Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can't (wsj.com)
Accurate location data is on smartphones, so why don't more wireless carriers use it to locate emergency callers? From a report, shared by a reader: Software on Apple's iPhones and Google's Android smartphones help mobile apps like Uber and Facebook to pinpoint a user's location, making it possible to order a car, check in at a local restaurant or receive targeted advertising. But 911, with a far more pressing purpose, is stuck in the past. U.S. regulators estimate as many as 10,000 lives could be saved each year if the 911 emergency dispatching system were able to get to callers one minute faster. Better technology would be especially helpful, regulators say, when a caller can't speak or identify his or her location. After years of pressure, wireless carriers and Silicon Valley companies are finally starting to work together to solve the problem. But progress has been slow. Roughly 80% of the 240 million calls to 911 each year are made using cellphones, according to a trade group that represents first responders. For landlines, the system shows a telephone's exact address. But it can register only an estimated location, sometimes hundreds of yards wide, from a cellphone call. That frustration is now a frequent source of tension during 911 calls, said Colleen Eyman, who oversees 911 services in Arvada, Colo., just outside Denver.
Admittedly posting this having only read the headline, but the answer is obvious:
Because people apparently trust corporations like Uber, Facebook, etc. with all kinds of sensitive data, but for God's sake don't trust the government with the time of day!
too bad i cant RTF article
the $1.99 "911/emergency service" fee your cell company charges is mandated by state law, and was originally set up to fund 911 call centers. they largely came about after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help modernize radio systems. after the 2008 housing collapse and recession, most states just redirected the 911 fee to the general fund out of sheer desparation to keep the wheels on the late-stage capitalism bus fueled by the fumes of corporate tax dodging and globalist outsourcing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
even if you don't know you did. It's there in the EULA.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The technology is out there but if the government doesn't want to buy it or can't due to funding, then it isn't going to be available. I work in the industry and there's quite a bit of new tech being created but it still costs money to implement (not to mention infrastructure upgrades by the towns, etc).
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Write an app that transmits your location when 911 is being called. Advertise it to people to install it on their phone for the times when they need it. Watch people not install it because they are afraid their government might track them, but they're more than happy to hand the very same information to Uber, Facebook and everyone else giving them ... well, basically nothing.
If I was your government, I'd probably shit on you, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I paid doesn't cover it? How about divert all the phone tax fee go toward upgrading the system?
Launch a new service Uber EMT. They could get there faster. And there would be less chance the cops would show up with them to shoot your dogs.
CEO's get bonuses regardless of whether their jobs get done. When they don't, they face zero consequences.
Fixed that for you!
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to install 911 systems. The biggest problem is the RBOCs (phone companies). They've refused to upgrade their systems to allow any meaningful data to directly reach their systems. Many 911 systems out there today rely on old analog connections that can't carry enhanced data except for caller-id. The 911 systems simply use the caller-id to match a location.
Want to know how cell phones work when you call 911?
The user dials the number associated with emergency services on their phone. The phone gets handed to the cell company. At the same time, the GPS unit is activated on the phone and the phone attempts to get a lock. GPS information is sent to the cell company emergency services "smart router".
Meanwhile, the call gets routed to the PSAP. It uses the address of the closest tower to find out which correct PSAP is supposed to answer. The PSAP answers and gets connected to an operator. There, they are given the location of the antenna/tower that the user called through. SOME cell providers offer a link (depending on the software they are using) to get additional information about the call, which often requires pulling up seperate software and/or a website to get the location from the smart router. The location /may/ be updating in real time, or it may not be. I've seen many cases where the GPS didn't get a lock at first and the location pulled up in the smart router never gets updated beyond that. Oh, and if you use a cell company that hasn't directly partnered with your local PSAP, the operator may only get the street address of the closest tower.
The phone companies have the technology to make this work, and make it work well. It would require the RBOCs to upgrade their networks a bit and provide advanced services to the 911 centers. It would also require the police, phone companies and 911 centers to want to work together and do things the right way. Right now there are a lot of people who think their technology is right and that everybody else should just simply use it. What ends up is that we have a bunch of different software, all cobbled together in ways that make the system really, really bad.
