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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

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 "Share My Location" cannot be disabled, even if all other app and system services are blocked from accessing Location data.

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

The purpose of opt-out is:

  device owner decides when to opt-out
  device owner does not need to explain why

Defaults serve common requirements. Opt-out serves everything else. At the scale of billions of devices, there can be millions of "edge cases" which need to opt-out of defaults, for contextual and time-variable reasons.

Probably when you just want to report an ongoing altercation on your street but don't feel like having police cars show up in your driveway and reveal to the neighbourhood that you're the one who called the police. Source: seen it happen.

There might be cases where a criminal would want to call 911 on a victim (possibly collateral damage of their crime).

Not saying this happens, but the only way it could happen is if the guy calling has some guarantee of not being identified.

I'd much prefer having a criminal get away and saving a life thanks to the 911 call than him getting away and letting someone die because he had no way to call 911 anonymously without disclosing his device's location.

I think that hypothetical is rare enough of an event that the overwhelming likelihood is more people turn it off without knowing the implications and then are unable to share their location when they are in an emergency.

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.

The point of 911 is to have emergency responders come to a location. Said location is not necessarily your location.

  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?

> full stop.

Maybe your brain finds it convenient to shut off there, but not for many of us. We have experience reporting crime but don't want to be identified because the rest of the criminal's cronies could turn on us.

Without knowing how our information travels once it leaves our hands, retaliation from crooked government organizations, gangs, small time mobs, abusive family members is all too possible. And we all know how information wants to travel.

You are claiming that you have experience calling from your cell phone to report organized crime, and you believe that heretofore those calls were untraceable?

Providing the location has literally nothing to do with anonymity in this scenario. If your cell phone is not traceable to you, then it doesn't matter if your 911 call is accompanied by location info automatically. You're going to provide that same location info to the dispatcher anyway. And the criminals involved will also know the location because they are there committing the crime.

I have on occasion called 911 and reported a crime in progress that happened a large distance away from me, coming to my location would have been useless, should I have refrained from calling?

I'm not saying that I don't think there is a use for this feature, but your claims are bordering on the absurd.

Carriers know your approximate location all the time, even without this feature. If you don't want to be tracked, you must pull out your SIM card.

And yet here you are making a call on a cell phone. Turning off location services does not make your phone invisible on the cell network. Your provider knows with fair accuracy where your phone is at all times that it has service (and often even when it does not).

It's not always that great accuracy. it's not logged continuously. And it's not readily available to anyone who wants it. And we are usually surrounded by others so things can't always be pinpointed to an individual.

Just because something is technically possible with a lot of preparation, doesn't make it a continuously usable source of information, especially in retrospect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be wary, but we shouldn't practice all-or-nothing thinking.

> It's not always that great accuracy.

Okay. It'll be high accuracy when you give the exact location to the dispatcher, though. Or are you using 911 for non-emergency calls? Keeping your location secret from the dispatcher in an emergency essentially means you're preventing an appropriate emergency response.

> it's not logged continuously.

Sure about that?

> And it's not readily available to anyone who wants it.

No change. Apple has not proposed posting your location on Twitter when you dial 911.

> And we are usually surrounded by others so things can't always be pinpointed to an individual.

Uh. You are wildly incorrect. Your cellphone is transmitting its location all the time. Assuming it can reasonably be called your cellphone, that location is definitely pinpointed to an individual.

You do realize that the police/fire services that would be dispatched to you are government agencies that you're going to have to tell your location, right?

Why are you calling 911 if you don't want emergency services to know where you are?

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?

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