 4y ago
  Yes, dozens. 71 in one weekend is a huge number for one small department! Just because this number sounded low to you as quoted in the headline doesn't mean it's not a big expensive problem for them. They can't ignore 911 calls.
  - bentcorner 4y ago
    And unless this ski town is home to an unusual number of clumsy iphone users, this pattern is likely happening wherever Apple has rolled out automated 911 calling in regions with outdoor active sports.
- badlucklottery 4y ago
  It's important to note how 911 calls "fail": if you don't answer, emergency services assume the worst and respond as such. So that's dozens of events where they have to send first responders out to see if there's a serious injury/fatality on the mountain because it could be nothing or you could have collided with a tree or fallen off a cliff. The problem seems to be that Apple under-thought this feature. They made it one-size-fits-all instead of context sensitive. For example, maybe when it detects you're near a ski resort it asks you to switch into a skiing-friendly mode for the rest of the day. Same for amusement parks and other common pastimes that involve rapid deceleration events.
mxkopy 4y ago
Expected to see some sort of botnet scam; surprised instead by an actually pretty cool feature TM from Apple.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > surprised instead by an actually pretty cool feature TM from Apple. In what world is generating false positives spamming 911 and potentially displacing actual emergencies a "pretty cool feature"??? This "feature" is doing more harm than good in Summit County, it's trash: “We are not in the practice of disregarding calls,” said Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 Center. “These calls involve a tremendous amount of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrollers. And I don’t think we’ve ever had an actual emergency event.”
  - cobbal 4y ago
    In a world where it's probably also saving a lot of lives. Ambulance sirens probably cause a couple extra accidents as drivers try to get out of the way. Doesn't mean we should stop trying; it means we should keep trying to improve.
  - taysix 4y ago
    I think OP was being sarcastic. I think that because they added TM (for trademark) after "Feature", which I take to mean sarcasm is being expressed in the sentence. All that to say, myself (and likely OP) agree with your thoughts.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    > The technology has been heralded for saving lives The problems faced by emergency ski services are niche. If this technology doesn't give false positives outside of that niche I'd say it's pretty worth it. And fixing it for that niche is probably not that hard. In general I'd say spend more resources if it meant saving more lives; inverse need not apply?
lynx23 4y ago
The day Apple makes automated emergency calls mandatory in my area is the day I will quit using an iPhone.
- nanidin 4y ago
  Is the feature mandatory in any area? It’s basically fall detection rebranded as crash detection.
  - lynx23 4y ago
    I honestly dont know, I am not an Apple support person. As we have learnt, its only a few steps from "this is useful" to "we have just mandated this because it is so useful and people are too stupid to realize how cool this is!" Trust me, in a few years, automated emergency calls will be mandatory, downvoting the messenger doesn't help either folks.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  From the comments, it sounds like it’s becoming a common feature in android phones also.
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    There is not a single Android phone I'm aware of that has a feature like iPhone's "detected crash to automated 911", could you provide an example?
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      Someone mentioned their pixel 4a called 911 when it fell and hit the floor.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Fall Detection is an optional feature. There is nothing mandatory about it.
userbinator 4y ago
The “crash detection” and “fall detection” features on the Apple iPhone 14 and watches automatically call 911 when the devices detect a sudden stop that, in concept, means the user has been involved in a car crash. I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason. “We are communicating with Apple to get them to pay more attention to this but it feels like we are trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub.” An easy way to get them to pay attention might be to just loudly announce the intention to, and then start ignoring, automated calls from them, or at least deprioritise them in favour of human calls. The equivalent of nullrouting DDoS traffic.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  > I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason. Even just dropping it. I’m bemused at how many cracked screen devices I see given how often I drop mine and yet it never seems to break.
  - shusaku 4y ago
    It’s all about the angle I think. The only time I cracked mine was a very short drop (two feet at most) but it hit flush with a tile floor
  - watwut 4y ago
    it depends on where exactly it falls. Mine cracked after it hit a rock I think, there is little hole that looks like made by something spiky. I have fallen while cruising on skateboard
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    I drop my phone a lot, but having a glass screen protector, I believe, adds the extra reinforcement needed to disapate the shock and prevents my screen from cracking.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Start billing Apple for the fake calls.
todd3834 4y ago
My Apple Watch had called 911 or “Emergency SOS” at least twice. I don’t even think it is fall detection but the button getting held down when I’m paddling or duck diving sometimes. What sucks is that when you’re wet you can’t easily cancel the call, let alone understand anything being said on the speaker. Even after taking it out of water mode, if you’re fully in the water it’s a problem. Luckily after the last situation I opened up the app and disabled all Emergency SOS features so hopefully it does not happen again. Also, hopefully I never actually need it