Consumers tend to like apps as the solution to get to 911 services. Sure, they can get advanced services (like a real GPS location), and other nice things, but it relies on a bunch of technologies that are designed to work "at best effort". If you don't have data service and you launch the app, it won't work. If you call 911 and don't have phone service, your phone will actually roam to anybody and everybody's network you have a radio for and place the call.
With FB and all the rest it is the Phone/Customer that send the information. With a cellphone call, it is the provider that sends the information.
Also not that if you are unwilling to send the info, you can turn it of. If the provider is sending the information, you are unable to turn it of, regardless of the reason.
And you can bet they will then also be starting to ask for the data to be given freely with non 911 calls.
So yeah, these are apples and oranges.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Telco equipment can be very modern (imagine a single rack of DC-powered commodity blade computers with OC3's coming in the back, taking just 30 inches of rack space to handle thousands of lines) or very old (imagine rows of racks, mostly empty with each line handles by four twisted wires going to a large, sparsely populated board featuring, I am not making this up, Zilog Z-80 SIO chips -- depending on the age other the boards they may feature other SIO chips -- remember your phone call is just a stream of 64kbps 8 bit data at the switch level). A technical change which requires anything different from how things currently work is easy on the new stuff, but impossible on the old stuff and obsoleting the old stuff would put some smaller telcos out of business.
The current 911 model (at least in the midwest) is a database with the phone number as the index key. This doesn't get seen/used at all from the person-to-switch level. There's NO meta-information. The rows and rows of ancient equipment do feed into one rack of slightly more modern stuff which can actually use a DB to look up info when the call is to the number 911. That looks in the DB to figure out what call center to send the call to. The call center can then look up that same record when the call comes to them based on caller-id.
That's why you don't get magical data-passing about location. It would be trivial to do, but everything would have to be modern.
Now, let's just talk about that database for a moment. I haven't looked at it in five years, but last I checked, it was a colossal pile of crap, filled with misspellings, illogical data, non-contained overlaps, etc. This has been the case since day one, and has never been improved. This means you need to have humans make a judgement call on where an address should actually be whenever a new person gets a land-line. If you get someone else's old phone number, it could be bound to the wrong address. A more likely situation would be that your 911 call would be routed to the wrong emergency call center, which either causes a scramble to reroute your call or a long drive from the wrong firestation. There's automatic checking to make sure someone signs off on your 911 info, but no checking to make sure it's right.
Because at the end of the day I can uninstall Uber but once the government mandates phone tracking for safety they'll know where you are forever for whatever reason they want.
They don't have to track your phone unless you dial 911. This is baseless FUD. Uber doesn't need your location unless you call for Uber. It is a trivial exercise to prevent either Uber or the government from receiving location data unless you contact.
If the government starts proposing a law to track you at all times then by all means get worked up about it. (yes that includes the NSA) That's a very different discussion. If I'm calling 911 I WANT them to have an accurate fix on my location. This should be a non issue. Fears about government overreach in this case are misplaced and demonstrably costs lives.
If they have e-911, phase II on the PSAP, it's easier to locate.
To build on yours:
1) Just create a new fake advertising agency and have it buy it's way into full access to facebook, twitter, and other social media.
2) Get access via whichever 3-letter agency has full open access, just use the usual "for the children" and all that.
Wasn't Uber recently taken to court for tracking its users even after they closed the app? Maybe 9/11 needs an app that people can optionally download to be tracked 24/7. They'd have less trouble locating you that way.
Wouldn't be easier to force all "Call Apps" to send GPS/"I'm here" alongside with the Phone Number only (for privacy) when calling 991/112 ?
On infrastructure. We just took on $1.5 trillion in debt to do a bunch of tax cuts. If we want these things we have to pay for them.
