Google Helped Cause the Mysterious Increase In 911 Calls SF Asked It To Solve (bbc.com)

theodp writes: Android users have long complained publicly that it's way too easy to accidentally dial 911. So it's pretty astonishing that it took a team of Google Researchers and San Francisco Department of Emergency Management government employees to figure out that butt-dialing was increasing the number of 911 calls. The Google 9-1-1 Team presented its results in How Googlers helped San Francisco Use Data Science to Understand a Surge in 911 Calls, a Google-sponsored presentation at the Code for America Summit, and in San Francisco's 9-1-1 Call Volume Increase, an accompanying 26-page paper.

Comments

Simple

[JMJimmy]

Many Android phones when you press the power button the screen activates with the "Emergency Call" touchable which means it easily enters calling mode. Since emergency services is the only valid call you can make from that screen those are the "butt dials" getting through.

More annoying is the fact that holding the power button, something that seems to happen often in my pocket, brings up the "silent/airplane mode/power off" options without having to enter the pass key. I've missed so many calls because of this damn "feature". It's a combination of bad phone design and bad software design.

Re:Android's Achilles Heel

[drinkypoo]

People have been filing bugs to the Android team over this issue since 2011 and it has never been addressed, and the newer bugs keep getting pushed to lower and lower priority.

I'm really starting to get pissed at this tendency. They let bugs that lots of people care about persist forever. For instance, there are actually two active bugs for pinless bluetooth pairing. This is a problem that actually predates gingerbread.