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Comment by Ms-J | Hacker News Reader

More abuse done to us. We never agreed for our GPS coordinates to tag along with calls for some assholes to see exactly where we are.

It is tiring. I am doing something about it by making technical contributions. If you are able to do the same, please do.

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I mean we kinda did when we decided that emergency services calls would be special and give first responders the ability to find you. Wireless carriers are required to provide GPS quality (actually better than GPS) location data to EMS and this is how they built it.

The only way to actually do this was develop a way to ask the phone because the tower isn't accurate enough. In the US it could have been more privacy preserving by being push but I imagine carriers don't want to maintain and update a list of current emergency numbers. "Sorry person in a car crash, we can't find you because cellular modem firmware is out of date and your emergency number isn't on list" is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Easier to coordinate with police and fire and let them do the asking.

911 is the only actual emergency number with regulations around it in the US. police and fire have _non_ emergency numbers that differ, my local hospitals will tell you to call 911; and gas, water, power, and other immediate risks to life safety are all 911 anyway (at least as the first call).

Sometimes it seems dumb, but as long as its an honest report I've never heard of anything more than an annoyed patrol officer. Felt stupid calling in an interstate sized sign hanging by a literal bolt-thread but the patrol shut down that lane.

In general the emergency services would rather come out for something that sounds on the face of it stupid ("This sign is hanging down above the road and flapping in the breeze, can you come out to it?") and deal with it with plenty of time.

Far better than getting the call "This sign has come down and chopped a bus in half, and then four cars have run into the back of the wreckage".

Build the fence at the top of the cliff, not the hospital at the bottom.

yea, that's exactly why I called. 99% of people wouldn't notice, and of those that do 99% won't call.

The other one you get is "remove object from person", which is usually not as rude as it sounds. Mostly, it's cutting a ring that's too tight off someone.

What, you want me to call 999? To get a ring that's too tight off? I mean it's hurting my finger but is it really an emergency?

Yes, dumbass, it's an emergency. Get the ring off your finger right now before the blood supply gets compromised and you end up with a big slug of stale dead blood washing round you when you finally do get it off. You could lose your hand if you piss about with it too long.

I know it seems like overkill to have a 18-tonne Scania rock up with five guys in it just to cut through that little ring, but they have the right tools to do it quickly and easily, and no-one wants to have to cut your hand off.

Ring 999 while you still have two working hands.

Smoke alarm going off? No apparent reason? At least ring them up for advice. There might be something you haven't seen. Just phone them.

It's far easier dealing with you not being on fire in the first place, than dealing with you being on fire later. Not being on fire is good.

It's perfectly reasonable to have the expectation that the cell phone network can provide location to emergency services but not the the telecom provider's marketing team or whoever they sell the data to.

In fact the apple feature the article talks about says [1]

> The limit precise location setting doesn't impact the precision of the location data that is shared with emergency responders during an emergency call.

So it actually now implements what it should have been all along. (except that it should be the default)

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/126101

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