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The underlying problem is https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub... . As best I can tell, those were the new standards for E911 location precision from 2015, which completely screwed up the working E911 system by requiring more precision than was physically possible with the existing, stable system from TruePosition, in use by most cell phone vendors. That system involved bolting hardware onto the cell phone towers, hardware that worked pretty well. They had a nice display of the system that survived the 9/11 bombings and helped provide location date to rescuers, including people who were underground in places with the doors covered with rubble.
Sadly, the updated regulations required even more accuracy. The cell phone companies are now pursuing "evaluation" projects for independent systems, none of which work. And Trueposition is *gone*. They got absorbed into a locaiton company called Skyhook, but kept their old management that failed to keep them intact. They're supporting only a few legacy systems E911 systems, and have since had two rounds of layoffs.
It should be possible to use other location systems, such as Skyhook's or Google maps or iPhone recovery tools to make some working location services for E911. Even Wayz would be a starting point. Getting the companies to play well with the data, or allow sharing of that data just for emergency services, is a software integration problem and an ethical morass due to privacy concerns.
And if you aren't satisfied with your CEO performance, you stop buying his product. If you aren't satisfied with your government performance, then fuck you, pay your taxes anyway.
Remember when Slashdot was a place for people slightly more tech saavy than the average? Bloody hell, my elderly relatives understand the answer to this question - it's pretty simple really. The answer is "because Uber and 911 don't communicate the same way." Another fun question to ask is why is it possible for me to mail a feather to someone via USPS, but there's no place to put a feather on my cell phone to sext it to my wife for kinky-time. The possibilities are endless, when you compare completely different things that work in completely different ways! Why can my stove cook food, but my iphone can't? Why does my dog bark, instead of doing my taxes? The second biggest reason is 911 isn't consistent...I'd say "standardized" but there is a standard available, it's just not overwhelmingly used. Check out John Oliver's segment on this like 2 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Uber and Lyft get your location information, tied to your cell phone, when you look at the map to get the price of the ride.
So they get your location when you use their app which you have to explicitly allow. I fail to see the problem. It is trivial to restrict 911 services to not worrying about your location unless you dial 911. Stop looking for problems where they don't exist.
I'd like to point out the "First they came" message, about creeping government power and abuses?
Knock yourself out but if that is the basis of your argument against good location identification for 911 then you have no argument. Worse you are arguing that people should die because you have a hypothetical concern about 911 location information being used for something other than an emergency response despite there being no evidence that such activity is or will occur. Seriously take off the tinfoil hat. There are plenty of places to worry about government overreach. This is clearly not one of them.
I pray you don't have a heart attack and need 911 tell first responders how to find you in a hurry.
They don't have to, but based on past behavior, they will.
Take off the tinfoil hat please.
What makes you think the NSA or any of the other three-letter agencies will bother with a law?
So we're supposed to live with shitty 911 service because you are paranoid about the NSA breaking the law? Newsflash dummy, they can already track your phone so all you are doing is costing lives to improve NOTHING. You aren't improving your privacy by slowing first responders. If the NSA wants to break the law, handicapping 911 service won't stop them from watching you legally or illegally. It just means a guy having a heart attack will die when he didn't have to.
Yeah, that works so well in the many, many cases where there is no real choice.
Thanks for the laugh, though. Much appreciated.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Why would you want a government to be able to find you?
Like it always does, the government will use that against you.
911 operates the way it does because it's mission is something different from Uber and other location based services. 911 is required to handle any phone ever invented and have it connect, every time, to a 911 center. It doesn't matter if Alexander Graham Bell picks up his telephone or a hipster on his iPhone X does. It has to work. It has to work regardless of weather conditions, satellite coverage, or natural disaster.
For that kind of reliability across all platforms, you can't have the latest and greatest location services. With the current E911, centers can pinpoint your location to about 20 meters, which for all intents and purposes is all you need. With Next Gen 911, which is currently under development, we will have enhanced location services as well as be able to accept video calls and pictures. But it will also be backwards compatible with older style phones.
that you go out to meet Uber vs. emergency services have to come find you. Imagine how this might work in high rise buildings.
