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Apple Watch's Fall Detection Could Get Users Into Legal Trouble (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Apple has released more details about how the Watch 4 will contact emergency services if the watch detects that you've had a hard fall. If the watch detects that the wearer is "immobile for about a minute," it begins a 15-second countdown. After that, the Watch will contact emergency services.
Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, was quick to point out that, by inviting the police into your home, Apple Watch wearers may be opening themselves up to criminal liability. If police are alerted by an Apple Watch of a possible injury, they do not need a warrant to enter a home under the "community caretaking" exception to the Fourth Amendment.
Any evidence of a crime in plain view (e.g. a joint) could land the owner in trouble.
The article notes the "(mostly) opt-in nature" of the service, though one New York-based criminal defense attorney had an even better idea.
He said he "would much prefer a feature that can automatically dial a user-determined contact."
Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, was quick to point out that, by inviting the police into your home, Apple Watch wearers may be opening themselves up to criminal liability. If police are alerted by an Apple Watch of a possible injury, they do not need a warrant to enter a home under the "community caretaking" exception to the Fourth Amendment.
Any evidence of a crime in plain view (e.g. a joint) could land the owner in trouble.
The article notes the "(mostly) opt-in nature" of the service, though one New York-based criminal defense attorney had an even better idea.
He said he "would much prefer a feature that can automatically dial a user-determined contact."
Why dont they just add the feature to the previous version?
Oh sorry, false alarm
FP mesdemoiselles
These issues are not newly raised by the watch.
I can only surmise that the reason the watch doesn't ask for voice confirmation before dialing is, they assume the wearer is unconscious. If the wearer wakes up later in the hospital and is enraged about criminal charges for a joint spotted on their table, they have their priorities out of whack.
Likewise if the wearer experiences some head injury or loss of blood pressure and is too delirious to notice and abort the countdown. Probably better off summoning medical personnel.
Of course there is plenty of room for improvement. There's no reason the watch couldn't make a unique beeping sound as it counts down to remind the wearer to disable it. There's no reason it couldn't alert emergency services AND text/email/call a list of contacts. There's no reason not to allow customizations like "slide to call" rather than "slide to cancel", at the wearer's own risk.
A joint isn't a crime, man. It is just a plant. In many states in the US it is legal as well. A joint will only get you a misdemeanor at most, not a felony as the lawyer claims.
How little faith do you have in your emergency services for this to be on the list of concerns?
v1.0 - whatever v1.1 - let me die option for apple watch fall detection
In general the fall detection of the iPhone is a gimmick - Apple seems to be running out of ideas for things that can set them apart. The obvious issue is that it is marketed as mainly for older people, but older people susceptible to falls are usually not the target demographic of a device that needs to go on the charger every 2 days! What's more, I don't know the stats, but I would assume going to the bathroom in the middle of the night must account for a respectable percentage of falls, but your watch would probably be on the charger. Unless you have 2 Apple watches?
That would not be enough to condemn it as a gimmick perhaps if there did not exist dedicated fall alert devices that had none of the disadvantages of an Apple watch. I suspect with those devices you also don't invite the police to your house (assuming the article is correct and the Apple watch might do so), they usually alert a specialized EMT service.
At least it is opt-in, so a less annoying feature than what the iPhone X brought. Yes, while Face ID seems to work well and some people like it (I am not a fan myself), the decision to put it in a "notch" was very bad. Now every phone maker out there just copies the "notch" without actually any hardware or functionality similar to Face ID, and pretends to be an iPhoneX-equivalent, or one of the "cool kids'. I'll have to wait until this notch idiocy dies out before upgrading my phone.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
...a pre-recorded Miranda rights app!
But do NOT under any circumstances make it your *default* ringtone; otherwise there will be a lot of people reaching for the sky.
As someone who has rolled out lone-worker / man-down alert systems before, 15 seconds is not long enough to prevent false alarms. Even with careful training, and even when a person knows they are wearing a dedicated man down device, the number of false alarms these things generate are incredibly high when not given a shitload of time for the user to respond.
Rather than worrying about police rummaging through your house looking for your weed stash while you lay unconscious on the floor, I'd be more concerned with getting fined for repeated false alarms in jurisdictions that allow for such.
Or if you want to commit a crime, don't turn on features that call the cops.
As for the example (a joint), if you are doing drugs and fall and can't stop the alert within 15 seconds, maybe you really need help. Sure, you will get into legal trouble, but that's still better than being dead.
Still agree with the idea of a used defined contact, especially since phones already have "ICE" contacts that can be called from a locked screen for that reason.
If you had it call a friend, and they took time to clean things up before calling for help, they could also be in legal limbo and possible civil lawsuits for not getting emergency medical help needed immediately.
What if the emergency services number changes?
In my state (KY but possibly others), we created a law that when 911 was called for an overdose that everyone at the scene was safe from prosecution of crimes such as possession etc. Could this law be expanded or interpreted to include 911 calls made by an apple watch?
http://www.lrc.ky.gov/statutes...
If the watch is contacting emergency services for a fall, wouldn't it be requesting medical help, not legal help? ie the paramedics should show up at your door, not the police. Unless it is normal for the cops to show up when someone calls for medical assistance in the States, this seems like a non-issue.
