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Apple Refuses To Enable iPhone Emergency Settings that Could Save Countless Lives (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite being relatively easy, Apple keeps ignoring requests to enable a feature called Advanced Mobile Location (AML) in iOS. Enabling AML would give emergency services extremely accurate locations of emergency calls made from iPhones, dramatically decreasing response time. As we have covered before, Google's successful implementation of AML for Android is already saving lives. But where Android users have become safer, iPhone owners have been left behind. The European Emergency Number Association (EENA), the organization behind implementing AML for emergency services, released a statement today that pleads Apple to consider the safety of its customers and participate in the program: "As AML is being deployed in more and more countries, iPhone users are put at a disadvantage compared to Android users in the scenario that matters most: An emergency. EENA calls on Apple to integrate Advanced Mobile Location in their smartphones for the safety of their customers." Why is AML so important? Majority of emergency calls today are made from cellphones, which has made location pinging increasingly more important for emergency services. There are many emergency apps and features in development, but AML's strength is that it doesn't require anything from the user -- no downloads and no forethought: The process is completely automated. With AML, smartphones running supporting operating systems will recognize when emergency calls are being made and turn on GNSS (global navigation satellite system) and Wi-Fi. The phone then automatically sends an SMS to emergency services, detailing the location of the caller. AML is up to 4,000 times more accurate than the current systems -- pinpointing phones down from an entire city to a room in an apartment. "In the past months, EENA has been travelling around Europe to raise awareness of AML in as many countries as possible. All these meetings brought up a recurring question that EENA had to reply to: 'So, what about Apple?'" reads EENA's statement.
That's ok, I have a One plus phone. Odds are it'll reboot when I dial for the emergency services ðY
They are joining you in showing "courage" in braving the wilderness or emergency situation on your own.
I had a sucky sig.
As usual, these CONservatives hate us and want to spy on us.
Well, not the next one, but in the plus version of the next one, for a premium price.
Remember, apple isn't a technology company, they're a luxury brand marketing company.
Europe, as allways, belives they are relevant, and need to have their own "standards" for everything - this is basically E911, but hey, why use a system that works daily in the US, when some EU-Sponsored Comission can do it better (like ie OSI, which was a worldwide success, and TCP/IP died after OSI was released)...
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
When you read an article that describes this incredible thing and all the advantages it brings, and how easy / painless it would be to implement, I kinda start to feel like a car salesman is telling me how cheap some car is. I suspect there's more to the story, and quite possibly a good reason Apple's not enabling this service.
Anyone out there have the other half of the story? I'm gonna go get some caffeine.
Is it just me, or does this summary seem very one-sided and accusatory?
I'd like to hear Apple's rationale - too often, security is sacrificed in the name of "safety"
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No thanks for me. But I'm not adverse to Apple making it a user-configurable feature, provided the default is off.
When someone tells you something is "countless", it usually means they want you to believe it's sufficiently many to accept their argument, but have no evidence to back that up.
How many people would this actually save?
What is the potential for abuse?
Glad to see Apple has the courage to hold the line on this. Google rolls over like a pet dog, but what else is new.
It's called re-gu-la-ti-on...
Specifically, European regulation. Any smartphone sold in Europe should integrate AML, or be banned outright. Period. No exceptions. You have 6 months to comply and communicate with the European regulators a detailed timetable for your compliance.
72 hours after that regulation is passed by the European Parliament, I bet you Apple will come out with an announcement supporting AML and a couple of months later, with the latest iOS updates, all iPhones would be AML-Compliant.
Sure, a lot of imbeciles will scream bloody murder, Big Brother and governmental interference with the free market, but seriously, this is what works with these companies. Apple makes tons of money in the EU, and it won't take the risk to lose that market.
