
Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can’t - rcarmo
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-uber-can-find-you-but-911-cant-1515326400
======
sirsuki
I always wondered why the Phone app didn't have location services on and a big
button that when the user presses it would grab the GPS coordinates and
reverse geocoded address then have Siri read those over the phone line. That
way no 911 center needs to upgrade and no telcos need to change
infrastructure.

A simple button right there on the phone that sends the following sound (in
best Siri Voice imitation): "This phone is likely located near 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue North West, Washington DC, Latitude North 38° 53.8258',
Longitude West 77° 2.1927' admire.admit.hulk" (last words intentional:
[http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/))

~~~
jstarfish
Smartphones are nightmarish enough in an actual emergency-- try unlocking your
phone and calling 911 when you've got blood all over your hands, or you're
actively sinking in a submerged vehicle in a dark and frozen lake. Or if
fluids get into the TFT, good luck getting the screen to stay on long enough
for you to press anything at all.

There are better ways. Government has the money to arm police with grenade
launchers and MRAPs. The telcos have no end of cash from mobile data
exploitation.

Nobody is suffering except the people. Spend the money. Fix the goddamn
infrastructure.

~~~
Washuu
I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood.

Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and
preferably outside of the vehicle.

~~~
jstarfish
> I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood.

I haven't. The screen registered keypresses all over the place. It doesn't
work reliably with wet hands either, or even in a steamy bathroom.

> Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and
> preferably outside of the vehicle.

Every situation is different. Revisit your strategy once the car has already
slipped under the ice and started to drift. The cabin is filling with freezing
water but you still have some oxygen left. You won't be able to make any calls
once you break the window and go underwater, so you better hope you can
find/reach the spot where you broke through the ice...in the dark.

I personally knew someone who drowned under these circumstances. (And the
saddest part is, even though she accurately reported her location, responders
showed up instead where E911 said she was...an entire county away.)

At the very least, you should be able to just call 911 and engage no further.
It should be broadcasting your exact GPS coordinates. To the dispatcher, the
pinpoint on the map in the middle of a body of water should speak for itself.

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timack
Just before Christmas I spent an hour in a ditch with a broken hip after
cycling into a a sheep (I'm from New Zealand and they crowd all our roads and
are a frequent hazard). I was in a rural location so I had to spend quite a
bit of time on the phone with the emergency dispatcher, while in a not
insignificant amount of pain, trying to describe my location in relation to
various landmarks. The dispatcher was in a different part of the country and
was unfamiliar with local landmarks so this was very frustrating. I found out
later that there is a increased probability of complications (avascular
necrosis) if there is a delay having surgery following this type of injury
(I'll know in a few month if I need to go back for a hip replacement). Not
sure if an extra 10 - 15 minutes it took to get a ambo to me would have
helped, but I'd prefer the odds my way where possible! My parents were
confused by how I wasn't able to send the dispatcher my exactly location over
the phone.

Me after being picked up by ambos ->
[https://imgur.com/a/HJKWo](https://imgur.com/a/HJKWo)

------
AdamJacobMuller
[http://archive.is/l5uLn](http://archive.is/l5uLn)

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jamra
If calling 911 can automatically send your location based on your mobile
phone, you'd be able to save a lot of time for the operators, but I wonder how
many lives would be saved from faster responses.

Even better, if they created some app that would speed up the 911 process.

~~~
markvdb
As countless other countries have been doing for ages. Even Belgium does it:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.Nextel.Emer...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.Nextel.EmergencyApp112&hl=en)

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geococcyxc
No need for an app even, I read that (some?) german emergency call centers use
a service that will send the caller a text with a link to a website that will
then use the browser's geolocation API.

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withdavidli
John Oliver covered this topic back in 2016:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs)

------
cryptoz
Also unable to read the article no matter what tricks I use, but I'll add this
nugget of info for E911 requirements. I believe we are coming up on the
deadline years for when telcos must incorporate barometric measurements from
barometer-carrying phones into altitude calculations so that 911 emergency
response can get an altitude clue from the moment you ring.