E.g. I take off my watch at bedtime and put it on the night table. Sometimes I bump it by accident so it falls on the floor and I pick it up in the morning. Would the drop result in an emergency call? That sounds crazy. Anyway I'll never buy an Apple watch or anything of the sort. I'll stay with dumb watches or at least watches that I can program myself.
The real problem here is people complaining about how the police might find incriminating evidence in a perpetrator's household.
If you aren't committing crimes, you have nothing to worry about.
Literally the only people that will downvote or negatively comment about this post are criminals and low-IQ types.
You're a fucking moron lol.
Rayn@RyPatts
So I apparently fell down 627 stairs then stopped moving for over 5 minutes. An ambulance showed up at the house along with my mum who let them in.
Tip: don't wear your new Apple Watch whilst having some alone time. Thanks Apple.
Lesson learned: Don't wear your Apple Watch while masturbating.
How is this opening up users into getting into legal trouble if said user wasn't actually doing anything against the law before the watch contacted first responders?
I thought maybe this was about something to do with an automated call to emergency services without human intervention, but no.... the legal trouble that the article mentions, of all things, is that when the police come in, they could find prohibited substances in the premises??? Stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place?
For fuck sake, I have *ZERO* sympathy for a person who gets caught breaking the law, even in the otherwise ordinarily private space of their own home, when they wouldn't otherwise be caught just because nobody else knows about it...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
He said he "would much prefer a feature that can automatically dial a user-determined contact."
This is also a bit problematic. What if that contact doesn't answer the phone, or it goes to voicemail, what's the service to do then? What if a stranger picks up the phone, or it's an old number, etc, etc.
There's probably a few people who would do well with that feature but I'm guessing most user-determined contacts wouldn't respond appropriately if a call ever came in. And I suspect that first responders are fairly lenient when they come in and see signs of illegal activity (I'm sure there's exceptions), though I suspect a drug trafficker would get reported.
The auto-opt in is definitely a concern, as is the concern about false positives. I could certainly see the occasional elderly person taking more than a minute to figure out the alarm sound, or if they dropped the watch on the floor taking more than a minute to retrieve it.
I stole this Sig
...it keeping track of dates/times a person has fallen. This record could easily be used by relatives to get conservatorship over a senior citizen against their will.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Help! My watch has fallen and I can't pick it up!
Sorry officer, my wife threw my watch into the laundry basket.
I don't need a watch to tell me its FALL.
I am not sure, but I think it would be illegal for a device to call 911 automatically. It is certainly that way with home alarm systems. So I don't see how this would be any different.
Samsung seems to know the correct way to handle this- on their watches, the user sets up, in advance, people that it will automatically text and call if there is an emergency. Then those HUMANS can try to determine if the situation warrants EMS and be the points of initiation and contact. Maybe Apple can "invent" that now...
Seems like an easily preventable problem..
That requires an input field which would totally ruin the clean look of the UI!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Never ever talk to the police. Just as useful.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
For fuck sake, I have *ZERO* sympathy for a person who gets caught breaking the law, even in the otherwise ordinarily private space of their own home, when they wouldn't otherwise be caught just because nobody else knows about it...
That's an instinct it's easy to fall into for a couple of reasons, but think about it a little more deeply. Unless you have a medical condition that prevents you from relating to other people at all, there are several major problems with that:
(1) there are things that get criminalized that never should get criminalized, and our system is very bad about intelligently removing bad laws. For example, sex between consenting adults with different skin colors was once illegal. Anal sex was once illegal. Having a beer was once illegal. Having an open container is illegal many places even though it's bad behavior and not drinking much less having a container that it would make sense to punish (drinking from an open container in a paper bag is basically a way to let police ignore the crime, btw). It's a felony to post the wrong lyrics on the wrong Facebook page. There are lots of weird laws and too many of them. Fundamentally, *Not all Laws are not necessarily good*, and if you have any ability to relate to other human beings you should recognize that there are bad laws and that you *should* have empathy for people who are arrested because of a bad law.
(2) the consequences of violating a law are sometimes proportional to the crime, but more frequently they are not. There are some extreme examples of this, like the guy who shoplifted maybe a VHS tape and got twenty years incarcerated because of the stupid 3-strikes law that cops hated that was on the books in California. Violating parole is often like this--prosecutors and judges throw in lots of conditions of parole without even thinking about it that have nothing to do with a crime and if you're caught breaking them you may be thrown in prison. Most criminal laws are like this, where the practical consequences of conviction are insanely high--whether you were arrested for punching someone in the face when they insulted your girlfriend twenty years ago should have no bearing on whether you are eligible for a job. Similarly, the consequences of taking your case to trial are so insanely high that there is ZERO moral justification for how much you're punishing a person for insisting that the state prove they are guilty. This is most problematic in the case of truly innocent people, who occasionally *do* get arrested for these crimes, but it's true for everybody.
(3) the rigid mindset kills people and makes us responsible for their deaths. The responsibility part is key. People will often If we take the attitude that people who call for help should be arrested if there's a law they've broken, people are going to call for help less frequently.
sorry, gtg.
Quote: "He said he "would much prefer a feature that can automatically dial a user-determined contact."
Yeah, it's called making the patient the focus of your system. That's what smart systems do: http://aetonix.com/
The Apple watch caters to making it easy for the corporation i.e. no finicky designing choice for the users. Maybe Mr. Jobs was labeled an ass to work for because we've only been hearing from the people he called out for doing a shitty job.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.