Also, it's pretty rich from Apple to refuse AML, when it deleted all VPN apps from its Chinese store. Fsck that company. Support AML or eat dung.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Yeah cause we can trust that this advanced location tracking feature won't be abused by governments to spy on its citizens. Its not like apple had to stand up against the intelligence industrial complex of multiple nations and tell them that encryption is part of the right of free speech and they won't submit to weakened encryption, or assist governments in decrypting phones outside of due process and in violations of ones 4th amendment rights.
For non-americans out there: 4th amendment right is your right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Its a right that pre-dates and existed before the United States, is an unalienable right of all humans not just Americans, and if your government doesn't already promise/guarantee such a right in a written and binding document similar to the U.S constitution, you should demand one from your government!
Unless there is absolutely no way to trigger AML remotely, I'm not sure I'd trust this system either.
Western countries have done a great job of demonstrating that they can and will violate every possible bit of privacy that they can manage, legality be damned.
Do we really want the various TLA agencies the ability to track the entire population down to the centimeter level?
Make sure you're not holding your phone while you're watching dirty videos!
We are talking about activation in emergency situations. Off otherwise. What are people trying to secure?
The other day I go to report a dangerous situation on the road to 911, the call goes through, then I go to turn the speakerphone on, since it is loud on the street, and.. well, I can't, 'cos there's this big bar across all that with a busy indicator, but eventually it gets my location and shows me a picture of where I am. So they crippled the phone app to let me know where I am?
Wait a sec...
So there'a a feature Android has had for years that's not available on iPhone.
This is news?
It's an EU thing, which means, politically, it's either left or far-left.
It's certainly not US conservatives who are pushing for it.
Exactly. Apple is consistent in preferring privacy — to a fault, such as when it chose the privacy of a dead terrorist over the potential for saving lives.
But the masses' reaction to that depends on the spin, and it is amusing to watch the crowd — even the /. crowd — flip-flop at the hands of the opinion-manipulators...
If only Apple were as heroic in other countries...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You mean like the requirement that all phones use a standard charger interface (micro-USB)? Not on any iPhone I've seen.
Apple is just slow. They original iPhone which came out in 2007 didn't even support video and 3G even though most existing smartphones supported it. How long did it take the iPhone to move to a large screen, even though I told them on slashdot as far back as 2005 that that's where things were moving: https://m.slashdot.org/thread/...
>Apple Refuses
So "no comment" now means "you refuse"? I think the civil liberties people would have a problem with that statement.
>Could Save Countless Lives
Given that it exists on Android, it seems extremely countable to me.
Another story with "Apple" in the title for teh clix.
Perhaps Apple knows ways in which this feature is being misused by the TLA's. And is refusing to become complicit in it, without being able to directly say, due to gagging orders, why.
The article makes it seems that Apple is "refusing to enable" a feature that their phones already have like it's part of some secret setting where as the statement from EENA says that Apple hasn't implemented the feature yet. From EENA "EENA calls on Apple to integrate Advanced Mobile Location in their smartphones for the safety of their customers."
There's a huge difference between the two meanings.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Sounds like a free open backdoor for the Government for surveillance!
I value what little privacy I have left.
If people who want AML are too stupid to enable it, charge them $5 for a setup fee.
They paid $600 for a phone. An extra $5 would be cheap - if they want it.
Costs money to implement. In the past the government has mandated these things,
so let's just work on getting our legislatures to mandate that AML for emergency services be
supported on cellular phones to be allowed to connect to the PSTN over the wireless spectrum assigned for cellular phone service.
Well, this got me asking myself the question " Just how accurate is wireless GPS data that is fed to the 911 systems ? "
Well, I can answer that actually since I can watch that data in real time as it traverses the 911 network.
That said, the GPS appears to report data that is accurate out to six decimal places.
A random one a few moments ago near the Chicago area came across as: +40.769997 -87.739716
My understanding is six digits out gives us an accuracy of .1 meter ( or about four inches for us non-metric types ) but this degrades a bit the further away from the equator you go.
