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Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

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Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#201

Post by mikeash »

occams_chainsaw wrote: post #191
mikeash wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you be sure your phone doesn’t have such a back door *now? I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.

You should give me spare keys to your car, in case you can't find your current pair. It's okay if you're uncomfortable with that, because I might have already made a copy without your knowledge, so you should give me a copy anyway.

I don't understand this analogy. I'm not giving keys to anything, I'm just having my phone do some more stuff when I call 911. It's like saying I should have the ability to give you the keys to my car (which, I do!) or I should have the ability to make a video call (ditto).

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#202

Post by mikeash »

lisper wrote: post #197
pera wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are assuming that this feature would let the government request your geolocation on demand, but I don't think this is what they are actually suggesting: the idea is to make your phone automatically send your current coordinate after you make a call to 911.

That's the feature described in the original article. But the comment I was responding to advocates expanding that capability without any specified limits (except, perhaps, that it be limited to "emergency" situations, but "emergency" is a very malleable word).

I'm pretty sure they were describing a system where that additional information would be sent when calling 911, not that it could be activated remotely on command.

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#203

Post by jonknee »

craftyguy wrote: post #194
jonknee wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a big shiny object for them that would 'help' in a wide variety of non-emergency situations, so expect abuse. Did you miss the part where I linked to and quoted that this data is only sent from your phone to the database when you call 911 ? In non-emergency situations no one will be able to search this database for your location because your location is not in the database.

> when you call 911? Right, and there's no possibility for this system being abused in non-emergency situations? Oh please.

If you call 911 it is by definition an emergency situation, so no I don't believe this could be abused outside of emergency situations. Also, 911 already gets your location and that feature isn't something that gets abused (again, I fail to see how it could, your phone sends its location when making the call, it's not the authorities requesting its location when receiving a call).

Automatically letting 911 know where you are when you call is something that saves lots of lives, trying to improve the speed and accuracy of that is a good thing that should not be controversial at all.

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#204

Post by AmericanChopper »

nrb wrote: post #136
gascan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hatred directed at police officers certainly doesn't help. The recent fury directed at the handful of police officers who did not enter this or that school with an active shooter comes to mind. People have the expectation that police officers are required to die for us. Imagine being told by someone who already hates you, that you are supposed to die for them. It feels like we are awfully entitled when it comes t…

Perhaps it could also be at least partly related to the systemic and indiscriminate killing of people of color by police forces across the entire country. I can't say I blame would-be "good cop" cadets deciding not to join the force to be associated with these acts; the willingness to protect bad cops by leadership seems, from the outside, to mean the entire system is rotten and impossible to change from within.

Well that's certainly the narrative that drives it. However for something to be systemic, it has to be happening regularly everywhere. The people who promote this narrative can only really point to a couple of unjustified office involved shootings (which are of course a tragedies, but are in no way 'systemic'), and in reality spend most of their time complaining about perfectly justified shootings as a scapegoat for all of the genuine problems in their communities.

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#205

Post by la_la_la »

abtinf wrote: post #9
walterbell wrote: post #4

For anyone with the iOS12 beta, is there an opt-out for this system service in the Privacy -> Location Services -> System Services list? What happens if "Location Services" has been disabled by MDM policy, or was never enabled since the device was setup? On a new iOS11 device, if you decline to enable Location Services during setup, it stays disabled. Once enabled, it can no longer be disabled, and the system service…

In what circumstances would you want to contact 911 but not reveal your location?

Someone picks up your phone and prank calls 911 without telling you, and then slips it back into your possession, without you noticing. Or stays on the line until emergency services arrive, and then abandons it, at which point it gets confiscated for investigation, and turns out to belong to you.

What would the punishment be for a situation where you leave your phone unattended, and it gets misused?

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#206

Post by la_la_la »

Rotten194 wrote: post #42
vxNsr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you just don't want your location ever being sent to a gov agency no matter your predicament.

The point of 911 is to have emergency responders come to your location. If you don't want emergency responders to come to your location, you shouldn't be calling 911, full stop.

  full stop
Not quite.

This trivially becomes a back door for malware that can initiate phone calls, by circumventing ordinary OS security and control.

Maybe there's a reason to intercept location data (e.g. cheating spouse), via a completed call that transmits a silent audio channel. So the software lands on the device, initiates a 911 call just to obtain the location of the device and send it to a botnet, and immediately hangs up.

Mission Accomplished: spouse is confirmed to be cheating. At the expense of an extra ring to 911.

This example is facetious. There are other reasons to snoop on a single individual's location data.

Now the calls are being triggered by remote software control, with your phone being hijacked as a proxy device, and who is left to blame?

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#207

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

dbcooperlives wrote: post #106

I have been deploying e911 call taking systems for more than 10 years. All the areas that I service have been getting pretty accurate location data on mobile callers since I started. Initially, the providers send the location of the tower they are on and the triangulation data with the call. A couple of seconds later they will send more accurate GPS coordinates for most calls, which are usually pretty good. Sometimes…

I have a favor to ask: I have a bunch of numbers through Twilio, do you know what Twilio numbers look like when they come into your systems?

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#208

Post by thewillium »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #93

This is an extraordinarily important and interesting “space” ripe for innovation. A few weeks ago, I was awarded one of the highest civilian public awards from the Commandant of the US Coast Guard in DC for my volunteer web mapping work during Harvey. That work helped coordinate 700 helicopter sorties and save 1700 lives. I’ve been thinking — and talking with Emergency Responders — about what an up to date 911 would…

Are you familiar with the work of Mark43? I visited their office in NYC last summer and they seem to be doing some good work with LEOs across the country modernizing their tech (especially with respect to dispatch).

https://www.mark43.com/

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#209

Post by mclehman »

lisper wrote: post #190
gregsadetsky wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP is me. :) I apologize if my original comment was not clear, or could leave itself open to a different interpretation. I really did mean that when someone in an emergency situation needs help, presently, they do not have the ability to send their location, a text message, an image or a video. That’s it — I was only referring to emergency situations, and anything that I am discussing would be user-initiated.

> The GP is me. :) Oh, sorry, I didn't see that. (This thread has grown a lot of tentacles.) > I was only referring to emergency situations That was very unclear. When you wrote: > Consider how 911 is but one service that sure sounded to me like you were advocating making this information available very broadly.

I could be wrong, but I read "Consider how 911 is but one service" as advocating expanding the idea to other countries' emergency services, not necessarily more broadly within the US.

Re: Apple sets up iPhones to relay location for 911 calls

#210

Post by jauer »

jgh wrote: post #116
gregsadetsky wrote: post #93

This is an extraordinarily important and interesting “space” ripe for innovation. A few weeks ago, I was awarded one of the highest civilian public awards from the Commandant of the US Coast Guard in DC for my volunteer web mapping work during Harvey. That work helped coordinate 700 helicopter sorties and save 1700 lives. I’ve been thinking — and talking with Emergency Responders — about what an up to date 911 would…

I worked on 911 reporting software oh 6 or 7 years ago now, and I seem to remember talk about allowing SMS and MMS along with live-streamed video coming from mobile phones to the PSAPs ... but I guess there hasn't been much movement on that. I think the trouble you'll run into is the various agencies involved (since it's been quite a while I don't really remember), e.g. the Sheriff's departments run the PSAPs and I b…

There's at least SMS/MMS in some US PSAPs. The area where I used to live had it a few years ago: http://fox6now.com/2016/01/10/in-the-event-of-an-emergency-y...
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