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Comment by BenjiWiebe | Hacker News Reader

The article says the vast majority of places do not know where you are when you call 911; is that true?

I've toured our 911 call center, since I am a volunteer firefighter, and when you call on a cell phone you are immediately located by GPS and displayed on a map, and even tracked for a short time after you hang up.

And I would not expect Marion county Kansas to be up and coming technology-wise.

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Unless it’s changed recently, Bay Area 911 calls all get routed to CHP in Vallejo and they didn’t have any information of where you are if calling from a cell phone.

Doesn’t seem fixed from a quick Google https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/cellphone-users-in-oak...

Maybe San Francisco should upgrade their tech to be on par with Kansas

And this is rural Kansas too, not Kansas City!

I’d be easier and more cost effective to move to a well managed state, and more likely to happen in human relevant time.

SF can't tell where you are when you use a cell phone because the cell phone providers don't provide that information.

They don't in Kansas, either. I reported an accident on the highway last year and they weren't able to locate me based on my cellphone's GPS.

Speaking of well managed states...California is the world's 4th largest economy. The entire Red Belt combined is smaller than California's economy.

So why do cell phone providers provide that information when you call 911 in Marion County? The 911 dispatcher literally showed me on her computer how the map displays the GPS coordinates of the cell phone, and live updates, and keeps updating even after the call has ended (for 3 minutes maybe? IDR).

Your cell phone provider isn't able to provide accurate live GPS coordinates; it can only triangulate your approximate location based on cell tower triangulation.

If Marion County is getting your pinpoint location, it's getting it from the phone itself, which requires a modern 911 system.

Which is the well managed state? Is California poorly managed?

Wow, you need to subscribe to a $20 per year app for 911 to work from a cellphone in Oakland.

Perhaps its time to get them onto the ESINet with a modern SIP stack and dispatch console. You can only kick the can down the road so far, this is an upgrade that has been clearly needed for many years.

That news article is over ten years old.

Good catch I read 20x6 and my brain filled in the wrong digit

Does anyone know if you have to have the GPS radio of the phone switched on for that to work? I keep my GPS and WIFI radios switched off for both privacy and to reduce the drain on the battery unless I specifically need it on when lost.

The OS overrides location service settings during emergency calls

> When using Emergency SOS to call emergency services, the call may include your location, regardless of whether you enable Location Services, to allow the dispatcher to assist you.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/emergency-sos/

Android has a similar feature.

There is no legislation requiring this of device (or OS) vendors, but carriers are legally required to make location information available to emergency services, and I think are even prohibited from connecting phones that don’t make this possible. So market forces effectively ensure that all phones do this.

The exception is when the call is too short to get a lock for GPS and location can’t be determined. The phone will still transmit what it can (say, WiFi proximity derived location). Worse case is fall through to carrier triangulation.

This is the correct answer.

There is no such thing as a GPS radio in a phone in the sense of something that broadcasts a signal. GPS signals are broadcast by satellites and any device on earth can choose to listen for the signal and triangulate their position by receiving the signal from multiple satellites. GPS doesn't send out any signal from your phone to work. In the same way that your eyeballs don't need to emit light for you to see (unless you're a superhero). Phones broadcast signal to connect to cell networks and wifi networks.

Now if you expect your phone to show your position on a map (using the GPS coordinates it calculated from the satellite signal) then it likely needs to retrieve map data from the internet (and in doing so it might be broadcasting over cell or wifi frequencies). But that's a different story.

Much confusion is caused by people saying "I tracked X with GPS" with the implication that GPS allows tracking of remote objects. It doesn't. It allows the remote object to know its own location. For that information to get to someone else (the spy in the chasing vehicle) the remote object needs to be broadcasting that location information through some other means (which has nothing to do with GPS).

I think most everyone but you interprets “GPS radio” in GP’s post to mean a “radio capable of reviving the GPS signal” same as I would call the thing in the middle of car’s dash an AM/FM radio.

>choose to listen for the signal

Devices need a radio receiver to be able to listen to and decode the signal. Without a radio it's impossible.

Short answer: no.