Still, FOUR INCHES ? If you can't find the damn caller within four inches, then you have a much bigger problem. Even with degradation, it should easily be within a couple of meters of the stated location. One of you super math types can probably calculate the deviation if you feel like it.
I understand the need for emergency services to have accurate information, but damn.
How much more accurate do you need it to be ?
Law enforcement and government will find a way to turn it on "for the public good." Sometimes you just have to stubbornly say no in order to protect rights, freedom, and privacy. Rights cost, not just on the battlefields of our nation's wars, but in our daily lives. Sad, but very true.
E Proelio Veritas.
Despite being relatively easy, Apple keeps ignoring requests to enable a feature called Advanced Mobile Location (AML) in iOS.
That's what the "The Next Web" writer said. Then later in TFA: a quote from the European Emergency Number Association:
EENA calls on Apple to integrate Advanced Mobile Location in their smartphones for the safety of their customers
"Enabling" and "integrating" don't mean the same thing, which is why they are two different words. Further down in TFA:
EENA Executive Director Gary Machado has been involved in the AML project from the beginning. “I don’t want to trivialize the work it requires,” Machado said. “But from a technical point of view, deploying AML is not an overly complicated task for an OS provider.”
So this writer has gone from "not an overly complicated task for an OS provider." (which is surely an assumption by Machado based on his knowledge that Google and Apple have lots of money) to "relatively easy ... to enable".
Further, AML sounds like a hack, and it has only been adopted by 4 countries in the EU (and only partially by one of the four), and has not even been accepted by the actual governing body. However, "there is a good chance it will be featured", which means the whole thing my not even be embraced by the rest of the EU. The reason I say it sounds like a hack is because the phone will SMS the location coordinates separately (while the call is ongoing) when the emergency call is placed. So on the receiving end they must have the ability to receive texts (many can't), and then somehow get that data associated with the actual call and into their CAD system.
The E911 system has the location information integrated directly into the cellular protocols themselves (the Radio resource location services protocol - RRLP). The real question is why the EU cellular systems do not support RRLP, as more than 90% of handsets in the world support it (and it is required for all handsets sold in the USA). I have't bothered to research to find out, so maybe someone can reply with info on that.
Better known as 318230.
I don't like being tracked!
Really? As in, not possible to count? If you have a point to make, then make it. Using hyperbole like this makes it sound like you're lying.
For e911 the cost burden is carried by the phone companies and the local governments. AML shifts the cost burden off them and onto cell phone manufacturers and cell phone owners.
Ignoring something is not the same thing as refusing something. TFA makes it clear that the headline is in error.
Countless? Really? how hard is it to count the number of people who called Emergency services but later lost their lives because of incomplete location data. Yes, any number more than zero is bad, but don't make Apple out to be Vlad the Impaler or Pol Pot here.
How much more accurate do you need it to be ?
I am not sure about the lat and long, but I have seen the altitude be fifty or sixty meters or more higher than my position, even with many GPS satellites detected.
Also kept getting my pictures tagged in Norway because of nearby WiFi from a ship visiting North America from Norway, despite the GPS.
My rewrite:
Despite being relatively easy, Apple is resisting requests to enable a government wet dream spying tool called Advanced Mobile Location (AML) in iOS. Enabling AML would give governments the ability to surreptitiously obtain the exact location of any iPhone user any time without the citizen's knowledge. As we have covered before, government officials claim without actual evidence other than rudimentary anecdotes that such wholesale spying should be allowed because it might at some unknown time in the future save a life that probably would have been saved anyway with current technology. Why is AML so important? The majority of citizens have their cell phones with them at all times and AML is up to 4,000 times more accurate than the current systems -- pinpointing a phone location allowing the government to know whether your phone is face down on your nightstand for sexy fun time or whether you are talking to your mom on the toilet. In a press release Government officials behind implementing AML state, "be assured that if you fall in while on the toilet, we will know, we will laugh at you and we will send someone to check on you sooner or later when your battery runs out and we are no longer receiving your location signal.
