Comment by hammock
Comment by hammock 13 hours ago
How would that work?
Comment by hammock 13 hours ago
How would that work?
The phone could literally pop up a consent alert asking whether to respond to a GPS ping request from the carrier. Or just not honor the pings at all unless you dialed 911 within the last hour.
This is a specific service inside the phone that looks for messages from the carrier requesting a GPS position, it could just refuse, or lie. It's not the same as cell tower triangulation.
I can imagine situations where the emergency is noticed by other people that might not be near the location itself, and the person whose location would need to be determined is not able to use the mobile phone, such as could be the case in many accidents.
I think it would be sufficient to just have a log of this information being queried, and cases where the information has been pinged without a legitimate use case would the be investigated.
The article does not explain in detail how all this works. But educated guess is that if a baseband SoC provides this information, that's it. The phone operating system (iOS, Android) does not get a chance to decide what to do, since baseband soc is a sort of autonomous computer, it has its own firmware, cpu and ram.
You might not be able to fix this in the OS alone, but phone manufacturers are responsible for the whole phone. The baseband doesn't need to behave that way.
Well, yes. But autonomous is acting in accordance with one's duty (a law) rather than one's desires.
Carrier* Android and iOS both integrate with RapidSOS UNITE. RapidSOS then processes the rich emergency information from the user's device (enhanced location, videos and photos, etc), and is available to the 911 dispatcher in their dispatch software. 99.99% of Americans are covered by RapidSOS integrations in their municipalities.
https://rapidsos.com/public-safety/unite/
When the call comes in they can click a button and query RapidSOS for current 911 calls for that number and pull the information inwards.
https://www.baycominc.com/hubfs/2025%20Website%20Update/Prod...
Phone detects that you call emergency service and enables gps.
Last time I called 911 (well, it's 112 in my country) my android phone asked if I want to provide gps coordinates. I did, but they still asked for address, so probably this is not integrated/used everywhere.