Android’s emergency call shortcut is flooding dispatchers with false calls
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Every electronic device needs to have a physical disconnect for the power supply. It should be considered a severe enough fault to warrant not getting market approval if this is missing.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/22/new-eu-law-to-forc...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+14+Battery+Replacement/1...
It literally says the following about removing the battery (emphasis mine)
> Unfasten the battery connector cover screws
and…
> remove the single 1.0 mm-long screw securing the charging coil connector cover
After that it’s just two easy to remove adhesive pull tabs to get the battery out (which would pass the test for user replaceable in the EU law).
Complain about how hard it is to get the glass off, fine, but that’s got zilch to do with the EU law
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/24/23771064/european-union-b...
If you need to use a heater to get access to the battery to remove it, this would probably be forbidden.
Sounds hair splitting I know, but court cases are won & lost on less.
And? That just seems to prove ifixit's estimate are accurate.
> It literally says the following about removing the battery (emphasis mine)
AFTER spending 30+ minutes very carefully remove a glass cover (as you even attest to). It isn't simply unscrewing screws as portrayed.
> Complain about how hard it is to get the glass off, fine, but that’s got zilch to do with the EU law
I wasn't commenting on EU law, but how "Screws are how in fact one accesses the battery in an iPhone" is very misleading.
Definitely works to kill reception forever if you power up the microwave for a couple of minutes…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
You gotta take that phone out sometime though to heat up your ramen.
> Just put it in a Faraday cage. Problem solved.
Even if I don't have a hammer handy, I could probably find something in the middle of the night to smash the thing. A Faraday cage on the other hand...
I figured my experience was a freak occurrence - how is this a (n=2) failure mode when getting wet!?
This worked fine for a few months, just turning it on at the gate then off afterwards and threw it back in the glove compartment.
Until one day driving home I heard a weird beeping, then a voice from the glove box asking what my emergency was. I shouted back pulling over and fumbling to get the phone out, and told the responder my phone had called them by itself. I was a little surprised as I thought every call, even abandoned, had to be followed up on, in case there was coercion? But I guess not if you just blame the phone. I guess the buttons had shorted to turn the phone on, then ended up going into the emergency call? I couldn't even turn it off at that point as the power button refused to work and the digitizer was partially non-functional.
A bit of a pain, and a (hopefully small) waste of an emergency responder's time, but I can see this sort of thing being relatively common - in "normal use" I've had my phone somehow end up on the emergency call menu, just being jostled and unlocked or fat fingering the wrong buttons, so wouldn't be surprised if unneeded emergency calls are relatively common on even fully functional devices.
But I guess that cost is worth paying if it's more convenient and quick when there is an emergency?
So unless you actively intend to set your own car on fire I urge you to end this habit and send the broken phone to an adapted recycling procedure.
(This is also why unrelatedly to the many pollution issues, throwing lithium-ion into landfill is like setting up a time bomb for our kids)
The solution you describe sounds like a potentially dangerous technical solution to a cultural problem. I don't hear of people phoning 999 in the UK to test a second hand phone works, or for fun.
What happens in the case where the only phone to hand happens to be someone else's and said person is incapacitated, or otherwise incapable of unlocking it?
Luckily I caught it before it became like the other case I heard of, where a kid learned he could get a fire truck to visit anytime he was bored and had a phone.
Reminds me of the kid's book where a young girl (kindergarten age) really has to use the bathroom but can't find it so she calls 911 because she was taught "call 911 if and only if there is an emergency".
There were also a handful of times we could hear a voice coming through the wife's phone where we narrowly avoided a few more visits.
This was all before we discovered how she actually calling 911. It's shocking to me Google didn't make more of a deal about this new "feature" when they rolled it out.
This definitely should have been opt-IN, not opt-out. Sure smells like a classic example of tech PMs making idealistic decisions that affect people in the real world without thinking through all of the consequences.
Years of iphone and I’m still not quick at blindly figuring out which set of buttons I’m touching.
Pro tip: the volume button is much looonger than the power button. That's how I tell them apart, anyway.
