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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.
> is an unalienable right of all humans not just Americans
As granted by whom? I'm seriously you asking this question. I often hear people go on about human rights, but nobody seems to know who or what has granted them. I, personally, have no clue.
The idea of absolute and universal rights seems too good to be true. I suspect people who make reference to them are either mistaken or are mentioning them rhetorically.
Can you elucidate?
I just pooped your party.
They are neither. They are a design company. The luxury came later.
There are android phones out there that are, (don't get value-judgment on imperfect, its a neutral term here) imperfect substitutes for iPhones. yet people still buy them. No one is forced to. There is added value to iPhone for some people. Just because you don't see that doen't mean they're a marketing company. They make their own chips. They're the ones that finally got a GUI working when the PARC people couldn't get it to quite work cleanly. They're the one that got multi-touch working on a mass market device when everything else was two guys in a lab. They've done real things.