Here in Denmark, we have an app for that, http://www.112app.dk/ (sorry don't think there's an english version)
When you install it, there's (IIRC), you have to add your phone number though, so I assume they send the phone number along with GPS coordinates when you run the app via the data connection and then it just uses the regular phone for calling.
I have used it once, and they did get the exact location and were able to send ambulances to the accident, which made it easier because I only roughly knew where I was, like the approximate distance to city I was driving to and where I was coming from, but not the name of the road.
The operator did say that it was not always that it worked.
L'Idiot
I thought there was a law saying we have to have GPS in our phone so 911 can find us? I had to buy a new phone several years ago because of it. What the fuck is going on?
The 911 system was put in place before cell phones included GPS locators, and to retrofit the system with a new capability would be quite expensive. Any idea how many 911 call centers there are across America? 5,783
According to a 911 industry group:
99.4% of PSAPs have some Phase I
99.0% of PSAPs have some Phase II
Phase I - Cellphone carrier provides caller's number and cell tower calculated location
Phase II - Cellphone carrier provides caller's number and cellphone calculated location
Shockingly, this isn't nearly the "crisis issue" the click-bait headline would have you believe, and it is actually being implemented today.
U.S. regulators estimate as many as 10,000 lives could be saved each year if the 911 emergency dispatching system were able to get to callers one minute faster.
Are they really asserting that as many as 10,000 deaths per year because first-responders got to the location up to 60 seconds too late? That seems a bit fantastical, and the reader is supposed to assume that the issue is that first-responders got lost on the way to the location and it has nothing to do with traffic between the first responder and the victim, delays calling 911 as helpful neighbors try and help rather than call 911, etc.
Ken
See here to learn that 99% of 911 call centers are capable of handling cellphone-generated GPS locations, but it relies on carrier upgrades outside their direct control.
Or, you know, take the bait, assume the 911 system has remained stagnant for the last two decades, and feign false outrage over this non-issue.
Ken
From my experience in San Diego:
Usually, if you call 911, youâ(TM)ll sit on hold for three or four minutes.
When you do get through, if youâ(TM)re calling for something as trivial as thieves returning to your house while your wife is there alone, donâ(TM)t be so inconsiderate as to call while itâ(TM)s raining or theyâ(TM)ll tell you theyâ(TM)re not going to dispatch someone until after the rain stops and your wife should just leave the house. No. Seriously. SDPD pulled that shit.
If you call back because youâ(TM)re seriously concerned about her safety, once youâ(TM)re done holding again, expect to be told to stop calling 911 for something as trivial as a potential home invasion.
Donâ(TM)t be surprised when you can drive the 80+ miles back from Orange County and still be there an hour before the police show up after the rain stops.
The police are a revenue generation service for cities. They do not serve. They do not protect.
Itâ(TM)s not a racist thing. They donâ(TM)t care about you, regardless of your skin color.
Having phones tell them where you are and get them to you a minute faster changes a two hour response to an hour and fifty nine minutes. The criminals will be long gone, regardless.
Mind you, it might help for ambulances, once you get past the lousy 911 hold times.
Because private companies are far better with data, why isn't 911 contracted out? The government sucks at running things in general, so having it moved to a private company which tends to be far, far better with keeping up with the times is a good thing. The Tenth Amendment shows that it isn't government's job to run stuff like that, and it should be left in the capable hands of the private sector.
Uber needs to be handed access to e911 info on towers. If it saves lives and cuts government waste, it is worth it.
How do you know they can't locate you? I listen to our local police investigations units on my scanner. And they can track a suspect ('s phone) to a particular location in a parking lot in real time. I suspect that they are letting a few innocent people die so as not to reveal their capabilities to the general public and criminals.
If this was 1945, Churchill would be complaining to the Nazis about how their uncrackable Enigma was a security threat.
Have gnu, will travel.
It triangulates wireless sources
Its all up in your shit with their app. Enjoy getting your shithole fucked!