Brian_K_White 4y ago
My pixel 4a5g running LineageOS did it on me one day from pressing the on/off button a few times in rapid succession. I had no idea it would do that. I was just in the final stages of trying to get any reaction out of it because the screen was not coming on. Turns out the phone was still running and working but the screen had died. I don't think any of these too-automatic and non-apparent things are a good idea. I had no intention to call 911, and I had not intentionally configured that action. I'm just glad the speaker and mic still worked and I was able to hear the operator and respond to them. I don't even see how this one even helps anyone even in theory. Is it even any faster than dialing 911? If I were in an emergency, would I remember some weird trick like that at a time like that? Are they thinking that people in duress will rapidly and repeatedly squeez their phone naturally and so it dials when needed without you consciouly needing to? I guess maybe the theory is that in any kind of car or bike crash, or even ordinary fall or violence, there is a good chance the violence will have damaged the phone's most fragile part, but just like in my case the phone still worked. So it's actually somewhat likely to be a valuable option to have some way to dial 911 witbout a working screen. Ok maybe I guess.
- albert180 4y ago
  It helps you when you need to call 911 quickly but maybe can't talk freely or something dangerous will happen to you (E.g. domestic violence, Assault, etc). The Pixel will transmit your location and also inform 5 emergency contacts, start a camera stream etc (depending on what you configured). It's also not enabled by default so you must have enabled it
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    I like the covert aspect. That sounds very good if you know about it so that it's a tool ready for you to use on purpose like mace in your bag etc. At least this did require pressing a button unlike the fall/crash detection from the article.
    - avian 4y ago
      It's not covert in any way. The phone emits a siren sound at full volume for a few seconds before calling and the call comes up in handsfree/speaker mode.
cimnine 4y ago
Devices should offer a quick way too disable the feature for a limited amount of time, so that people don't forget to turn it back on. Like it's possible with Do Not Disturb features. Perhaps that could be called Action Mode.
TheMiddleMan 4y ago
Blind spot in the training data?
snickerbockers 4y ago
I wish there was some way to make apple responsible for the costs this incurs. I hate the idea that they can sell more phones based on a feature that effectively DDOSes emergency services, with the cost being beared entirely by the public.
- bmitc 4y ago
  I fully agree. Corporations get away with stuff all the time because of the scale of the mistakes, when those are the times they should be punished the most.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  As a business owner, I receive random ass invoices all the time. I ignore them and have an attorney for the cheeky ones who send them to collections or small claims hoping I won’t show up. My wife has dual sim with US + NL phone numbers. Her iPhone will not let her choose which one to call from when tapping a phone number on a webpage, so whenever she does this, depending on which country we are in, can cost a few dollars/euros per minute. I was joking that we should send Apple an invoice for the faulty feature. Maybe they will pay it, and if they don’t, we can take them to small claims court. I’m quite familiar with the process now. Lol.
  - snickerbockers 4y ago
    I actually saw a case where some guy took Apple to small-claims court because they wouldn't service his iphone unless he changed the password, and he contended that this is a violation of his contract with Apple-care. They kept sending the manager of the local apple-store to represent them despite local laws requiring them to send either a lawyer or the CEO. Eventually after several court dates and appeals they're forced to grant him an exception to their policy and also he got Apple's income garnished for $185 to cover his court fees. https://old.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/8pocxv/apples_holierthanthou_attitude_is_their_undoing/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/8pocxv/apples_h...
    - tpmoney 4y ago
Duhck 4y ago
I’m an avid snowboarder and mountain biker and live in a Colorado ski town. I had called detection and crash detection enabled on my phone and watch since it came out. I was thrilled when I took a bad spill over the bars of my mountain bike at 30mph downhill and my phone offered to call 911. I was dismayed when I started snowboarding this season and without falling my watch texted my emergency contacts and called 911 repeatedly on my first runs of the season. I’ve now disabled it as my older mother doesn’t need another reason to be scared of her son doing extreme sports regularly. Now I lost the extra safety the feature provided simply because it was incapable of understanding snowboarding behavior.
- electriclove 4y ago
  Hopefully Apple refines this.. overall, this is the cycle that improves things
bmitc 4y ago
I am very surprised that automated systems like this aren’t illegal. If Apple wants to start a service like this, they should be required to install an intermediary to properly handle the calls instead of just wasting the time of emergency operators and responders and endangering people’s lives by tying up the system. I believe that’s how OnStar worked/works. As it is now, they’re just outsourcing implementations of the feature to emergency services. I absolutely hate the world where our government sits around and waits for Apple to “fix” this, whatever that means, instead of actively prosecuting them to force this feature off and penalize them. A quick web search shows that several people have been charged and jailed over spamming 911. Apple should be too. As a thought experiment, say you were a person on a ski slope watching people ski and immediately calling 911 when a fall occurred. Would that stand? No. So why should Apple get away with it just because they’ve automated it and outsourced it to phones and scaled it geographically?
