Apple’s crash detection functionality continues to be a problem, especially in this ski season. In the United States, emergency services are overwhelmed by fake emergency calls made by iPhone 14s and Apple Watches.
Since the start of the winter season and the opening of ski resorts, emergency services have faced an unexpected phenomenon: that of false emergency calls made by Apple devices. Indeed, Apple has launched an accident detection feature on the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro, the Apple Watch Series 8, the Apple Watch SE of 2e generation and the Apple Watch Ultra. This feature allows the device to independently contact the emergency services in the event of an accident if the user is not able to do so himself.
Only here, the iPhone 14 tends to detect false ski accidents and to call for help by mistake. Users who have their iPhone snug in their pocket may not always realize it in time to cancel the call. Therefore, rescue centers are receiving more and more fake emergency calls.
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911 centers are seeing an increase in fake emergency calls near ski resorts compared to last year
In upstate New York in the United States, the Greene County 911 center near a ski resort has noticed an increase in fake emergency calls this season. Compared to December 2021, false calls, calls that hang up immediately and open lines increased by 22%.
According to Jim DiPerna who runs the center, ” we continue to see this 15-25% increase in calls [par rapport à l’année dernière]which could very well be generated by these Apple standalone crash notifications “. For the emergency services, this increase in false emergency calls obviously poses a problem. They are obliged to check each of these calls to make sure no one is injuredbut it wastes their resources to respond to real emergency calls.
In Pennsylvania, Shawn Datesman who is the director of operations of 911 encounters the same problem. ” You don’t want to assume that nothing happened and that everyone is fine following the automated emergency call. So this is something we need to check “, he explained. In any case, Apple is aware of the bad detections of its functionality. A spokesperson even confirmed thatApple is already in contact with 911 call centers. However, we do not yet know how the feature will be improved to prevent fake emergency calls in the future.
Source : New York Post