How are they ensuring that AML can't be abused by random hackers, corporations, or governments?
Did they ever think that maybe the people with iphones just don't want to be tracked 24/7/365?
"AML automatically turns on mobile data on the headset (which may lead to charges to the user), automatically contacts NTP servers and sets date, and sends IMSI/IMEI over unencrypted (but invisible to the user) SMS message."
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
emergency services do *not* need my IMSI / IMEI, they have my phone number (both from the call, as well as the SMS)...
and that's even without going into the fact that this is sent in an SMS (the user will never know about), so security isn't even a word you can use in a debate about this.
we, developers, don't get access to the IMEI on iOS, it's against security policies (and rightly so), so I suspect this is part of the reason why Apple isn't replying to requests (which isn't the same thing as "refusing"!).
I'd rather have a secure phone, thank you very much... the benefits of this system do not outweigh the risks, it's not even close
save countless lives... what a selfish bastard...
What is to stop the government from exploiting this feature when they call you? Yeah, yeah, yeah...if you have don't nothing wrong....But that is hardly the point. Warrants and the courts exist for a reason.
why do we need the government to help us when they go around raping and torturing people? why should they have our precise location when they don't care about us and only want to take advantage of us?
https://www.obamasweapon.com/
What are people trying to secure? Their location and identity in the event they are trying to report an incident anonymously.
I've been long enough to have have made more 911 than I care think about. Not once would it been desirable to disguise my identity or location. More than once it has been .difficult to speak or to think clearly --- to remember your own name. The "anonymous caller" makes for good TV, In real life, the 911 caller is more likely to having a asthma attack.
Sweden couldn't wait for all these political and technical discussions. So recently, the emergency agency came up with a simple solution that works for now.
When you call 112, (911 for you Americans), and they need your location, they ask if it's ok if they send you a SMS with a link that asks your browser for location information.
So they can't get your location without consent. But they can with consent and only takes a few seconds.
And if the person can't give consent due to the situation of the emergency, they can get a quick court order for it.
But "quick" is not good enough for some emergencies. So they are asking the legislators to come up with a way for them to always get the location, but without jeopardizing callers wishing to be anonymous.
In many EU country not only you HAVE to legally report any incident , but you are under the threat of a prison sentence if you don't assist (e.g. unterlassene Hilfeleistung (failure to provide assistance) is a crime under section 323(c)). You have no right to report incident anonymously, in fact you have a duty to stay until the rescuer are here to take over, you have a duty to give possible help you are able to (as far as you are able). There are similar laws in some other EU countries (not all mind you). Pretty much why a few month ago when there was some old guy lying down in blood, and a pair of adult was a bit non plussed as what to do, I *had* to stop and help, help make the person warm, try to check if they had brain problem , etc... Until the ambulance came. Now I would have stopped , the law be there or not, because I see it as the moral thing to do. But even if I did not have that view, I was legally obligated.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Thanks for clarifying the systems, yours is the first post I read pointing out it wasn't even necessarily the standard it claimed to be yet...
It sure seems like they should just all implement E911 as you said instead of pushing AML. After all, it could save countless lives...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The whole article looks like written like a Google Ad.
Let us do math:
Only UK and two other tiny countries comprising of 1% world population has this system. Assume 50% of emergency calls are by cell phone (article says 70% of emergency call in USA and in a tone which indicates that is on high side). Also assume 75% use Android. Assuming 75% of caller can provide address. So even if iOS has this feature, the benefit will reach to only about 0.04 % of the population!
The article nowhere shows any evidence that Apple has refused to enable this (enable would mean the phone has a functionality and is deliberately disabled). The AML developed the system with the help of Google so obviously, it will take time for it to come on iPhone (assuming that AML is the only standard).
AML might be better in a perfect world where their is no corruption in the emergency sector workforce. My advice is not to rely on your parent/s and others to save you in an emergency. In fact, the whole article reeks of Google trying to sell their product and "DO MORE EVIL.".