- g_p 4y ago
  Interestingly, this seems to be one of the ways their satellite based emergency services system works - using a relay station to receive messages from phones. This would suggest they already have infrastructure they could use for these features. I believe there is established precedent in some countries that you can't connect alarm auto dialers straight to the emergency phone number (precisely because of false call-outs), and therefore need to go through an alarm monitoring company. Apple seems to be doing a direct link to emergency services here, in a world where circuit switched telco precedents seem to be missed in the packet switched world. My guess is they think they can win in the court of public opinion because it's for "people like you" using a phone that you have, rather than something for "other people". It would be interesting to see how Apple could be forced to implement proper quality assurance and scenario-based negative test validation of their products before they are allowed to do these kinds of things.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    > My guess is they think they can win in the court of public opinion because it's for "people like you" using a phone that you have, rather than something for "other people". This stuff just really upsets me because, if it happens like that, it just shows the corporate capture of the U.S. and Apple's nearly limitless market power. > It would be interesting to see how Apple could be forced to implement proper quality assurance and scenario-based negative test validation of their products before they are allowed to do these kinds of things. It seems to me that the bar should be incredibly high, which would mean that it's basically impossible to hook up automated systems to the emergency services line. Because I don't see a way that they could rule out false positives, especially when they're actively pushing their Apple Watch to the active and extreme sports crowds.
buildbot 4y ago
I set mine off in a ski “crash”, where I turned uphill very quickly and apparently that was high enough g force - oddly, I had already crashed hard enough to bruise my ribs earlier but that did not set off the detection.
Loic 4y ago
Every year, I spend one week as ski/snowboard instructor with "town" teenagers for the first time on a board. 3 years ago, I had to ban these automatic alerts and ask the kids to disable them because of the false alerts. Last year was ok. It looks like I will have to do it again this year. As an instructor, it is really bad wenn you see the rescue team coming to you for nothing, knowing that it diverts resources for real cases. Update: you never ever need such piece of shitty automated system on a normal ski slope. Outside of the slopes you need an Arva.
aa-jv 4y ago
A long time ago, I wrote a fall detector application for Android which could be configured to send a Tweet (Twitter was fresh and new then), send an SMS to a caretaker number, make alerts, etc. This really is important technology, particularly for the elderly and infirm. When the app started to get used, it was very popular. The reason is - we configured it to be used with a caretaker - i.e. another human that would be alerted if there were a fall. This use-case was immediately compatible with existing structures in the fall-detector market; i.e. letting grandma out into the yard for a bit of alone time while I put the kettle on... I don't know if Apple have a way for the user to inform a caretaker, but if they do I can only assume its a nuisance to set up.
- benj111 4y ago
  >i.e. letting grandma out into the yard for a bit of alone time while I put the kettle on... I think you could have worded this to make your gran sound less like a dog...
  - aa-jv 4y ago
    .. if only you'd seen how fast Grandma's so often hit the grass to get into the sunshine.
slaw 4y ago
Apple Watch OS 9 replaced power off with emergency call. Now power off is a small button at top right instead of slide at the bottom. I did call 911 once instead of powering off watch.
- macintux 4y ago
  Sliding had its own risks. I dialed 911 once because the screen was wet and it misinterpreted the location of my finger.
sinuhe69 4y ago
I didn’t exactly test it, but I believe on the Apple Watch, an emergency call will be only activated after an explicit announcement was not interrupted. Why Apple changed that in the iPhone 14 is a riddle for me.
gst 4y ago
Why is that not a problem with Android phones? Does Google have more accurate crash detection? Or is it just because much less Android phones with crash detection (such as the Pixel phones) are in use?
Gordonjcp 4y ago
It goes without saying, I hope, that if you do accidentally call the emergency services you should stay on the phone until you speak to someone and explain the situation. No-one will shout at you for it. You're not in any trouble. Just for fuck's sake don't hang up the call, because then we have to send everyone to your phone's reported position just in case there *is* a problem.
ChoGGi 4y ago
"were working on a fix they were hoping to have out in the first quarter of 2023" Or Apple could disable it temporarily to stop filling up the 911 queue? At least add a msg saying it's automated?
Waterluvian 4y ago
My car does this. It doesn’t call 911, it calls a service. And I pay something like $20/year for it (along with other features). Apple is wrongly exploiting a public service rather than paying (and charging for) a proxy.
33955985 4y ago
As anyone who has worked in ML knows, this feature will require some tuning. Tuning that Apple will do. I’m not sure this minor issue warrants rounding up the firing squad to execute the teams that built it.
cookie_monsta 4y ago
It seems this problem could be largely mitigated by incorporating some kind of timestamp. "This person hasn't moved in the last minute" isn't such a big deal. "This person hasn't moved in 10 minutes" is probably cause for alarm
notjulianjaynes 4y ago
Similar thing happened at an amusement park: https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/increase-of-911-calls-to-six-flags-new-england-by-mistake/ https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/increase-of-911-calls-t...

