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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.
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.
Or you could stop putting your phone in your pants pockets. Either or :3
Full transcript of Google's remarks follow:
Uhh... We're sorry. We're really, really sorry.
#DeleteChrome
Yes the iPhone and software are perfect and not a contributing factor, you are just pocketing it wrong.
"Help! My owner has me trapped in these tight jeans!"
Have gnu, will travel.
You could, maybe, stop wearing those ridiculously uncomfortable skinny jeans and actually leave "room" for your phone, in a FRONT pocket?
I've never worn skinny jeans in my life and always put it in my front pocket and unintentional calls/commands happen a LOT.
You could, maybe, stop wearing those ridiculously uncomfortable skinny jeans and actually leave "room" for your phone, in a FRONT pocket?
Impractical. How are you supposed to play "pocket pool" if you start putting stuff in your front pockets?
lucm, indeed.
Butt texting... now THAT"S a challenge.
Read the document instead of relying on a poor, click-baiting summary. There's an actual problem with ass callers.
Although the source data (i.e., whether a call is coming from a landline, cellphone or business) can be passed from the telephone system to the CAD system, technical issues can require human intervention to capture this data in CAD. For example, in 2014, DEM discovered that telephone routers could take 2-8 seconds to transmit ANI/ALI information (which includes source data) to dispatcher phones. However, if ANI/ALI information is not present at the time the dispatcher begins typing in the CAD Incident Entry window, source data is not captured, and dispatchers would need to manually port source data into the CAD Incident Entry window. Given this, source data (particularly for wireless calls, labeled as “W911”) was lacking in the CAD dataset which impacted the ability to identify the number CAD incidents created from wireless calls. Correspondingly, the number of CAD incidents resulting from wireless calls is significantly underrepresented, given that ~60% of DEM’s call volume comes from wireless phones.
lucm, indeed.
Emergency Call on my phone takes you to a screen where you can dial only previously manually entered emergency numbers.... on my phone, its empty. I still don't understand why on my device I have no choice on whether or not to have "emergency call" appear on the lock screen.
Are there really that many butt dials to 911? Enough to flood the system?
I accidentally emergency called 911 on a blackberry a few years back. I have no idea how long the call was going before I realized it was on, but there was nobody on the other end.
"Peoples butts are too fat"
how many does it take to flood the system?. I would expect in a relatively small volume to be extremely problematic tying up a considerable number of staff, after all they can't just hang up on the person immediately as it could be someone injured struggling to speak or someone in trouble silently dialing in the hope of someone listening in and providing assistance.
Your translation is wrong. The problem is not the 911 software. The problem is the delay in getting the caller id from the PSTN, and this is not something they can accelerate from the 911 data center.
Imagine that your boss tells you that he wants to receive emails within one second of any client or potential customer sending them. The problem is not his Thunderbird or Outlook settings, the problem is that email has to cross multiple boundaries, from one ISP to another, from one SMTP server to another, and nobody has control over the entire process.
In the case of 911, how can they fix it? Operators get thousands of hang up calls for which they don't get the caller id immediately when the form pops up on their screen. Instead of spending 20 seconds tidying up the call information they dismiss it with the "ass caller" flag. The call is logged but no details are entered in the database, and while technically they probably are able to reconcile calls using the switch logs or some other mean, it's just a huge pain in the ass that nobody has the budget to deal with. Typical big data problem.
lucm, indeed.
I was out in the woods one day and sitting on a hill for a while. I thought I heard some noise from my pocket, so I checked my phone. I had a voicemail from 911 saying something to the effect of "This is the third time you've called 911! Please check your damn phone!"
I checked my phone and it had two outgoing calls to 911 in the list. I was pretty horrified.
They obviously were familiar with butt dials. However, what if I was injured and unable to speak? Hopefully they could tell the difference. At least I didn't get a helicopter flying over me or something.
The ease at which the phones can dial 911 is absolutely stupid... it's absolutely Google's fault. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to make it harder to do accidentally, but still easy enough to do if you're injured/impaired.
Read the document instead of relying on a poor, click-baiting summary. There's an actual problem with ass callers.
I believe the collective term for these callers is 'ass-clowns'.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
also: for the record the difference between an ass-clown and an ass-bandit is red-nose vs bandanna!
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I thought the generic term is pocket dial.
I'm guessing that "butt dialing" is more for girls or others who wear skinny jeans or those who enjoy sitting on the phone.
