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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.
"Help! My owner has me trapped in these tight jeans!"
Have gnu, will travel.
Sorry, not going to start carrying a murse.
What about a belt clip? It worked for Batman.
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.
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.
Agreed, I started glueing mine to my head, looks cool and I get better reception!
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"Where the hell else can I carry it? I've got jeans and a t-shirt."
That's exactly why I use a fisher-style vest in summer.
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.
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.
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!
Where the hell else can I carry it? I've got jeans and a t-shirt. The phone fits in my jeans pocket so that's the only logical place to put it. I guess I could get a belt clip and have it catch on everything but I think not. How about they could just make it where I have to actually unlock the screen to make a call? Problem solved!
fucking simple... I buy trousers (or pants to you yanks :P ) with my stuff in min... cargo trousers, the map pocket is great for yer phone when paired with bluetooth headset.
I also buy shirts/tops at times with phone in mind.It's not rocket science
But no... it always boils down to.. " WAAAAH... moan moan moan"
So just for you..... have a gander at this
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.
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If you can't put your phone in your front pocket where you won't ever butt dial and instead put it in your back pocket, news flash, you're already wearing a "murse." Its just in the form of ball-crushing tight pants with no space.
Free the dangly appendages, wear more comfortable pants!
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.
Put it in the pants pocket, it makes sense. However the phone makers, who are all shouting "you're holding it wrong!", probably disagree.
And everyone is different too. I keep my keys in my pockets all the time. All day, all night, then I swap them to new pants. However my father would always remove all his change and keys from pockets when he got home and put them in a tray in the dining room, and retrieved in the morning. Other people put the phone on the nightstand. Some never put the phone down because they use it all day long.
Smart phones are still new enough that we haven't figured them out yet.
Except that I do keep it in my front pocket and it still "butt dials".
Wow, you must have a really big butt, if it reaches all the way to the front pockets ;-)
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.