133 points by pxeboot 4y ago

> Emergency dispatch centers fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from iPhones The submission title is missing vital context, original title: “Colorado ski town emergency dispatch centers fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from skier iPhones”

pessimizer 4y ago
Yeah. If it's too long, better to take out the "emergency dispatch centers." "Colorado town fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from skier iPhones"
anonporridge 4y ago
But that wouldn't generate as many clicks!
weird-eye-issue 4y ago
I think lots of us were able to assume that context from the title
- strombofulous 4y ago
  My first thought was that more people were able to contact 911 because of the new satellite feature
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    This reminds me when I was younger my family would bring walkie talkies to talk to each other when skiing. But they didn't work well or at all if you were on different mountains, in a valley, etc. It's a wonder we were able to not get lost lol
- dotancohen 4y ago
  I thought that there was some sort of natural disaster in the town, resulting in POTS phones and normal cell service being out, but some Apple feature (meshing perhaps) enabling the automated alerts to get through.

CGamesPlay 4y ago

> “Apple has validated sensor and algorithm performance using extensive real world and simulated car crashes, allowing the feature to detect as many severe crashes as possible, while minimizing false positives” Ah yes, the tried and true method of minimizing false positives: test on true positives.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Black swans everywhere.

maximilianroos 4y ago

Dozens!

vsef 4y ago
Yes, dozens. 71 in one weekend is a huge number for one small department! Just because this number sounded low to you as quoted in the headline doesn't mean it's not a big expensive problem for them. They can't ignore 911 calls.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  And unless this ski town is home to an unusual number of clumsy iphone users, this pattern is likely happening wherever Apple has rolled out automated 911 calling in regions with outdoor active sports.
badlucklottery 4y ago
It's important to note how 911 calls "fail": if you don't answer, emergency services assume the worst and respond as such. So that's dozens of events where they have to send first responders out to see if there's a serious injury/fatality on the mountain because it could be nothing or you could have collided with a tree or fallen off a cliff. The problem seems to be that Apple under-thought this feature. They made it one-size-fits-all instead of context sensitive. For example, maybe when it detects you're near a ski resort it asks you to switch into a skiing-friendly mode for the rest of the day. Same for amusement parks and other common pastimes that involve rapid deceleration events.

mxkopy 4y ago

Expected to see some sort of botnet scam; surprised instead by an actually pretty cool feature TM from Apple.