Still unsure what happened with it exactly, but whatever was triggering it to do this seemed to not simply be due to water on the screen since it tried to call 911 again even when I put the watch back on hours later after it had dried. I have since power cycled it a few times and let it run out of battery and it hasn't tried getting me arrested for spoof calling 911 again, so that's promising.
(EDIT: grammar)
A swiss piece, ~20k retail.
It's a nice piece of men's jewelry, but that's all it is.
The continuous monitoring of a bunch of my health indicators is quite helpful when trying to determine how much more quickly than baseline the medication I'm on is trying to kill me.
I was swimming in a local lake last summer when I heard a faint voice from my watch. I look and it had unhelpfully called 911 and I was being asked what my emergency was.
I'm normally really good about locking the screen when I'm done, but something with fingerprint or face recognition or lock screen quick actions behaves poorly.
Maybe I'm not crazy. Twice in the past couple weeks, my phone has seemingly unlocked itself in my pocket and I suspected it was to do with moisture/sweat, but dismissed it as unlikely.
In the first instance, it emergency dialed. I had just hung up the phone and put it away, so I thought I hadn't secured it.
In the second instance, I hadn't touched my phone in several minutes when suddenly my podcadt was overlaid with a demo video from an executive at my company which had opened in Teams. I closed out of that and discovered an unsent text to my wife filled with gibberish and a dozen image attachments.
I have a swipe and fingerprint enabled. My best guess is the mosture is registering my leg through the pocket and swiping it unlocked in an infinite monkeys scenario. I switched to password only for my walks now and haven't had an issue since.
I received a call with my Mom, my emergency contact, because somehow my phone had pinged her or dialed her as an emergency.
Other times I pull out my phone and also see that it was doing something. Earlier today I was using google maps in a new city, I put my phone back in my pocket and when I pulled it out a few minutes later I was on an "add a new place to the map" or "mark a new place" flow.
It amazes me that the simplest thing is not done here: if proximity sensor senses your screen is covered - do not enable the screen ever.
When I'm jogging my phone sometimes sends texts, runs apps etc, same when I have phone in my pocket.
Why don't they use proximity sensor?
While it was my own doing, I can see many people having that problem to the point where Android turned off the functionality. Multiple support calls, requests to return "defective" phones, etc.
But yeah, I currently have the same issue. If my current Pixel 3a is in my slightly damp pocket, it will have tried to "monkey touching" as the post above called it.
The sensor is prone to false positives, such as when you have the phone in a waterproof pouch while hiking or boating.
This works well, until the prox sensor stops working (e.g. a piece of dust lands on it) and you can no longer get the phone screen to turn on.
It cuts both ways. :(
Unfortunately it seems easy to unlock that as well.
The biggest problems I have with this are related to the "raise to wake" and "tap to wake" features that seem to be enabled by default on all the phones I've tried including iOS devices. I think on Pixel it was called "pick up to check phone" or something else like that. Turning these off drastically reduces the number of times the phone turns on in my pocket because the power button becomes the only way to activate the screen.
On Samsung phones you additionally have to turn off a setting under Always-On display so that widgets are turned off and/or cannot receive touches, such as the music app etc.
And I'm sure I didn't push the power button because it's quite hard to press in the case I'm using (Spigen tough armor)
Each of these means 2-6 volunteers responding from home to the station and then spending 30-60 minutes driving around in large trucks looking for non-existent emergencies. Each call also gets an ambulance staffed with career paramedics.
On the other hand someone's Apple watch did call us and we found he had fallen and gotten stuck down in some bushes and did need our help.
There is lots of promise, but also the tax payers are footing the bill for the false positives, not to mention the added risk to responders.
I wonder if too many "smart" false alarms will lead to similar regulation.
The only notable exception I can see is that monitors of alarms at financial institutions are allowed to contact police directly without sending someone else to investigate first.
It generally feels like the city/police here has decided that alarms are not a thing for the police to deal with, unless it concerns banks.
Are your records shared or aggregated up to a central agency?
Wondeing how we might calculate the cost/benefit analysis.
Emergency services in my city (the one you call via phone) have a "true emergency" rate of about 1 in 10 according to emergency personnel I talked to, so it is always a matter of balancing the false positive/false negative rate.
Seconds literally matter for many emergencies.
Your position makes the assumption that the rest of the emergency services infrastructure is at maximum use at all times.