Edit: PDF source
[https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-9A1.pdf](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-9A1.pdf)

And edit: This is a tricky situation, because the barometer does not provide
real altitude data, and if the math is done incorrectly or there is some
interference, the 911 response could be sent to the wrong altitude. Perhaps
there are delays with that because extracting the correct altitude from the
data is extremely difficult to do with only a single phone to use a source.

~~~
chipperyman573
[https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/...](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-
uber-can-find-you-but-911-cant-1515326400) will let you read it :)

~~~
cryptoz
Good trick, thanks! Reading now. Super interesting.

------
jpalomaki
In Finland we have an official 112 (that’s our 911) app which you can use to
make the call and pass location info.

The app will send the phone number and coordinates and then initiate a normal
call. Officials can see the calling phone number and connect that to received
location.

------
larrik
Not as serious as the article, but I still don't understand why _Find My
Phone_ can almost tell me what room in the house each device is, but the
(built-in) weather app tells me I'm 2 towns away...

~~~
api_or_ipa
Not sure how far away towns are around you, but around the Bay Area at least,
2 towns don't stretch more than ~5 miles. Weather usually doesn't change that
fast so its not a smart power move to thrash your battery querying for the
most accurate weather data. Find My Phone, on the other hand, is probably a
way more pressing issue and worthy of more resources spent achieving the best
accuracy possible.

Just my 2 cents, not a iOS engineer or anything.

------
halukakin
There was a tv show called APB about this app/911 idea.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5542294/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5542294/)

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madcow2011
To bypass the paywall, try going to Google and typing in the name of the
article ("Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can’t"). That worked for me.

~~~
thangngoc89
Oh thank you. They must have check for referer. Because the google's link is
exactly the same with HN's link

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leeoniya
paywall, so cannot read.

i assume it's because you volunteer your location to uber, whereas you don't
to gov't (and something about warrant-less surveillance/wiretapping laws).
there should be an easy way built into Android/iOS to transmit your location
during a phone call to the other end. it would not just solve the 911 use case
but a lot of other non-emergency uses.

EDIT: i'm also very interested why this comment is garnering downvotes.

~~~
chrisseaton
> i'm also very interested why this comment is garnering downvotes.

Your comment about the paywall is explicitly off-topic, and then you've
commented without reading the article. And now you're posting about being
downvoted, which is likely to attract further downvotes.

~~~
rabidonrails
>>Your comment about the paywall is explicitly off-topic

That seems harsh. If there's a paywalled article posted then it's fair of him
to say that he can't access it because it's paywalled. If you have an issue
with that then you should have (an issue with the HN rules and whether they
should or) shouldn't allow paywalled sites/articles to be posted.

~~~
chrisseaton
> (this comment was a reponse to the initial comment by chrisseaton which has
> since been removed.)

I haven't removed any comment at all. The quote you're replying to is still in
my comment. And I can't have edited after you posted that comment, because HN
doesn't apply comments that have been replied to to be edited.

~~~
Stratoscope
> I can't have edited after you posted that comment, because HN doesn't apply
> [allow?] comments that have been replied to to be edited.

Is that true? I'm pretty sure I have edited comments after they have been
replied to, as long as it was within the two-hour edit window. But I could be
remembering wrong.

Want to try editing your comment now that it has one or more replies and see
what happens?

Edit: Testing an edit after this comment has been replied to. Indeed it can be
edited.

~~~
chrisseaton
Well whatever I don't edit my comments after they've been replied to. And it
wouldn't make sense to have edited because I've repeated the same information
several times in replies to my replies.

~~~
Stratoscope
I wasn't suggesting that you should edit your comments (except for that one as
a test). :-)

Your note about HN not allowing edits got me wondering, so I was curious to
verify it one way or another.

Since you replied to my previous comment, I did a test edit on it and indeed
editing was allowed. Mystery solved!

~~~
chrisseaton
Maybe I was thinking of the rules for deletion.