pengaru 4y ago
> surprised instead by an actually pretty cool feature TM from Apple. In what world is generating false positives spamming 911 and potentially displacing actual emergencies a "pretty cool feature"??? This "feature" is doing more harm than good in Summit County, it's trash: “We are not in the practice of disregarding calls,” said Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 Center. “These calls involve a tremendous amount of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrollers. And I don’t think we’ve ever had an actual emergency event.”
- cobbal 4y ago
  In a world where it's probably also saving a lot of lives. Ambulance sirens probably cause a couple extra accidents as drivers try to get out of the way. Doesn't mean we should stop trying; it means we should keep trying to improve.
- taysix 4y ago
  I think OP was being sarcastic. I think that because they added TM (for trademark) after "Feature", which I take to mean sarcasm is being expressed in the sentence. All that to say, myself (and likely OP) agree with your thoughts.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  > The technology has been heralded for saving lives The problems faced by emergency ski services are niche. If this technology doesn't give false positives outside of that niche I'd say it's pretty worth it. And fixing it for that niche is probably not that hard. In general I'd say spend more resources if it meant saving more lives; inverse need not apply?

lynx23 4y ago

The day Apple makes automated emergency calls mandatory in my area is the day I will quit using an iPhone.

nanidin 4y ago
Is the feature mandatory in any area? It’s basically fall detection rebranded as crash detection.
- lynx23 4y ago
  I honestly dont know, I am not an Apple support person. As we have learnt, its only a few steps from "this is useful" to "we have just mandated this because it is so useful and people are too stupid to realize how cool this is!" Trust me, in a few years, automated emergency calls will be mandatory, downvoting the messenger doesn't help either folks.
amanaplanacanal 4y ago
From the comments, it sounds like it’s becoming a common feature in android phones also.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  There is not a single Android phone I'm aware of that has a feature like iPhone's "detected crash to automated 911", could you provide an example?
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    Someone mentioned their pixel 4a called 911 when it fell and hit the floor.
nickthegreek 4y ago
Fall Detection is an optional feature. There is nothing mandatory about it.

userbinator 4y ago

The “crash detection” and “fall detection” features on the Apple iPhone 14 and watches automatically call 911 when the devices detect a sudden stop that, in concept, means the user has been involved in a car crash. I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason. “We are communicating with Apple to get them to pay more attention to this but it feels like we are trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub.” An easy way to get them to pay attention might be to just loudly announce the intention to, and then start ignoring, automated calls from them, or at least deprioritise them in favour of human calls. The equivalent of nullrouting DDoS traffic.

lostlogin 4y ago
> I wonder how many times it's been activated not by skiers, but by angry people throwing their phones for whatever reason. Even just dropping it. I’m bemused at how many cracked screen devices I see given how often I drop mine and yet it never seems to break.
- shusaku 4y ago
  It’s all about the angle I think. The only time I cracked mine was a very short drop (two feet at most) but it hit flush with a tile floor
- watwut 4y ago
  it depends on where exactly it falls. Mine cracked after it hit a rock I think, there is little hole that looks like made by something spiky. I have fallen while cruising on skateboard
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  I drop my phone a lot, but having a glass screen protector, I believe, adds the extra reinforcement needed to disapate the shock and prevents my screen from cracking.
icelancer 4y ago
Start billing Apple for the fake calls.

todd3834 4y ago

My Apple Watch had called 911 or “Emergency SOS” at least twice. I don’t even think it is fall detection but the button getting held down when I’m paddling or duck diving sometimes. What sucks is that when you’re wet you can’t easily cancel the call, let alone understand anything being said on the speaker. Even after taking it out of water mode, if you’re fully in the water it’s a problem. Luckily after the last situation I opened up the app and disabled all Emergency SOS features so hopefully it does not happen again. Also, hopefully I never actually need it

Brian_K_White 4y ago

My pixel 4a5g running LineageOS did it on me one day from pressing the on/off button a few times in rapid succession. I had no idea it would do that. I was just in the final stages of trying to get any reaction out of it because the screen was not coming on. Turns out the phone was still running and working but the screen had died. I don't think any of these too-automatic and non-apparent things are a good idea. I had no intention to call 911, and I had not intentionally configured that action. I'm just glad the speaker and mic still worked and I was able to hear the operator and respond to them. I don't even see how this one even helps anyone even in theory. Is it even any faster than dialing 911? If I were in an emergency, would I remember some weird trick like that at a time like that? Are they thinking that people in duress will rapidly and repeatedly squeez their phone naturally and so it dials when needed without you consciouly needing to? I guess maybe the theory is that in any kind of car or bike crash, or even ordinary fall or violence, there is a good chance the violence will have damaged the phone's most fragile part, but just like in my case the phone still worked. So it's actually somewhat likely to be a valuable option to have some way to dial 911 witbout a working screen. Ok maybe I guess.