You should have smartphones sending gps (or other positioning data) to police everytime you dial 911 or whatever number you use for emergency calls.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
"After years of pressure, wireless carriers and Silicon Valley companies are finally starting to work together to solve the problem. " - woohoo, multimillion grants all around. Or they could just use AML which is already implemented in every android phone and supported in several EU countries (with others in process of implementing it).
It's not just that the apps have geolocation, that alone is not sufficient at all.
What happens with Uber (and I think Lyft) apps, is that it uses your location to show an approximation of where you are on the map - but then you make the final choice about where exactly the pickup point is, by moving the point around the map. So there's a lot more active feedback from Uber app users than there is in a 911 scenario.
I wouldn't mind seeing systems updated somehow so calling 911 also activated the most powerful GPS the device had, and sent what it had to 911 when you called so they would have that information.,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Zachranka app is successfully cooperating with emergency services. But it works only in Czech Republic now, reportedly they are deploying it in some other EU countries.
In every wireless 911 call I've ever seen*, GPS data is transmitted along with the calling number.
( * I've seen quite a lot considering what I do for a living )
In addition, the GPS data transmitted is accurate to SIX digits past the decimal point.
Example, here is PSAP data output ( sanitized for obvious reasons ) from a call that came in today:
Of interest to this discussion, is the final line of data, which is the callers location. I had to wait for a few calls to come across
as the first few were centered on individual homes, whereas this one is in the middle of the street and safe to publish. It tells me
some other data as well, such as who the carrier is, the PSAP #, date and time, etc. etc. but I've omitted it here.
Springfield IL Ph# (xxx) xxx-xxxx
Wireless: Sangamon County
Request caller location / number.
ESN: xxxx
CO= xxxxx
Pos # xx
+39.813541,-089.670775
Want to know where it is ?
Copy / paste that lat-long data line into Google Maps and presto. There's your caller.
http://www.mbie.govt.nz/info-s...
America is just slow.
Love the John Oliver segment, but it would be child's play to put an app on everybody's phones that relayed GPS coords during and after a 911 call. I know folks scared of gov't tracking (which is funny, since the gov't has plenty of post 9/11 laws that let them track you as much as they want). But I'm a techy and this looks like a pretty easily solvable problem. The real hold up is money. You'd have to pay for it and that means taxes. And to be blunt, the rich neighborhoods have better systems for tracking plus private security systems. This is another one of those problems that only hits the poor and middle class.
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It's no secret that everything Americans do on any electronic device is scooped up in full-take surveillance. Cyberspace has no expectation of privacy. When we take steps to create a small amount of privacy, our letter agency cry foul with the power words TERRORISTS, CHILDREN, and WAR on X.
We all need to remember that American security services are actively working against EVERYBODY when it comes to personal privacy. When things like this hit the headlines, its hard to not make the connection.
FBI says it needs to break all encryption for our safety. NSA needs to gobble up more data than can possibly be analyzed, and big tech needs to see everything "To better serve their customers"
We enlightened citizens push-back with facts and history, so they spin it and try another angle.
The sad truth is that our government has been caught doing so much un-good and fact changing that citizens simply no longer trust anything they say. And for good reason.
The 911 system does need an upgrade. I bet it is costing lives. But we've seen time and time again what happens when we trust our overseers with a little more power.
Besides, they are ALREADY tracking everything. At this point it's just noise making to normalize it and go above board... you know...for the children
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
The E911 feature on cell phones was supposed to do this. Why is this not working?
When I had to call 911 for an ambulance the E911 icon appeared and I gave the dispatcher my address. The paramedics called me to unlock my door - which was already unlocked. When I asked them to thewhat address they went, it was wrong. I gave them the correct address and went through that again. The third time they arrived at my location.
Gladly, my condition was not life threatening. Sadly, there is a fire station with ambulance around the corner.
An enormous amount of modern phone are using SoC in a configuration where the baseband modem acts like the northbridge of the smartphone (e.g.: nearly every thing with built-in 3G/4G by Qualcomm).
