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Apple Directs Users Not to Hang Up on Operators in Accidental Crash Detection Calls

Perhaps Apple should be changing the hang up button to automatically give a message stating “this call was triggered automatically by crash detection on an Apple device and has been manually cancelled by the user”.

Also, wasn’t crash detection enabled by default? Is it still? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make it manually enabled, to make sure the user is aware it is active and (even most importantly) spell out the behaviour that will trigger it, and the correct user response if accidentally triggered? They seem to give lots of disclaimers whenever I enable other features such as Face ID.

It seems like it could be a good feature, but even my car makes me enable the “Call 911 in case of collision” feature, and I would expect it to be more predictable to trigger the car version… or at least harder and more obvious once triggered!
 
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If Apple is making hundreds of false 911 calls per week at this one cell tower, I have to imagine that means they’re making tens of thousands of false 911 calls per week and millions per year. That’s likely added up to a few people who were in situations where seconds counted dying because emergency services didn’t reach them in time.

Has Apple saved any lives at all with this feature?

Individuals get hit with hefty fines for calling 911 when it’s not an emergency - why wouldn’t Apple get hit hundreds of times harder for this criminal negligence?
 
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Oh yeah instead of having a feature to avoid using up precious seconds on emergency service centres, let’s use up more of their time just to let user say “sorry I’m ok my phone triggered that call for me”.
Brilliant logic and outstanding work from Apple, a company that has trillion-dollar market value and billions in cash.
 
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rjp1 said:
This feature gets a lot of hate on here sometimes.

Personally, I had a bike accident about a year ago and broke some bones. As I was gathering myself, the siren started to go off and I was able to cancel it. Luckily, I didn't need it to call 911, but I was very thankful for it going off. I guess that is why I'd rather it be a little too sensitive instead of not sensitive enough. This is one of those things that will never be perfect and that is okay.
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That is okay...unless you're the 911 operator who has to field an extra 100 calls a day because Apple wanted to sell more phones and watches. It's not a problem until it's your problem.😑

Imagine how much hate you would have if the rest of your iPhone functions at the level of crash detection? This software isn't even worthy of beta status. It's 100% "I am an alpha."
 
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I was the systems administrator of a county-wide 9-1-1 system for a decade that just so happen to have a 991-XXXX NXX within the county, back in the days of 7-digit dialing. We actually had to source funding for a 30-second television commercial in our local market to educate our citizens in the difference of 9-9-1 and 9-1-1 and long term, we finally got Bellsouth (now AT&T) to phase out the 991 NXX.

This doesn't seem like a big deal but the issue lies in the amount of available 9-1-1 trunk lines at a local 9-1-1 center and the failover system to other surrounding 9-1-1 centers. Being a county-wide 9-1-1 center, we had eight trunk lines, or we could accept eight 9-1-1 calls simultaneously. If all eight of those trunk lines are busy, the 9-1-1 call is routed to another local 9-1-1 center, which in turn ties up their trunk lines. In our case, the other local 9-1-1 centers were municipalities and most of them only had 2-4 trunk lines. A wreck on the interstate where 20 people are trying to report the same wreck at the same time would easily tie up every 9-1-1 trunk line in a three county radius until all of the calls were handled. To make matters worse, the other local 9-1-1 centers had no way of knowing that the calls they were taking were actually roll-over from us, so they would then transfer the caller BACK to us and they cycle would start all over again. 😄

I say all of that to say that if the local 9-1-1 center that services one of these ski resorts has a limited number of available 9-1-1 trunks, the possibility of one or two accidental crash detection calls creating a substantial delay in getting a true emergency caller to the right agency is not as far fetched as one might think.
 
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hacky said:
This is one view.

Let me give you another standpoint - emergency services have limited capacity and because of these false calls reaction to actual emergency can be delayed and someone may die consequently.
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There needs to be an option to only call emergency contacts and not actually 911. It already calls both. It could even default to both, but be toggleable.

Funny people say that Apple won’t allow phone call recording because of legal liability, but they are deliberately getting themselves into the emergency services business. Talk about liability.
 
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In Germany it is a serious crime to call emergency without an emergency. That can get you into real trouble. I wonder if it is legal to own a device that calls emergency without an emergency on its own.
 
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-BigMac- said:
I mean, thats something that can never be proven.

Prove to me that you reading this comment, and subsequently delaying your activities thereafter by 20 seconds, didn’t save/pre-emptively end your life crossing the road in the future
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And that's the point. It's an argumentation foul to say this feature definitely saved more lives than it killed by overloading the emergency services, because you don't have and can't have all the data backing such claim. Either way can be valid.
 
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I simply dont get it. The algorithm is that it triggers the emergency call after massive changes in acceleration.

Now what if it instead triggered a 1 minute countdown. If the phone doesn’t start moving again during that countdown it will make the call.

I mean - if you’re not hurt and need help you’re able to move around with your phone. If you passed out you won’t
 
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Skyscraperfan said:
In Germany it is a serious crime to call emergency without an emergency. That can get you into real trouble. I wonder if it is legal to own a device that calls emergency without an emergency on its own.
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Germany has a very big premium car industry. Most premium cars these days also have this same feature, so I guess there’s no legality issue.

I imagine the law you referred to is specific to malicious intent or negligence.
 
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NightFox said:
Germany has a very big premium car industry. Most premium cars these days also have this same feature, so I guess there’s no legality issue.

I imagine the law you referred to is specific to malicious intent or negligence.
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This is different. E-call function is mandatory in the EU and has strict defined rules. Also it calls when the airbags fire, so there are basically no false positives.

Your airbags normally don't fire during standard drive without any crash. So no, this analogy is not good. Apple's solution is illegal in the whole EU and it is the reason why it does not call emergency number directly there.
 
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I won’t argue that this feature wouldn’t save lives, if properly implemented.

But as it is now, it looks like an ”alpha” implementation that was released to the public. It goes without saying that no feature should be released for general use without thorough testing, but this is especially egregious due to the life or death nature of the calls handled by emergency personnel. Considering the implications of large numbers of false positives on the real-world emergency services the feature will contact, I would expect the bright minds at Apple to devise appropriate in-house experimentation, testing, and data collection as part of iterative development to mitigate false positives before it is released. It is true that you can’t account for 100% of situations ahead of time but as it is, it looks like Apple really dropped the ball.
 
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