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

Posted by msmash on from the women-safety dept.

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.

10 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. False alarms? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How many butt-dialed panics will that generate per day per square mile?

    1. Re:False alarms? by danbob999 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I have an idea, to avoid false alarms, we could require 2 more buttons instead of just one. The user would need to press once on a button and twice on the other.

    2. Re:False alarms? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      ... From the article.

      "Under the new rules that come into effect in January 2017, all feature phones will need to have a panic button configured to the numeric key 5 or 9 and all smartphones will have the panic button linked to three short presses of the on-off button, according to the country's Department of Communications."

    3. Re:False alarms? by Shadow99_1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Most of India lives in very tight quarters, if you think cities like New York and Tokyo are cramped then Dehli would shock you. Also they select children with a preference for boys over girls (not to Chinese degree, but it still is certainly a 'thing'), with boys in a often superior cultural role over girls. Combine these two and it's no surprise some boys can't keep their hands to themselves. I bet many feel safely anonymous most of the time. They also have a culture social class structure to make this all the worse.

      So I'm not terribly surprised that this combination has lead to severe issues.

      --
      we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
    4. Re:False alarms? by arth1 · · Score: 2

      Years of doing end-user support has taught me that pressing two buttons at the same time is difficult for some people to do. And that's not even people in an emergency situation.

      Years of being a sysadmin has taught me that some people should not be saved.

  2. growing women safety issues ... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    1. Re:growing women safety issues ... by tomhath · · Score: 2

      You just outdid GP in terms of the most-boring-pedantic-comment-of-the-year. But GP is correct, there is a growing awareness and concern; the issue itself has been a big problem for a long time.

  3. Re:Hardware or software? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't understand E911 - the PSAP operator will see the phase one information tower - location and sector - when you call. The phone originated GPS location may not even be available until 30 seconds after you START the call (or never depending on a number of factors) To call it BS is ignorant and unhelpful.

  4. mod parent up please / Phones will be taken first. by gavron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:mod parent up please / Phones will be taken fir by willy_me · · Score: 2

    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.

    Cell phones use assisted-GPS to improve the position acquisition speed. From the Wikipedia article:

    Standalone GPS provides first position in approximately 30–40 seconds. A standalone GPS needs orbital information of the satellites to calculate the current position. The data rate of the satellite signal is only 50 bit/s, so downloading orbital information like ephemerides and the almanac directly from satellites typically takes a long time, and if the satellite signals are lost during the acquisition of this information, it is discarded and the standalone system has to start from scratch. In A-GPS, the network operator deploys an A-GPS server. These A-GPS servers download the orbital information from the satellite and store it in the database. An A-GPS capable device can connect to these servers and download this information using mobile network radio bearers such as GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE or even using other wireless radio bearers such as Wi-Fi. Usually the data rate of these bearers is high, hence downloading orbital information takes less time.