The OP was talking about a place where they use volunteers, so it's not likely that they're constantly in use.
While you are correct that seconds can sometimes matter, it's not always true. Not every emergency call is life-or-death. Not every emergency call even requires a response.
Imaging a hypothetical world where every call is a true emergency, and emergency services are at 100% utilization 100% of the time is arguing just for the sake of arguing.
I live in a place where emergency services is over-taxed. But I'd rather have actual lives saved with a certain number of false alarms than have people die because someone decided that perfection is the only option.
That would be even better, as that would mean 3/4 of the alarms are hits/non false-positives. I argue that even a 1/4 hit rate, i.e. 3/4 false positive rate, is a good start.
These types of false calls have been happening for a long, long time. We should get more data and fix the system for sure -- but this isn't a new dynamic and the historic baseline before smartphones isn't zero.
After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy!
I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police. Open up!"
I asked the officers what the problem was and they said "We got a 911 call with no one on the line. We tried to call you back, but no one answered. So we had to come out and investigate."
I invited them in and said, "I think I know what happened." They followed me over to the landline speakerphone in the kitchen and listened to the clicking.
Then I explained, "You remember the old rotary dial phones? They worked by making and breaking the circuit, just like this clicking. Even if we all have touch-tone phones these days, the phone lines are still compatible with the rotary dial. So somewhere in the midst of all this clicking, there were nine fast clicks in a row, and then one click, and one more. And that dialed 911. Sorry about that!"
How do you rule out BUI/drowning? It would suck to be given up on. Is there ever any information indicating the call was placed by a device?
A classmate of mine accidentally drove into a lake and drowned when GPS/E911 conflict dispatched responders to the wrong location. It's not a perfect system to begin with, and made worse by automatic dialers undermining responder trust.
Once I was tucking to pick up speed and I must have accidentally held the side button down in my pocket. I didn't notice anything had happened until I got a call back asking if I was okay. (I did hear the countdown alarm that plays, but misattributed it to a snowmobile or other equipment at the ski resort.)
The second time I was also skiing and did actually fall. I was unhurt but I guess going fast enough to trigger the call. Unfortunately I couldn't get myself situated enough (gloves, zippered pocket, super steep hill) to cancel before the call went through.
The dispatchers were great in both cases. Asked me a few questions to make sure nobody in the area needed help and nothing else happened.
I've gotten it into a position where if this occurs I can blow near the power button which typically makes it go away for a day or so, but it was very scary walking around with the phone out before I understood the nature of the issue, because I wasn't sure if it would magically trigger the power button unprompted just sitting in my pocket. I've ordered a new phone (it was nearing time for an upgrade anyways) but I've yet to set it up, so I'm stuck with this for the time being.
What the hell is wrong with these people? We are humans, not a data science project.
Source: I've had human subjects training
Not realizing that the way to bring up the power menu now is to either access it through Quick Settings or press the power + volume up buttons, the previous commenter's friend started pressing the power button multiple times. (Not blaming that friend, just summarizing what happened.)
Additionally, this doesn't seem to have been a problem when it rolled out on Pixel devices a year and a half ago, Pixels are certainly common enough for that to become a known issue.
Why is Android different? Why are third party Android devices seemingly so different?
My Blackberry Android phone is the same, I remember having to train myself not to hit power when I first got it because my previous phone wasn't like this.
It seems strange that Samsung wouldn't do something to tackle this. Part of the point of Samsung and other OEMs taking ages to roll out new Android versions is that they're testing and ensuring compatibility.
Apple seem to have lockscreen "keyboard mash detection" for macOS (where, if you are cleaning your keyboard and therefore mashing down keys as you swipe across them with a cloth, the OS will wake up and process the random inputs a while — until it detects that you've mashed 4+ function-row keys at once, at which point it'll just go back to sleep) so I wouldn't put it past them to have similar logic for iOS.
> The funny thing is, Android 12 — and this easy emergency call feature — came out a year and a half ago. [...] the feature is only now hitting enough people to become a national problem. Google's Pixel devices get new Android updates immediately, but everyone else can take months or years to get new versions of Android [...]. When this landed on Pixel devices in 2021, it was immediately flagged as a problem by some people, with one Reddit post calling it "dangerous." Since then, there has been a steady stream of posts warning people about it.
