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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!
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.
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.
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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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.
You really don't understand how state pensions work. I, for one, used to have one (I cashed my non-vested money out when I quit my job because I don't trust Illinois). You pay into it instead of Social Security (My share was 8% at the time). That money is supposed to be invested and earn a return. The state government has been robbing that money for years (yes, for the "general fund") - so not only is it not earning dividends, it's losing value to inflation.
And then the state governor blames the people that paid into the pension for being "greedy" when the reality is that it was always supposed to be a separate, completely solvent fund. No, there are a few cherry-picked outliers, but the reality is that the money is gone because of state mismanagement, not because of the people who paid a large share of their paycheck into it for decades.