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by fasthands9 1352 days ago
I am very curious if they did assessment of other situations which could trigger similar sensor reactions that they had to rule out. Theme parks could actually be geofenced off without not that much work - there are under 1000 roller coasters in the US.

Did they have to consider people dropping phones out of car windows (or off a boat ?) What about ski crashes or skateboard crashes?

5 comments

There are traveling carnivals to things like state/county fairs, as well as just big empty parking lots of malls/etc for a few weeks, with significant g-force rides. So well over a thousand locations in the US.
> Theme parks could actually be geofenced off without not that much work - there are under 1000 roller coasters in the US.

I'm cognizant of the 80/20 rule, and "perfect is the enemy of good," but if a run-of-the-mill coaster is setting off that detection, then I'd wager the traveling fair rides will be even more violent, based on my experiences growing up

I have no idea where this falls on the privacy spectrum, but I'd guess if there are 5 or 10 triggering events within some timespan and some geo boundary, that's an indicator of a themepark-ish setup

Clicking "report false positive" on the phone would also likely go a long way

There was an article a couple weeks ago about the feature triggering when someone's iPhone fell off his motorcycle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32968229
To be fair it didn’t fall off a motorcycle. It was thrown (due to a hard bump) from a moving motorcycle. If it had been in the person’s pocket at the time because they had fallen off too, calling 911 would have been very fitting.
I guess the question to me is what the final false positive rate on this feature is. Its obviously a huge net win if the proportion is small - but if it is high enough I'd imagine that dispatchers would be less likely to want to send officers to the automated calls.
Hard to answer. However it’s also probably hard to come up with all the edge cases.
Or NFL quarterbacks!