
What3words: The app that can save your life - ismiseted
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-49319760
======
reustle
Reminder that you should avoid what3words. Still unfortunate that some
governments fell into using them.

[https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-
three-...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-..).

> The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed
> to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for
> permission.

> If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and
> conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement.
> And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.

> You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you
> look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!

------
johnday
This reads exactly like a press release from W3W, the private entity. I'm not
clear on why the BBC thought it would be within their rights to publicise it
in this way, other than they didn't know they were basically advertising a
product (NOT doing so is a cornerstone of the BBC philisophy).

It's also entirely unclear to me why the emergency services dispatchers
wouldn't just ask a caller to read out their GPS location from any webservice
which can report it. Hell, they could set up "999.gov.uk" or similar to show
exactly their GPS location.

~~~
DanBC
I'd be interested to know if BBC checked any 999 call handling centres to see
if this was common advice.

------
lode
This sounds awfully like a PR puff piece. (In fact a link to it is liked by
their PR person
[https://twitter.com/miriamfrankLDN/likes](https://twitter.com/miriamfrankLDN/likes),
and the images come straight from their PR archive:
[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S-kYBJIjhfkIElyONvod...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S-kYBJIjhfkIElyONvod-
UMYT5CcE_Dq))

If they had a smartphone with GPS and data connectivity so they could download
an app, they could use that to share their exact coordinates without having to
download this proprietary app that wants to copyright the concept of location.

Just on my homescreen alone I have 4 apps that can already share my exact
location: Google Maps, Apple Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger

------
mxuribe
Whether this article is a puff piece, i think is less important (though it
sure seems it to me). The important aspect here is that for some people GPS is
failing them; and to me it's an UI/UX problem.

For example...Why do developers use text names for variables in their
programs, and why don't they just use binary - which are clearly more precise?
</sarcasm>

If this is in fact a proprietary thing, then I really dislike that. If
something is actually, supposedly this useful, then it should be public
domain. However, I'll give credit to the founders of what3words for attempting
to solve an issue that they ran into (to scratch their itch as it were). Would
"fixing" the delivery issue with the government service (postal service in the
original case) be the appropriate solution? Would better UI for current GPS
apps be another solution? Maybe, probably...But the founders took a hypothesis
and ran with it to test it out; kudos to them for that. Clearly, it is working
for some people. While no one might argue for the benefits of precision that
conventional GPS coordinates bring, what is clear - in real life - is that
some people could benefit from an alternative UI for describing their
location.

So, a puff piece, yeah sure; it seems it to me. Nifty and novel concept for
using an alternative "language" for indicating and describing location; yep.
Is it great? I guess we'll see. Does it have to be a whole, different thing,
or can it be a layer on top of legacy GPS? Who knows?

Do __YOU __have a better alternative???

~~~
nxpnsv
Nearby locations have radically different 3 words - thus it is useless for
distances and small typos can lead to arbitrarily large errors.

~~~
mxuribe
You mean like if the following GPS location is uttered verbally to, say, a
first responder: 40.7485452,-73.9879575 ...you likely would end up in midtown
NYC...while if i verbally forget to include the "-"...then i end up in
Kyrgyzstan? ;-)

I'm teasing you of course (all in good fun). But you certainly make valid
points: what3words isn't perfect...But, i still stand by the point that it's a
novel approach, AND that there's an opportunity here (here, i mean an
opportunity for the betterment of society, safety, humanity, etc., less about
"business opportunity").

~~~
Gys
There are many alternative systems that are open and based on algoritmes. The
only downside of those: they do not have massive VC money backing them to do
the marketing. But then again, in the end these VCs will need a massive
return. Guess who will pay for that ;-)

------
laputan_machine
Aren't longitude/latitude co-ordinates even more precise? There's a bunch of
free apps that give that information out. Am I missing something?

>I tried to get people to use longitude and latitude but that never caught
on," Mr Sheldrick said.

Well, if it's a life or death situation Mr Sheldrick, I'm pretty sure people
would catch on fairly quick

~~~
JulianMorrison
It's easier to say a string of words than a string of numbers. There's also
more intrinsic redundancy against small mistakes, that with a co-ordinate
could move the designated area by hundreds of miles.

I don't like the fact it's an opaque monopoly, but as a way to designate
locations for human use, it's effective.

~~~
johnday
If you're in the UK, moving the area by hundreds of miles would be obviously
detectable. If you said to the operator "I don't know where I am, somewhere in
the New Forest" and then you gave them a long/lat in Newcastle, they'd know to
check again. Given that phone towers connect emergency calls to local
dispatchers, even saying roughly where you are isn't necessary.

Long-lat are highly effective precisely because almost anyone can read a
number [including dyslexic people], and because the concept of a numeric pair
as a GPS location is understood, at least in passing, by almost everybody.

~~~
JulianMorrison
And if you're in many places globally, particularly the backwoods, you could
displace or misread a digit, point out a location well away from your
position, and still be pointing at "a forest".

Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble
getting _all_ the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.

Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as
if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a
glitch and can ask for retransmission. That matters when eg: using a CB radio,
or there's a blizzard blowing into a phone's pickup.

~~~
johnday
> Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble
> getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.

You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a
5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of
that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight
problems.

Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS
location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher
to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not
proprietary and harder to mess up.

> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as
> if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a
> glitch and can ask for retransmission.

This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.

------
crb
Prior discussions: \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017)
\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198)

They summarise as "proprietary & commercial, not obvious to humans without the
service, and not compatible with maps."

------
jhanschoo
If you're looking for a compact addressing system, have a look at the Google-
developed, openly-available plus codes.
[https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

~~~
mxuribe
TIL! Thanks for sharing this!

------
yostrovs
They had a smartphone with working GPS and they didn't know where they were...

------
madsbuch
Something's rotten with article. It resembles an advertisement more than a
news article.

If they had a cell phone and was lost in a forest why didn't they just boot up
maps (they had bandwidth enough to download an app) and walk out of there?

~~~
ExBritNStuff
It's not an advertisement, the BBC are explicitly not allowed to provide that
kind of content. Also, you've got to understand the mentality of someone when
they are stressed and scared. They wouldn't be thinking straight and the
fairly simple task of following a line on Google Maps becomes much harder.
Additionally, when dealing with navigating in rural locations, it's not as
simple as just 'go in straight line to place X'. There is terrain to navigate
around, which is not obvious in the dark, especially when you're not familiar
with the location.

They had obviously got to the point of calling the emergency services, so
let's make it easier for them to be located, rather than complaining that they
should have just got their compass out and sucked it up.

~~~
johnday
Just because the BBC didn't _know_ it was an advertisement doesn't mean it
_isn 't_ an advertisement. I have sent an email to their news team encouraging
them to re-read the article and letting them know that they may be
accidentally promoting a product. I suspect their editors may have mistaken
the "scientific" skin of the article as being of academic interest rather than
of business interest.

------
remicmacs
This is a repost of something that was posted today already :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702995)