It can autonomously access RAM, other peripherals (including GSM), whitout any interraction from the main ARM cpu cores and the Linux/Android running on it.
By standard (because it's a licensed frequency) you don't get a say on what that modem runs as a software, only licensee can decide.
So in practice that modem runs parts of code which are defined in closed BLOB, and parts of code which are sent as over-the-air upgrades usually by the service provider (again, nearly completely outside the control of the main OS. On some phone, the main OS could even be shut down).
It's like Intel ME, but on steroid.
All it takes for a government/state-level attacker is to force a service provider to beam a specially crafted blob to the modem, and it will happily start broadcasting your GPS coordinates, what it listense on the mic, etc.
In other words, if you have a smartphone in your pocket, you're already toast.
So why again adding a small check box "Do you want to send your current GPS coordinate along with the audio/video feed of this call ?" and corresponding ITU standard to make this possible represent any increase in threat ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No. Run for office or work for the opposition party to boot them out of office. As a citizen it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to run your government.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
they're spending that money on people. It's mostly wars. 7 wars actually (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria). After that it's keeping old people alive. See here. 70% of our budget is wars and keeping old folks alive. Now, I'm not opposed to the old folks (I am to the wars).
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Such a service is already built into Google Play Services in Android. Its called Emergency Location Service (https://blog.google/topics/google-europe/helping-emergency-services-find-you/). Several countries such as UK, Estonia, Lithuania and Austria have it enabled for their emergency service numbers.
http://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/tech-news/google-has-created-a-new-location-tool-to-help-emergency-services-find-you-faster-11364075879276
https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/03/10/googles-clever-tool-for-emergency-services-is-now-saving-lives/
I've wondered for years why a GPS equipped phone itself couldn't simply display raw GPS coordinates to the user. Either within the built in phone software or a sufficient number of directly related apps (e.g., Google Maps). Then a person retains their privacy and can simply read off the coordinates to 911 (or whoever they choose). Of course, reading off cross-streets (if available from a map or road signs) is similar, and if you can't speak/text you're in trouble...but it's an improvement to have the option.
Some of these things seem to be "hidden" from the user nowadays...I'm sure there are simple GPS data stream reading apps aplenty.
Sounds like you live in a functioning democracy. I live in a one-party state where the media/government union party uses racial identity politics and government union money to ensure they will always control the state.
911 'finds us' just fine where I live. Might want to step out of your time zone and see for yourself instead of quoting statistics you have no direct experience with. The parroting just makes you look dumb and inexperienced. The 'socialists' among you should be grateful you can even call 911, I assure you such services do not exist in socialist/communist countries.
Link to a good ELI5 from Reddit a few days ago. I work in fire/EMS & it sounds right from what I remember the dispatch center saying
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7mb35n/eli5_if_there_is_no_cellphone_signal_how_does_the/drsxmdn/
This should be resolved by people who talk to each other like adults. This thread isn't a good use of time, people just provoked anger in each other while not knowing the details of what they're arguing about.
Why don't you work on fixing your democracy, instead of trying to cripple 911? It sounds like your priorities are entirely messed up.
Why don't you work on fixing your democracy, instead of trying to cripple 911? It sounds like your priorities are entirely messed up.
I neither control democracy nor 911 service. If I had my way 911 service would be better. But local and state government serves the public less and less every year. The prefer to serve themselves. And voters have made themselves irrelevant by voting based on their race and their shallow self image rather than voting for their practical interests.
Enhanced wireless 911, including location information, was done years ago.
You've got all sorts of excuses to sit on your ass and complain, don't you? If you're that unhappy about your government, find out how you can push it in the direction you want rather than find reasons why you can't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Because spending your life trying to reform government is a good substitute for just not buying a product. Those are the two models of human interaction under discussion. Don't like a business, walk away from the transaction and be free of it. Don't like government, spend many years trying (and probably failing) to enact reforms. But you guys still think government is a better way for people to interact. So any reforms have to be enacted into a headwind of delusional fanaticism.