albert180 4y ago
It helps you when you need to call 911 quickly but maybe can't talk freely or something dangerous will happen to you (E.g. domestic violence, Assault, etc). The Pixel will transmit your location and also inform 5 emergency contacts, start a camera stream etc (depending on what you configured). It's also not enabled by default so you must have enabled it
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  I like the covert aspect. That sounds very good if you know about it so that it's a tool ready for you to use on purpose like mace in your bag etc. At least this did require pressing a button unlike the fall/crash detection from the article.
  - avian 4y ago
    It's not covert in any way. The phone emits a siren sound at full volume for a few seconds before calling and the call comes up in handsfree/speaker mode.

cimnine 4y ago

Devices should offer a quick way too disable the feature for a limited amount of time, so that people don't forget to turn it back on. Like it's possible with Do Not Disturb features. Perhaps that could be called Action Mode.

TheMiddleMan 4y ago

Blind spot in the training data?

snickerbockers 4y ago

I wish there was some way to make apple responsible for the costs this incurs. I hate the idea that they can sell more phones based on a feature that effectively DDOSes emergency services, with the cost being beared entirely by the public.

bmitc 4y ago
I fully agree. Corporations get away with stuff all the time because of the scale of the mistakes, when those are the times they should be punished the most.
withinboredom 4y ago
As a business owner, I receive random ass invoices all the time. I ignore them and have an attorney for the cheeky ones who send them to collections or small claims hoping I won’t show up. My wife has dual sim with US + NL phone numbers. Her iPhone will not let her choose which one to call from when tapping a phone number on a webpage, so whenever she does this, depending on which country we are in, can cost a few dollars/euros per minute. I was joking that we should send Apple an invoice for the faulty feature. Maybe they will pay it, and if they don’t, we can take them to small claims court. I’m quite familiar with the process now. Lol.
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  I actually saw a case where some guy took Apple to small-claims court because they wouldn't service his iphone unless he changed the password, and he contended that this is a violation of his contract with Apple-care. They kept sending the manager of the local apple-store to represent them despite local laws requiring them to send either a lawyer or the CEO. Eventually after several court dates and appeals they're forced to grant him an exception to their policy and also he got Apple's income garnished for $185 to cover his court fees. https://old.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/8pocxv/apples_holierthanthou_attitude_is_their_undoing/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/8pocxv/apples_h...
  - tpmoney 4y ago

Duhck 4y ago

I’m an avid snowboarder and mountain biker and live in a Colorado ski town. I had called detection and crash detection enabled on my phone and watch since it came out. I was thrilled when I took a bad spill over the bars of my mountain bike at 30mph downhill and my phone offered to call 911. I was dismayed when I started snowboarding this season and without falling my watch texted my emergency contacts and called 911 repeatedly on my first runs of the season. I’ve now disabled it as my older mother doesn’t need another reason to be scared of her son doing extreme sports regularly. Now I lost the extra safety the feature provided simply because it was incapable of understanding snowboarding behavior.

electriclove 4y ago
Hopefully Apple refines this.. overall, this is the cycle that improves things

bmitc 4y ago

I am very surprised that automated systems like this aren’t illegal. If Apple wants to start a service like this, they should be required to install an intermediary to properly handle the calls instead of just wasting the time of emergency operators and responders and endangering people’s lives by tying up the system. I believe that’s how OnStar worked/works. As it is now, they’re just outsourcing implementations of the feature to emergency services. I absolutely hate the world where our government sits around and waits for Apple to “fix” this, whatever that means, instead of actively prosecuting them to force this feature off and penalize them. A quick web search shows that several people have been charged and jailed over spamming 911. Apple should be too. As a thought experiment, say you were a person on a ski slope watching people ski and immediately calling 911 when a fall occurred. Would that stand? No. So why should Apple get away with it just because they’ve automated it and outsourced it to phones and scaled it geographically?