I am also guessing that skinny jeans and "butt"-dialing does not usually apply to slashdot users.
My biggest gripe with using an Android phone is that the phone unlocks during calls even when they placed/answered via a hands-free Bluetooth device. Answering a call via Bluetooth with your phone in your pocket unlocks it and starts feeding the UI random screen clicks. 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. Its safe to say at this point that Android butt dialing is now a feature and is included by design.
My Skinit Cargo case keeps this from happening. You actually have to purposely press the power button, in the years I've used that type of case I've never accidentally dialed anyone. And until two months ago when I dropped the phone face down onto a gravel covered concrete parking lot, the phone looked practically new. I'm sure other cases provide similar protection.
someday soon instead of a call back, a small drone will just show up. Not sure if that's a good thing or not, but it will happen.
is to change 911 to 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3 instead. It's an easy number to remember, just learn the song!
Thanks! That's 3/4 down this thread and you're the first NOT to talk about looks or tight jeans, but about the actual problem!
Phones are designed to male emergency calls easy - for exactly the reasons you noted. You may have to do a silent call or have an arm and a leg torn off and still need to be able to dial 911. Anything that makes it harder for your butt to dial 911 makes it harder in those situations, too.
bickerdyke
Bothers reading bug reports or they would have fixed this issue 7 years ago when users first started reporting how shitty the lock screen configuration is
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I work for the sixth largest teleco in the US ... Phone number portion of caller-I'd comes during the call setup phase, the phone number has been sent before the call connects.
CNAM dipping turns that number into a name and address using a third party service ... And we send billions of CNAM dip requests a day to them and get the response before call setup completes or we move on without it ... A quick look shows we had a grand total of 8 requests that failed yesterday after 150ms, they were retried and all completed the second try, total lookup time was never over 500 ms
Anyone claiming it takes a long time to do CID lookups is a liar.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But I did 3 pocket-dials in a short time. I have no idea how that happened, since my iPhone was locked. Those calls were to my GF and my mom, so it appeared to be accessing my Favorites, but how it did that is a mystery.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
What are you talking about? Read your own quote:
if ANI/ALI information is not present at the time the dispatcher begins typing in the CAD Incident Entry window, source data is not captured, and dispatchers would need to manually port source data into the CAD Incident Entry window
That's a SOFTWARE issue, not a butt-dialing issue. When the information finally comes in, it can be recorded on the record asynchronously if the software is designed correctly.
You were dialing 9 to get an outside line you dummy. 1 is the long distance / US country code.
Where have you been? This is the sort of copypasta that made this place great back in the day!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
The HTC One M7 don't have a user accessible battery. It's hardwired to reboot the phone because otherwise a software glitch that crashes the phone could brick it until it ran out of power.
I used to have a Morphie power case for mine, but the power button on it was even more sensitive. My wife with the same setup didn't have issues with her purse. But even the loose extra side pockets of cargo shorts would allow it to get pressed.
My solution was figuring out that I didn't need the extra power from the case and switching to a $2 silicon case that makes the power button slightly recessed. I haven't had issues since.
I've had this problem myself and at first scratched my head at the odds of random brushes across the digitizer dialing only 911 then pushing call was even remotely possible. Then I realized there is practically no "debounce" and the random brushes are allowed to be registered at uselessly inhuman rates.
Secondly a proximity sensor is present in all but about 15% of android devices. If the emergency dialer checked this sensor before pocket calling emergency services this problem would be significantly reduced. You could at the very least include an extra on-screen hoop such as long pressing keys that would only be activated if the sensor detected it was in a pocket so that emergency services could still be contacted even if the sensor malfunctioned.
Another thing is the design just sucks.. if the goal is quickly and easily contact emergency services dialing 911 on a touch screen display can't be even remotely optimal. If your going to mandate anything it should be a single physical button intentionally engineered to be maximally both easy to use and resistant to unintentional use. Drop your phone, fall, get hit by something, get into an accident.. cracked displays and broken digitizers are by far the most vulnerable and failure prone components.. good luck making a call without them.
You must be new here.
Way back in 2004 I worked in an office where you had to dial 9-1 before dialing an outside line. Try dialing a 1-800 number after that.
At my office they changed the "9" to "8" to get an outside line, and I heard that was the reason.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It's now possible to open an app by tapping its notification bar thingo on the front screen.
You can't call it a lock screen any more because it doesn't fucking lock anything.
I can guarantee that this idea was the brainchild of some UX hobgoblin.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.