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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."
They changed the sensors to be better able to detect falls specificity. The older models would potentially have more false positives.
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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
Here is news for you: It is basically impossible to not commit crimes these days. And if they are just pissed you called them for nothing they may even manufacture some crimes they can pin on you.
Also, obvious troll is obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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'
Even if you accept this premise as true, which I do not, I would very much like to see even an iota of substantiation for this argument as it pertains specifically to crimes that are not only "basically impossible" to avoid, but also crimes that one might only do privately because they would risk legal ramifications if law enforcement knew about them, since that is really the only kind of crimes that the so-called "legal trouble" would pertain to for something like this.
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
Or if you want to commit a crime, don't turn on features that call the cops.
How would you even know if you're committing a crime? No one can keep track of all of the laws, there are over 300,000 federal laws and regulations that can result in criminal prosecution and over 70% of people have comitted one or more jailable offenses.
https://www.politifact.com/pun...
Some may seem innocuous like 'If a doctor gave you a prescription for the common painkiller vicodin and your spouse brings it to you as you lie in bed, "your spouse is dispensing a controlled substance without a license,"' but if a cop sees it and is looking for an excuse to arrest you, he's got the legal justification to do so and it may cost you many thousands of dollars to clear the charges.
...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.
I don't need a watch to tell me its FALL.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-F...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
My 86 year old grandmother could benefit from this device (and, in fact, uses a competing product purpose-built for fall detection that automatically places a 911 call when triggered.) My grandmother is statistically pretty likely to have need of this device at some point during the remaining years of her life. She's statistically pretty unlikely to be arrested, charged or convicted of a crime that police happened to notice/fabricate when they respond to her call for help. Its extremely unlikely that the police have any reason to look for an excuse to arrest my grandma. For her, the cost/benefit clearly supports having this kind of device.
I'm a young, healthy, mobile person who usually has my cell phone in my pocket. Statistically, I'm not likely to have any use for a fall detection device, hopefully for at least the next 30 years or so. I'd like to imagine the police wouldn't have any particular reason to want to find an excuse to arrest me, but I won't be giving them the opportunity. The cost/benefit doesn't support me using one of these devices.
That's life. I don't know if you've ever have had to respond to an elderly person who's fallen on the floor and remained there for several days before being found. I have, several times (I work as a paramedic.) Its gruesome. Beyond the medical consequences (broken bones, pressure sores, malnourishment), its degrading - likely lying in your own piss and shit, and then having your house fill with cops, firemen and paramedics to help you. And elderly people are rightly terrified of this scenario. I can't in good conscience recommend that they forego this kind of device because of the hypothetical conspiracy theory that the cops might dig up some arcane law just to throw them in jail.
How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
Uh... sure, but that book is about breaking laws in other jurisdictions. Of course it can sometimes be very easy to break a law of some place that you don't necessarily reside in and don't know the law of that place, but it's not particularly easy for the cops from that location to come to your door and arrest you for such a crime either.
So my question remains open... can it even begin to be substantiated that it is so similarly simple to commit crimes in the jurisdiction in which you reside and for which evidence exists of the crime having been committed, such that cops coming into your home and seeing such evidence could arrest you for it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Three Felonies a Day
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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...
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."
Likely, soon the watch will call iAmbulance, a subsidiary of Apple.
Never ever talk to the police. Just as useful.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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.