India Makes It Compulsory For Phones To Have a 'Panic Button' (cio.com)

Reader itwbennett writes: Starting in January 2017, all feature phones sold in India will need to have a panic button that will alert "police, designated friends and relatives, for immediate response in case of distress or security related issues," said Minister of Communications, Ravi Shankar Prasad, on Twitter late Tuesday. The measure is one of many responses by the Indian government to the growing women safety issues in the country. Furthermore, starting in January 2018, mobile phones will also be required to have GPS systems to help pinpoint the location of the affected person in the event of harassment or distress, said Prasad.Mashable has more details.

Comments

growing women safety issues ...

[angel'o'sphere]

There is no growing women safety issues.
There is growing international (and national) awareness to the general un safety/danger for women.

mod parent up please / Phones will be taken first.

[gavron]

He's informative and he's correct.

Emergency calls in the NANPA areas are handled by PSAPs (public service answering points). Most are consolidated centers, like the one servicing all 12 of CenturyLink states.

The operator is trained to take the call as soon as possible, and say "911; what is the emergency". *

At that point the only thing they have for sure is your CLID and if there's a LIDB CNAM entry for it, that entry (Colloquially "Caller ID number and a name").
It takes time for the system to also display any other information. Your cellular telephone's GPS is actually not used -- instead tower information is used. However, if you're out on a rural highway with sequential towers, you're likely only hitting one tower so all the operator can know is you're within an X-mile radius of some location. Note that "X miles" is approximated by using the round-trip-delay in the cellphone-to-tower communication and dividing by the speed of light.

So that's E911. This new suggestion that Indian phones send out their coordinates supposes that the GPS/GLONASS is on all the time. If it isn't, it may need to acquire ephemeris data and that can take 30s-5m if the GPS has been recently used, and up to an hour if not. (These times vary depending on various factors too complex to get into here and not entirely relevant). The point being is that if you push the "PANIC" button and someone is attacking you, it is extremely likely they can take your phone and render it inoperative prior to it getting a GPS fix. (GLONASS ephemeris time to live is a one-byte field that counts how many 900-second intervals the data is valid. This allows their users more flexibility in not needing always-on devices.)

That leaves the simple issue that if someone wants to perpetrate a crime in India then the FIRST THING they are going to do is take the phone away from the victim. So much for a panic button.

Ehud

* There was talk at some point of having the automated system say it and then put the operator on the line (thus saving on personnel costs) but they decided that oftentimes what the operator hears in the background while saying that is actually useful intel. Also in the event of a delay in putting an operator on the call, the caller hasn't already started talking.