What kind of astro-turf crap is this. Does all this greatness come for three easy payments of $49.99?
In the US and Canada, they've required the implementation of mobile E911 phase 2. It requires the location of the device within 300m (max) within 6minutes of the location being asked for.
This is done both in the network (triangulation/timing) and with the cooperation of the chipset in the device, which already reports the location. AT&T already uses the GPS chips in the device - the phone's chipset grabs the data.
So, there is no reason to ask for the location from the device manufacturer if the location is already being provided by the network.
That the EU can't get their rules passed and in force (since 2003) [1] is their own problem. The technology is there, available and has been for over a decade.
[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal...
Exactly. This.
People, for the love of God think a bit before you comment on this issue, don't jump to conclusions about things you don't properly understand just because you can't set aside your bias for or against Apple and whatnot.
At the very least, if you are gonna make accusations about it being a privacy liability, about the system being used for spying on people, and other ignorant crap like that at least know how the f*cking thing works before making baseless assumptions and accusations.
http://www.eena.org/uploads/ga...
http://www.eena.org/download.a...
Why exactly Apple still didn't take a stance on this, we'll know when they decide to talk. But it's bad enough that they didn't say anything up to now. If there are security/privacy worries on their side, they have to say it themselves. The system is already in use on Android phones, there are no known vulnerabilities in the system, and it's only triggered when people call emergency numbers sending a coded SMS message with location information that is more accurate than what current systems can do for the parts of the world it's being targeted.
Huh... So thats how law enforcement has been tracking Android users.
From what I have read, almost every emergency call involves stating where you are early in the call - something like "who am I, where am I, and why am I calling". That should also enable dispatchers to immediately start looking into what types of assets they have available for responding.
It is only a few days ago that I was thinking about this very same issue, as I drove past a very recent traffic accident involving a trailer and a scooter (with plenty of people already handling the situation), and it struck me that if I had been there only a minute ago and would have been one of the people stopping to help - then how would I explain my exact location. I would be able to say that I was on the road between A and B and roughly some percentage on the way, but that's about it. And when being lazy and driving other entirely unknown places purely by GPS, I often have no clue where I am.
This is one type of scenario, a person who reports an emergency who does not know how to describe their location. Another scenario would be someone who has for instance a medical or mental problem, or who is in shock, who is unable to provide a location.
So I can clearly see a need for this type of reporting. There are perhaps security concerns, but that is why you have a burner phone ;-) Joke aside, there could be for instance an obscure opt-out option for such calls, with a small icon appearing when making the call to ask 'press here within 5 seconds to hide location'.
AML could be exploited to give away caller location without calling emergency services. What if privacy calling/texting services that used phone numbers had AML unknowingly turned on? Two-factor authentication turned into a location beacon? I think someone figured out a way, and like always, fear is being used to push a hidden agenda. Odd timing for it. By the way, "Despite the existence of legislation to mandate accuracy and reliability targets, no Member State in Europe has set any." -- http://www.eena.org/uploads/ga.... It's a document describing AML in the UK. Honestly, it sounds more like the push for backdoors isn't going so well and once again, Apple is getting shit on, but in a much more clever and relatable way. AML information is sent over plain SMS. Apple doesn't allow automated texting for security reasons. Pardon the pun, but "phoning home" over SMS doesn't sound so great. What they could do is allow phone callers be added to a whitelist temporarily and then allow the caller SMS to text gps location information themselves. This would help filter spam. It's easy to do with Maps. I'm surprised law enforcement hasn't tried gaining easy access to Find My iPhone. Oh wait, they have -_-. Don't be a sucker.
If your want AML, use a phone that has it.
Thank you but no thank you. I remove my SIM-card every time I call 112 because that is the only way to prevent them from seeing my number. I share information when I want to share information.
only accurate down to the city?