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Japan skiers’ smartphones making unnecessary emergency calls
- softskunk 4y ago[flagged]
- sokoloff 4y agoOn what basis would it be illegal? Does that site have an obligation to serve you? Are they not serving you because of your membership in a protected class in their jurisdiction?
- type_Ben_struct 4y agoShould be illegal != is illegal. It would be illegal if it was against the law. If the government in a jurisdiction the site operates in decided to make that the case then it would be illegal.
- sokoloff 4y ago“has to be” ~= “is” != “should be”
- philip1209 4y agoIn the USA, we have "no duty to deal" https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/refusal-deal https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
- r3trohack3r 4y agoFWIW, I just wrote a privacy policy and terms of service for my app. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t understand GDPR. I could probably understand it if I took the time to do some research. But, at this point, I don’t have a single user and I don’t think going after the EU as an early adopter (and the time spent to make sure I’m actually compliant with their laws) is a better use of my time than targeting people in a jurisdiction I understand and can be reasonably sure I’m following the laws of. So, instead of figuring out all of the laws of all the countries, my ToS require you to attest that you’re in the United States and using the service under U.S. law. If you try to access my product from the EU, you’re in breach of our contract. If you believe I’m mishandling your data under another countries law, send me your account and I’ll gladly disable it. I suspect this is going to become increasingly common as companies try to regulate digital imports/exports. I’m not interested in assuming legal liability for sending bits across a border.
- martin8412 4y agoYour contract is irrelevant. If you process data of EU subjects, then you're bound by the rules of GDPR regardless of what your contract contains. You can't sign away your rights in the EU, so I can lie and say that I'm in the US, and that's entirely your problem.
- pb7 4y agoIs it his problem? He doesn’t have to respect GDPR because he doesn’t operate in the EU. Sounds like it’s your problem if he doesn’t handle your data the way you think he does.
- lfodofod 4y agoEuropean authorities are still able to enforce fines against him unless he’s exceedingly careful, even if he doesn’t have direct presence in the EU. This is why many websites just block European IP addresses entirely. You might think you’re safe in the US, but perhaps you use a payment processor with significant European presence? Stripe or Paypal, for example. European authorities can take your money.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago> This is why many websites just block European IP addresses entirely. This is not sufficient. IP addresses do not have sovereign rights and only loosely correlate with the legal jurisdiction of the user behind the originating packet. This is a world where, by connecting to the internet and exchanging packets, you are simultaneously liable for every law under every jurisdiction; it’s just a game of roulette which jurisdiction the packet you receive is coming from. This doesn’t seem scalable, sustainable, or particularly good for human/civil rights.
- pb7 4y agoNo, they can’t. People in sovereign countries aren’t beholden to your country’s laws. The EU can block access to the site from inside but nothing more. It doesn’t rule the world.
- squarefoot 4y agoIt's their thing and they can do whatever they want with it. However, you can use Ublock Origin's "block element" feature (right mouse button over the element you want to block opens the contextual menu) to block all those annoying modals. It works on some other sites too, while others will not merely cover their content with modals but serve an incomplete article.
- googlryas 4y agoThe ones that deny you aren't in the EUs jurisdiction. So the EU can have fun writing a law for that.
- pixl97 4y agoI remember the day my wife and I were driving on the interstate and I tossed her iphone in the center console of the car. Suddenly I get a text saying that she has been involved in an emergency and the authorities have been called. The phone starts dialing and I hit the end call button, unfortunately this is 911 ending the call doesn't do any good. We get a call back a moment later asking if we're ok. Then minutes later from all of our family contacts asking what happened. I'm 99% sure she disabled that feature after that.
- homero 4y agoIt should know better by seeing that the car is still traveling
- photoGrant 4y agoYou can fall in a vehicle that’s still travelling. It just has to be able to occupy the fall, so to speak
- LarryMullins 4y agoI don't think it's meant to call 911 whenever somebody trips, on a bus or otherwise. It's supposed to detect car crashes, not somebody stumbling on a bus.
- nickthegreek 4y agoThe main reason I am getting my elderly mother one is for fall detection. It is not just meant for cad accidents.
- jrockway 4y agoMaybe I was indoctrinated by early 90s TV ads, but don't you want that "I've fallen and I can't get up!" thing? Seems more reliable.
- mtgentry 4y agoSeems like an edge case that Apple can solve by comparing phone behavior on a ski lift vs that of a car. There’s gotta be some patterns in the data that are distinctly skier behavior. However if they want to help those skiers that are truly in need of help, it gets much trickier.