It objectively has been a problem, and was a known issue, with Reddit posts warning others. There just weren't enough Pixels to cause this latest tsunami. That year-and-a-half delay from Samsung rolling out Android 12 was meant to be for testing - which apparently didn't catch everything.
Increasing the accessibility of emergency calls is always going to be a tradeoff, so I'm not surprised there are accidental calls. However it strikes me as being significantly exacerbated by something about the phones it's rolling out to.
Now the iPhone's fake 911 call issue comes from its "auto car crash detection," which gets set off when people ski and, well, fall.
https://gizmodo.com/iphones-false-911-calls-bonnaroo-android...
1) Due to the general lag between Google pushing a new release out to AOSP and OEMs pushing out updates, many devices have only recently been updated to Android 12. OEMs with outsize market share pushing out updates will result in many more people - who probably don't know this gesture was added or how it's activated - accidentally triggering it.
2) Some OEMs may have flipped the switch in an OTA to turn the gesture from off by default to on by default.
But if I remember correctly, the emergency call feature is something that is explicitly explained during the iOS/watchOS initial setup and/or upgrade procedure, at which point you can also elect to opt out, so at the very least, it's less of a surprise.
It absolutely was a problem for me and I disabled it. I attach the phone to my car vent with an adapter and it slipped and when trying to adjust it called 911 twice while I was driving (couldn't pick up the first time).
How come such a critical shortcut be so unknown is a mystery to me. I can't imagine anyone ever used it intentionally.
Android is usually pretty good at providing quick menu toggles for things like this, or indicating to you where/when a new feature has been added, but this was entirely hidden in sub-menus without me even realising. Unfortunate for the emergency dispatcher who had to listen to me frantically trying to understand what was happening with a broken phone screen.
I understand why this is an auto on feature for safety, but the lack of highlighting is really sub-par for the average user
For context in case it was missed in TFA: While Samsung has a settings page for the feature, some users report the page doesn't actually have an "off" switch. Some builds for the Galaxy S23 and S22 let you control things, like if emergency SOS should play a warning sound, but you can't actually turn off the power button shortcut.
I don't blame you for not realising, considering you were never notified, and likely not even given the option to turn it off.
This was actually a large part of why I decided to buy a "flip" phone. With the screen closed, far fewer ways for me to have it activate while in my pocket.
> Texting with 22911 (SMS/MMS)
> Chicago 911, we received a call from you, do you have a Police, Fire or medical emergency?
> 9-1-1 has ended this conversation. 9-1-1 will not receive additional replies to this message. Call 9-1-1 to report an emergency.
I didn't see any of this until I took the phone out of my pocket.
I don't think it was from pressing the power button five times. With the case I have on my S22 Ultra, it takes a fairly hard press. And with where I keep the phone in my pocket, it doesn't seem that it would have gotten pressed at all, much less five times. But maybe that was it after all.
Is there another way an Android phone can do an unexpected 911 call?
Because Google doesn't understand the word "lock" in "lockscreen"
There's like a decade-old issue marked "won't fix", despite constant user complaints and non-Google manufacturers having a clear option for locking Quick Settings on the lock screen.
Just another papercut making me consider dropping the Pixel line and just buying something even cheaper than can run LineageOS. It's amazing the lengths Google goes to enact death by a million papercuts on their flagship OS.
This would quickly cut down on these issues and if not, could at least provide funding to staff it.
the first time I cancelled the call, they called back and I explained.
second time, I stayed on the line to explain, which they appreciated. this time I turned the feature off.
third time was on a new phone and hadn't disabled it...
I don't remember if iphone switch the volume button side between generations, but on Android it's not consistent model to model..
it's a great idea for sure, but it's easy to do accidentally if you confuse volume for power.
Imagine if pharmaceuticals worked the same way. Instead of requiring medical studies on small groups, any drug could just be released on the public. Who cares if it causes birth defects. Move fast and break things! Buyer beware. Once in a while you’d get a check for $20 in the mail after you find out you have some horrible incurable neurodegenerative disease.
