3 ms·

How much of a nuisance is this in reality? From what I've heard, 911 operators regularly get people calling them for non-emergencies. The 911 operator's job is

by cj 3y ago

How much of a nuisance is this in reality? From what I've heard, 911 operators regularly get people calling them for non-emergencies. The 911 operator's job is to judge whether the caller is actually reporting a legitimate emergency, and if so, route the report to the correct emergency personnel (fire/police/ambulance/etc) OR disregard the report as a non-emergency. The end of the article seems to confirm the false positives didn't actually have any real negative impact. So legitimate emergencies were not drowned out by the accidental dialing. > Thankfully, that wasn’t enough false 911 calls to overwhelm the local system and prevent responders from dealing with real emergencies that weekend, and with the help of festival organizers, the local authorities were able to locate the source of every false 911 call to determine that no actual emergencies were being reported. Obviously eliminating false positives would be ideal. But if the false positives aren't overloading 911 operators, seems like maybe a non-issue? Especially if these things can be predicted, e.g. local emergency personell should be aware of a local festival anyway (and can be on alert for these false positives, assuming it's not so bad as to drown out actual emergencies). Many people have an irrational fear of dialing 911. If you do it right now, someone will pickup the phone, and if you simply say "Sorry, I didn't mean to dial!" you won't get in trouble and the 911 operator will gladly let you off the line.

short_throw 3y ago
If no one speaks than you can't differentiate a false alarm from someone who can't breathe, or is hiding from an attacker, or is too hurt to put the phone to their ear. 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.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  This system doesn’t just open a voice line to 999, it dials 999 and then plays an automated message saying something along the lines of “The owner of this iPhone may have been involved in a crash, the device is currently located at [location]” and then repeats it a few times. Ideally there’d be a better system for this where 999 can be notified in a machine readable format allowing them to filter out automated calls from known sites that are generating false positives, but it’s not like the operators don’t have information to work from. It’s also possible operators could (maybe they already can) see which mobile cell the call came from, which would also help rule out false alerts because they’d be flagged as coming from the vicinity of a festival. Generally for large events 999 are going to contact the organisers and let them know they need to send out a first aid team anyway, they’re not going to automatically despatch an ambulance without someone having confirmed the need for one.
megous 3y ago
> ... OR disregard the report as a non-emergency. 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.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  The "person" is Apple. This is an automated dialing based on various parameters. I don't see a good outcome of fining this. Either the person turns off the feature and now there's a bunch of situations where it could have saved lives lost, or you charge Apple and they turn off the feature, effectively doing the same. Or worse, because as of now every smartphone has requirements to dial emergency services, regardless of sim cards or passwords or whatnot. If it's not completely dead it can contact 911.
  - megous 3y ago
    The person is the person buying apple phones and not turning off the feature when not needed in a situation where it's likely to produce a false positive. People can be expected to behave responsibly.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      It's a brand new feature so most may not even know it exists. These things are basically pocket computer these days, you can't expect a user to understand every available feature on them
emptyfile 3y ago
[dead]
ihattendorf 3y ago
If 911 calls go up by an order of magnitude (or more) due to a bug in a device that 25% of the population has, then yes that's a problem as there likely aren't enough 911 operators to handle the increased load.
activiation 3y ago
Sure... Let's make it ok because some stupid ass people call 911 to get the time... Apple should know better.

by cj 3y ago

short_throw 3y ago

If no one speaks than you can't differentiate a false alarm from someone who can't breathe, or is hiding from an attacker, or is too hurt to put the phone to their ear. 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.

jon-wood 3y ago
This system doesn’t just open a voice line to 999, it dials 999 and then plays an automated message saying something along the lines of “The owner of this iPhone may have been involved in a crash, the device is currently located at [location]” and then repeats it a few times. Ideally there’d be a better system for this where 999 can be notified in a machine readable format allowing them to filter out automated calls from known sites that are generating false positives, but it’s not like the operators don’t have information to work from. It’s also possible operators could (maybe they already can) see which mobile cell the call came from, which would also help rule out false alerts because they’d be flagged as coming from the vicinity of a festival. Generally for large events 999 are going to contact the organisers and let them know they need to send out a first aid team anyway, they’re not going to automatically despatch an ambulance without someone having confirmed the need for one.

megous 3y ago

> ... OR disregard the report as a non-emergency. 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.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
The "person" is Apple. This is an automated dialing based on various parameters. I don't see a good outcome of fining this. Either the person turns off the feature and now there's a bunch of situations where it could have saved lives lost, or you charge Apple and they turn off the feature, effectively doing the same. Or worse, because as of now every smartphone has requirements to dial emergency services, regardless of sim cards or passwords or whatnot. If it's not completely dead it can contact 911.
- megous 3y ago
  The person is the person buying apple phones and not turning off the feature when not needed in a situation where it's likely to produce a false positive. People can be expected to behave responsibly.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    It's a brand new feature so most may not even know it exists. These things are basically pocket computer these days, you can't expect a user to understand every available feature on them

emptyfile 3y ago

[dead]

ihattendorf 3y ago

If 911 calls go up by an order of magnitude (or more) due to a bug in a device that 25% of the population has, then yes that's a problem as there likely aren't enough 911 operators to handle the increased load.

activiation 3y ago

Sure... Let's make it ok because some stupid ass people call 911 to get the time... Apple should know better.