[short_throw]

If no one speaks than you can't differentiate a false alarm from someone who can't breathe, or is hiding from an attacker, or is too hurt to put the phone to their ear.

It's a massive nuisance unless someone gets on to say it was a mistake...and if someone didn't notice their phone buzzing before it made the call they aren't gonna pick up.

[jon-wood]

This system doesn’t just open a voice line to 999, it dials 999 and then plays an automated message saying something along the lines of “The owner of this iPhone may have been involved in a crash, the device is currently located at [location]” and then repeats it a few times.

Ideally there’d be a better system for this where 999 can be notified in a machine readable format allowing them to filter out automated calls from known sites that are generating false positives, but it’s not like the operators don’t have information to work from.

It’s also possible operators could (maybe they already can) see which mobile cell the call came from, which would also help rule out false alerts because they’d be flagged as coming from the vicinity of a festival. Generally for large events 999 are going to contact the organisers and let them know they need to send out a first aid team anyway, they’re not going to automatically despatch an ambulance without someone having confirmed the need for one.