g_p 4y ago
Interestingly, this seems to be one of the ways their satellite based emergency services system works - using a relay station to receive messages from phones. This would suggest they already have infrastructure they could use for these features. I believe there is established precedent in some countries that you can't connect alarm auto dialers straight to the emergency phone number (precisely because of false call-outs), and therefore need to go through an alarm monitoring company. Apple seems to be doing a direct link to emergency services here, in a world where circuit switched telco precedents seem to be missed in the packet switched world. My guess is they think they can win in the court of public opinion because it's for "people like you" using a phone that you have, rather than something for "other people". It would be interesting to see how Apple could be forced to implement proper quality assurance and scenario-based negative test validation of their products before they are allowed to do these kinds of things.
- bmitc 4y ago
  > My guess is they think they can win in the court of public opinion because it's for "people like you" using a phone that you have, rather than something for "other people". This stuff just really upsets me because, if it happens like that, it just shows the corporate capture of the U.S. and Apple's nearly limitless market power. > It would be interesting to see how Apple could be forced to implement proper quality assurance and scenario-based negative test validation of their products before they are allowed to do these kinds of things. It seems to me that the bar should be incredibly high, which would mean that it's basically impossible to hook up automated systems to the emergency services line. Because I don't see a way that they could rule out false positives, especially when they're actively pushing their Apple Watch to the active and extreme sports crowds.

buildbot 4y ago

I set mine off in a ski “crash”, where I turned uphill very quickly and apparently that was high enough g force - oddly, I had already crashed hard enough to bruise my ribs earlier but that did not set off the detection.

Loic 4y ago

Every year, I spend one week as ski/snowboard instructor with "town" teenagers for the first time on a board. 3 years ago, I had to ban these automatic alerts and ask the kids to disable them because of the false alerts. Last year was ok. It looks like I will have to do it again this year. As an instructor, it is really bad wenn you see the rescue team coming to you for nothing, knowing that it diverts resources for real cases. Update: you never ever need such piece of shitty automated system on a normal ski slope. Outside of the slopes you need an Arva.

aa-jv 4y ago

A long time ago, I wrote a fall detector application for Android which could be configured to send a Tweet (Twitter was fresh and new then), send an SMS to a caretaker number, make alerts, etc. This really is important technology, particularly for the elderly and infirm. When the app started to get used, it was very popular. The reason is - we configured it to be used with a caretaker - i.e. another human that would be alerted if there were a fall. This use-case was immediately compatible with existing structures in the fall-detector market; i.e. letting grandma out into the yard for a bit of alone time while I put the kettle on... I don't know if Apple have a way for the user to inform a caretaker, but if they do I can only assume its a nuisance to set up.

benj111 4y ago
>i.e. letting grandma out into the yard for a bit of alone time while I put the kettle on... I think you could have worded this to make your gran sound less like a dog...
- aa-jv 4y ago
  .. if only you'd seen how fast Grandma's so often hit the grass to get into the sunshine.

slaw 4y ago

Apple Watch OS 9 replaced power off with emergency call. Now power off is a small button at top right instead of slide at the bottom. I did call 911 once instead of powering off watch.

macintux 4y ago
Sliding had its own risks. I dialed 911 once because the screen was wet and it misinterpreted the location of my finger.

sinuhe69 4y ago

I didn’t exactly test it, but I believe on the Apple Watch, an emergency call will be only activated after an explicit announcement was not interrupted. Why Apple changed that in the iPhone 14 is a riddle for me.

gst 4y ago

Why is that not a problem with Android phones? Does Google have more accurate crash detection? Or is it just because much less Android phones with crash detection (such as the Pixel phones) are in use?

Gordonjcp 4y ago

It goes without saying, I hope, that if you do accidentally call the emergency services you should stay on the phone until you speak to someone and explain the situation. No-one will shout at you for it. You're not in any trouble. Just for fuck's sake don't hang up the call, because then we have to send everyone to your phone's reported position just in case there *is* a problem.

ChoGGi 4y ago

"were working on a fix they were hoping to have out in the first quarter of 2023" Or Apple could disable it temporarily to stop filling up the 911 queue? At least add a msg saying it's automated?

Waterluvian 4y ago

My car does this. It doesn’t call 911, it calls a service. And I pay something like $20/year for it (along with other features). Apple is wrongly exploiting a public service rather than paying (and charging for) a proxy.

33955985 4y ago

As anyone who has worked in ML knows, this feature will require some tuning. Tuning that Apple will do. I’m not sure this minor issue warrants rounding up the firing squad to execute the teams that built it.

cookie_monsta 4y ago

It seems this problem could be largely mitigated by incorporating some kind of timestamp. "This person hasn't moved in the last minute" isn't such a big deal. "This person hasn't moved in 10 minutes" is probably cause for alarm

notjulianjaynes 4y ago

Similar thing happened at an amusement park: https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/increase-of-911-calls-to-six-flags-new-england-by-mistake/ https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/increase-of-911-calls-t...