Apple, Samsung, and other tech giants need to consult emergency services before implementing features that automatically place 911 calls. The plea has come from EENA, an organization representing more than 1,500 emergency services in over 80 countries.

It says that although features like Fall Detection on the Apple Watch and Auto-call for Emergency SOS on the iPhone are well-intentioned and have been credited with saving a great many people, they can also cost lives…

EENA started by tweeting some good news today.

But followed up with the flip side of the tech.

The big problem with such features, says EENA in a new position paper, is that tech companies fail to consult emergency services before launching them. That can result in the worst of both worlds: wasted resources on false alarms, while other users who are expecting help to arrive will never receive it.

They couldn’t take their minds off one detail – what if something had actually happened, but data received was inaccurate/incomplete? What if there was someone waiting for help that wouldn’t arrive?

EENA invites tech companies to contact it in order to ensure that such features are implemented in a way that will save lives, not cost them. Apple heeded a previous EENA call to adopt AML, a standard way to transmit exact locations of callers to emergency services, implementing Advanced Mobile Location last year. It will hopefully do the same with this plea to consult emergency services over the way its safety features operate.

There have been cases where call centres have received automated messages (sometimes even in a foreign language) from apps alerting them of users in distress. Given that the emergency services had no prior information of this new product or of how the messages would be relayed to them, no protocol had been defined. Citizens were in danger, but emergency services did not know how to properly respond to these alerts […]

This situation could significantly harm the credibility of a company and its products, as well as put the safety of its users at risk.

Signatories to the paper include the 9-1-1 Association in the US, the 999 Liaison Committee and London Ambulance Service in the UK, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials in Canada and similar organizations across Europe.

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