- thunfischtoast 4y agoI guess that in the emergency case the phone will automatically determine the GPS position. For the fire departments it might make sense to discard the automated calls if the position is on a serviced skiing slope during the slopes operation times since there, in case of an anncident, in 99% of cases others are there for helping immediately. Also the emergency service would call the slopes emergency helpers anyway since they have the skidos ready for rescue on the slopes.
- bluescrn 4y agoIt's probably not just the lifts. Anybody new to skis/snowboards is likely to do a lot of falling over. (But if you're expecting to be frequently falling onto wet snow or hard ice, it's probably a good idea not to have a $1000 smartphone in your pocket...)
- ghaff 4y agoAlthough the Apple Watch has the same feature. Learning to ski is certainly a particularly strong example of a case where you're likely to have a lot of false positives. But, honestly, even with something like hiking, tripping over a tree root or something like that isn't exactly rare. I've taken a ton of spills over the years and fortunately nothing worse than some minor bloodshed or maybe a twisted something was involved. (And the one time it was something more serious I didn't actually fall but did have a serious bone break.) I've been on the fence whether I ought to enable the feature on my watch.
- amf12 4y agoIt's not too difficult to solve actually. They could monitor for movement after the fall. If the person hasn't moved or has moved, but hasn't got up, then it should announce a warning (with enough time) before calling emergency services. If they got up and have started walking again, its a false positive, or they don't need automatic help.
- jonplackett 4y agoThis seems like a pretty easy thing to fix right, a quick GPS check to see if you’re anywhere near a road?
- dvhh 4y agoWhat if you're driving off the road ?
- jonplackett 4y agoOK, so we need a toggle that says 'i never drive off road' which will cover like 99.9% of people. also, if you do, you still don't drive off road on a snow covered mountain. maps surely can help here.
- nahkoots 4y ago> The Gujo City Fire Department in Gifu Prefecture, which has many ski resorts within its jurisdiction, received 351 emergency calls between Jan. 1 and Jan. 23. Nearly 40% — 135 calls — were made erroneously. I wonder how many of the 351 emergency calls and how many of the 135 erroneous calls were made by a phone's automatic crash detection system. It's obviously not great that the automatic system is placing so many erroneous calls, but it may be worth the burden on Japan's (or any other country's) emergency services if such calls aren't an overwhelming majority.
- boredpudding 4y agoBut if 99% of the automatic calls are false, the feature won't work. Because the 1% that is a proper automatic call, will be ignored and assumed false as well.
- Aeolun 4y ago> The department usually calls the number to check the situation when it receives an automated alert but there is no follow-up from the smartphone’s user. If the user does not answer, the department calls again sometime later This doesn’t make any sense to me. The user has been in an (assumed) crash where they are presumably unable to call 119 themselves, but the fire department tries calling back to see if it was an actual emergency? Then if nobody answers, instead of rushing over there, they try again in a little while?
- mattboardman 4y agoIf they are resource constrained then this just seems like a form of triaging where non-automated calls are prioritized. I don't see the problem with this approach if they are seeing a lot of false positives from automated sources.
- maccard 4y agoTangential, but I was looking into a monitored alarm system recently for my home. For £50/month, the alarm company will respond to an alarm and try to phone me. If they cannot get through to me, or I confirm I'm not home, they will dispatch a guard to arrive within 30 minutes. They will assess whether or not there is someone there and will call the police if there is, wait until they arrive, and charge £70 per callout with some standing charge for however long they wait for the police too. Needless to say I went with a Ring alarm, which is £8/month, and will notify me immediately, and I can call the police myself.
- taeric 4y agoI think it is safe to assume that the "don't rush over there" behavior is a learned one. After rushing over many times for what appears to be a false alarm, you start to think more of the calls are false alarms. There is even a parable about this. Several of them, actually. :D
- pflenker 4y agoI am surprised this edge case exists - last time I set up an iPhone with Apple Watch I had to specifically enable the feature (it was for an elderly person so it made sense)
- meltyness 4y agoThis isn't a disaster if you've got your AirPods in, you just explain everything is OK. Just put on your Rosegold Apple AR, you'll see.
- alana314 4y agoI got two of these alerts while snowboarding. I was able to catch them in time.
- theptip 4y agoWe should remember to evaluate interventions based on the cost and rate of false positive/negatives, vs. the benefit of true positive/negatives. In this case, the pertinent benefit to weigh against is the benefit of fall detection, particularly for elderly people, but also for active folks e.g. falling while cycling. Obviously we’d rather not make false emergency calls, all else being equal. But it could be worth it on its face, we need to analyze the benefits to know.