The network knows the signal strength between you and the cell towers nearest you. You are usually within range of more than one cell tower. That can locate you fairly accurately. Network data like this is used to augment GPS which can have problems among tall buildings for example.

The cell towers know where your phone is whenever it has signal. It's not as accurate as modern GPS, but 5G especially can locate you to within about a hundred meter radius. Precision varies wildly depending on conditions, distance, etc.

GPS is entirely passive (it is receive only), so leaving it on is harmless for your privacy on Apple devices. For Android... well, if you have an Android phone, you're not a privacy-conscious consumer by definition, so just leave it on for the convenience of not having to turn it on and off manually all the time!

WiFi, again, is not that big a deal with Apple because they rotate your unique MAC address to preserve your privacy. Android is a mixed bag, depends on the model of phone you purchased.

> if you have an Android phone, you're not a privacy-conscious consumer by definition

Maybe you have a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Or you care about freedom more than privacy alone so you want the option to install apps outside of Google Play (and you got your phone before they announced the new restrictions).

>if you have an Android phone, you're not a privacy-conscious consumer by definition

Or maybe they are privacy-conscious but can't afford/justify spending $1600 on an iPhone.

The price difference is the value Google and co extracted from you by selling your private data.

Probably not, the network towers are the ones being used to triangulate I think.

That would be trilateration. But no, your phone is perfectly able to transfer your GPS position during a 911 call, as well.

It depends. There are two tiers of location tracking, and parts of it come down to E911, and cellular tower data. I could pull up dispatch on our MDTs (Tiburon) and see GPS coordinates and a confidence value and whether it was triangulation or direct location.

I believe it has to do with the age of the 911 system. Older systems do not support remote location, microphone and camera access.

Apparently the US 911 system integrated some Israeli tech from a company founded by Israeli intelligence personnel called Reporty Homeland Security that later rebranded as Carbyne. Carbyne was headed by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. The company, received much of its initial funding from Jeffery Epstein and Ehud Barak.

I don't know if any of the Israeli tech is running on handsets, but it is definitely running on the back-end in the US 911 emergency call systems. The on-device portion of the 911 emergency calling that grants remote access to location, video, and microphone is part of the closed, proprietary, Google Play Services, on Android.

If running a de-googled rom, you will presumably not be sending any location data or providing other access to your phone when calling 911.

Someone who is usually reliable stated that Scott Bessent had strong ties to this company, Ahud Barrak, and Jeffery Epstien (and was instrumental in getting Carbyne's tech adopted by US 911 system). But, I have not found evidence documenting Bessent's ties to Carbyne. If someone knows more about this-- either confirming or definitively refuting, please share.

Everything you said after the first paragraph is irrelevant and has the distinct odor of racist baiting.

Israel has been regularly caught spying on the US (and nearly every other country on earth). Most of the tech used to compromise phones to attack e.g., journalists and political dissidents, is Israeli. I do not trust anything coming out of that country to run on my phone nor as part of my country's communications infrastructure. If you think a genocidal Jewish supremacist messianic expansionist settler colonial regime that terrorizes its neighbors and is engaged in an extermination campaign against its indigenous population and who regularly murders American citizens too, is good and trustworthy, that is on you.

The US elite is so intertwined with the Israeli elite and Jeffrey Epstein, that if there is light to be shed, it should be. And, I explicitly stated, "either confirming or definitively refuting". I want to know the truth, not the Israeli propaganda from our Zionist controlled government and media (e.g., Secretary of State, Rubio admitted that we went to war with Iran solely for Israel. CNN sends all stories about the region to Israel military censors to be re-written with pro-Israel spin / denied for publication, New York Times has editorial guidelines that forbid even acknowledging that Palestinians exist unless no way to write story around it-- 'genocide' is a forbidden word in stories about Palestine/Israel, etc. Axios and New York Times publish stories written by Israeli intelligence). And, I do not want conspiracy theories from people with other agendas either. The person who made the statement is an academic who is usually reliable.

A response that would make you look less racist would be not to double down on it when confronted.

I look forward to your sequel to Mein Kampf. Let us know when it’s out.

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