This is quickly moving from annoyance to public nuisance to public safety emergency. Self-driving vehicle companies can push updates over the air that not only brick the vehicles, but endanger 3rd parties who never signed 95 page Terms and Conditions contracts. Obviously not all software needs to be subject to this regulation but some of it does.
The alternative is to move fast and break things which is maybe acceptable if that thing is a production database but far less charming if that thing is our emergency communications systems.
Eh, in this case this is just a gap for the FCC who already regulates 911 and it's implementation that needs patching. The FCC can be absolutely brutal in their enforcement execution. It's just they move slow as rocks.
> Self-driving vehicle companies can push updates over the air that not only brick the vehicles, but endanger 3rd parties who never signed 95 page Terms and Conditions contracts.
The NHTSA regulates vehicles via the FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards). They are responsible for things as requiring e-braking, backup cameras and more. It's really their job and ability to crack down on self-driving vehicles and OTA in vehicles. They could very easily do it but the automakers of course throw tantrums and start getting their local senators to interfere.
Now, why doesn't anything happen? Well, it's part regulatory capture, part rotting federal government due to extremists.
I went out and got the cheapest android phone I could find just temporarily. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was clear that whatever crummy little SoC they put in there was hardly capable of running the OS version they struck on it.
Often, the phone would lock up, but in a strange way. Only the rendering would freeze. There were several times an app would appear to completely lock up, and I would try to press the lock button of even restart it, but whatever app froze was still stuck on the screen, at least until it finally got going again and I realized that whatever frustrating tapping I was doing hit the emergency call button before the Lock Screen had even rendered. I had to explain to the operator about 5-6 times before I went and got a new phone.
I managed to make it to the menu described to turn off this feature. And gave up on fixing that device.
Really don't know what went on in the product owners minds to release this... There's plenty of people with finicky power buttons, children pressing things, general people pressing things hoping to make something work, accidental button presses, and so on...
I was at Busch Gardens in VA, riding their new coaster (Pantheon [1] for those curious). It's a fast, launched coaster and I guess the way I was sitting with the restraints hit the power button of my pixel 5 times and toggled the emergency call feature. I felt my smart watch vibrating with the ongoing call as we went up the top hat spike of the ride. Thankfully I was able to stop the call from my wrist before it connected. But that was the last time I didn't turn my phone off or put it in a locker before I got on a ride.
Granted, this all became way worse with touch. I wouldn't be surprised if larger phones make it worse, too. I have loved my flip's ability to "close" and render this a non-issue. Wallet style cases also helped, back when I had a non foldable phone.
Way back when cell phones were rare, the intention was that in an emergency you could make a call on someone else's phone, even if they were incapacitated. For example, a vehicle accident that left the phone owner unconscious while other passengers were OK.
In the modern age, where the US has 1.16 cell connections per person [1] the chances of needing to use someone else's phone are of course much reduced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
Long time ago since I used android but how do y’all put up with this crap? It sounds incredibly frustrating. Aren’t phone vendors infamous for absolute abysmal UX?
How's the shortcut useful when nobody has an idea it even exists except those who stumble upon it by mistake?!
The police came for a wellness check, and my wife had to talk to them through doorbell camera and explain that she can't come to the door because she was sick and extremely dizzy.
Yeah, that went over about as well as you'd think.
This is common sense to me, but unfortunately most people use default settings.
My second favorite is when you search for things, it shows up in search, you tap and it brings you to a page and the setting isn't there.
Every time I turned it off, it would boot up again and then immediately call 911. I had to talk with the dispatchers multiple times very nicely that no, everything's fine, my phone is going nuts. Eventually I was able to bypass the screen and turn it off in settings before it rang again.
It gave me a massive scare and I thought my phone was crying bloody murder because I was switching to a newer one.
This sums up the fraud of Android perfectly.
Great, isn't it?
I acknowledge the intention... but I'm not sure it's a net good. And it requires others to bear the costs.
- would this not be one of the best examples of when to use small, incremental canary releases with the emergency feature enabled?
- if you did do a canary release, i would think that one of your first contacts be EMS in the area that you were planning on rolling out the feature to, so that you’d get good feedback directly rather than through news reports. do apple and google just not do this?