- saiya-jin 4y agoFlooding emergency services with fake incidents can easily start killing people due to help being called just because some idiot manager thought 'this is good marketing so lets get this done quickly' and pushed half-baked solution. I ain't talking about theory, read this thread about feature disabled and still calling 911, imagine if you had phone in trunk of the car. Glad it doesn't seem to be enabled in Switzerland, my wife is a doctor, worked on emergency and also as a doctor with ambulances so has perspective from other side. This is outright criminal behavior from Apple, easily to get sued for billions in each bigger market (not saying they would automatically lose, they can play well meaning idiot at the courts but PR effect is nevertheless properly bad).
- theptip 4y agoRight, but just to be clear, that is the sort of “cost of false positive” that I was talking about considering.
- rchaud 4y agoShouldn't people who want this have a specific device or service that handles the logistics of rescue, like Onstar? From the looks of it, Apple gets to market this feature but shoves the work off to public rescue services, which are then burdened by false positives due to Apple unilaterally letting their phones dial emergency numbers and putting the onus on the user to handle 'impact classification'.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ilikehurdles 4y agoAnyone who's been skiing with an actual fitness watch over the last 5+ years knows this feature doesn't work even with devices that gather and understand more vitals than annual consumer iDevices. It's a shame the gadget geeks, techies, and Apple couldn't learn from others before going down this path.
- hinkley 4y agoCan I just take a minute to say how salty I am that the “hike” exercise doesn’t ask for how heavy a pack I’m carrying? They estimate is that you add 2 seconds to your mile pace for every extra pound. You can’t tell me that doesn’t affect caloric intensity. I had a problem, last year that the heavier the pack the worse Apple would report my cardiac fitness. Yeah of course I’m shorter of breath today, I’m carrying 20 lbs! I feel like this whole part of the ecosystem is just in maintenance mode. You can’t learn much when you stop doing.
- brianwawok 4y agoI’d assume they would need a new category called backpack. I suspect 99.9% of hikers using an Apple watch don’t have a backpack.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NickBusey 4y ago> I suspect 99.9% of hikers using an Apple watch don’t have a backpack. I'm sorry, but what? This is a wild claim to assert without any data whatsoever. You think only one in one thousand people on a _hike_ are carrying a backpack?
- neffy 4y agoGet the feeling the software is being developed by people who never stray far from their desks?!
- hinkley 4y agoI have to wear my smartwatch backward and upside down because it kept sending random emojis to my partner when I was doing yard work. Drove her nuts. Either flexion or just the glove would push the button, causing it to take input. If the last thing I looked at was messages from her, then she’d get responses out of some cheesy horror movie. I haven’t tried again with my latest model. I would have thought the lock would prevent such things, but it didn’t, and I am starting to forget the repro steps.
- hulitu 4y agoIt seems (from the comments) to be a "feature" of Apple devices. In some countries calling emergency "for fun" can have legal consequences.
- zackangelo 4y agoI stopped wearing my Apple Watch while surfing because this feature would trigger almost every time. It’s made worse by the fact that the touch screen is inoperable when the phone senses that it’s wet, so it’s difficult to cancel.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoWhy didn't you just disable the feature? In the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, tap "Emergency SOS" and then turn off "Severe Crash" and/or "Fall Detection".
- trompetenaccoun 4y agoWhy would it be enabled by default? That's crazy.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoHardly anyone looks in the settings. If it was off by default it would be pointless. (I believe in current versions, it asks you during initial setup whether you would like it activated or not.)
- mildavw 4y agoUS ski patroller here, this is happening via Apple Watches here too. Not nearly as many as in the article, though. Couple times per month per resort.
- 0110101001 4y agoUS skiers' phones too https://coloradosun.com/2022/12/26/skier-iphone-crash-detection-calls/ https://coloradosun.com/2022/12/26/skier-iphone-crash-detect... https://www.explorebigsky.com/iphone-software-issued-28-false-emergency-calls-from-skiers-in-gallatin-county-this-month/46944 https://www.explorebigsky.com/iphone-software-issued-28-fals...
- JshWright 4y agoI’m a firefighter/paramedic in a suburban town. We average one of these a month (false automated reports of vehicle crashes). I’ve never see a true positive report.
- snvzz 4y agohttps://archive.is/oE4hk https://archive.is/oE4hk
- _rutinerad 4y agoI had this happen to me in an unexpected way as well. I parked my car on the side of the road, ran to my parents’ house, ran back to the car and jumped in. When I jumped in the car, the phone thought I had been in an accident and called emergency services. Luckily I think I was able to cancel it in time.