Comment by virtue3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by virtue3 | Hacker News Reader

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You are massively underestimating the strain and resources expended for false positives for emergency services. This will be a major issue for municipalities. And it won't be apple footing the bill it will be your local tax dollars at work.

Put another way; if an emergency team arrives late to another accident because they were tied up on a false positive from an iphone and that results in less effective care, what happens? Do we just front the bill for more emergency workers? Do we hold apple accountable for false positives? Do we hold the user accountable for false positives (I guarantee most people are gonna start turning it off then).

Seems like emergency response centers are a little mixed in how they feel about the feature. But this last point is especially important as to why false positives are pretty irresponsible.

"An automated call from Crash Detection could cost responders as much as $10,000, and they have a limited budget."

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/09/apple-crash-detec...

I feel you are massively overstating, though? Largely, it doesn't help to compare costs of rescue and recovery in places with ski resorts to most municipalities. And the money saved from the legit crash notifications can add in to this well, such that this is an evolving space.

Again, they should improve it. And reporting and asking for changes makes sense. The disdain on this post is baffling to me, though. You don't have to search hard to find cases of this feature providing tangible help to people.

If you have solid data showing that it is overwhelming places, that changes things. So far, it has not been reported to be doing that.

> The disdain on this post is baffling to me, though. You don't have to search hard to find cases of this feature providing tangible help to people.

I know you mean well, but if this is that hard for you to understand then you aren't even trying to consider responders' wasted time or effort. Until the majority of automated calls are verifiable emergencies, this is adding more noise than signal. The handful of times it gets it right puts it a step above a broken clock in terms of usefulness. For what response costs in human capital, it needs to do better than occasionally getting it right. "If it saves one life..." isn't good enough when you're driving responders to apathy and exhaustion; others will suffer from their lack of attention.

Really, welfare checks borne from vaguely-substantiated malfunctions are a job for friends, not emergency services.

I confess that I don't know that you mean well, sadly.

For one, you haven't established that the majority are not verifiable emergencies. You are asserting that it can't possibly be the case that this is providing real value, as it is.

You also have not established that it causes a substantial increase in costs for most municipalities. Again, quoting how much a search and rescue can cost up to, in a place with many ski resorts, does little to actually convince me of good faith discussions here.

For places that have a convention or festival, I can already assume that they will have an increase in everything because of that. Per this very story, they were emphatically not overwhelmed. It was an increase, and is notable such that it is best if it is addressed.

But I see very little ways of framing the doom and gloom posts here other than FUD.

The cost of a false positive is money.

The cost of a false negative could be a life.

Improved protocols and better algorithms from Apple will probably help tremendously with false positives.

the cost of a false positive could be a life too. Someone could die because 911 was tied up with false reports and a person with a real emergency couldn't get though. Worse, first responders could be dispatched to a music festival and be unavailable when/where people really need them. This "feature" is broken and irresponsible.

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