We should remember to evaluate interventions based on the cost and rate of false positive/negatives, vs. the benefit of true positive/negatives.
In this case, the pertinent benefit to weigh against is the benefit of fall detection, particularly for elderly people, but also for active folks e.g. falling while cycling.
Obviously we’d rather not make false emergency calls, all else being equal. But it could be worth it on its face, we need to analyze the benefits to know.
Shouldn't people who want this have a specific device or service that handles the logistics of rescue, like Onstar?
From the looks of it, Apple gets to market this feature but shoves the work off to public rescue services, which are then burdened by false positives due to Apple unilaterally letting their phones dial emergency numbers and putting the onus on the user to handle 'impact classification'.
I don’t think so, no. By this logic, all roads would be toll roads, all schools would be private, etc. I would not like to live in that society. If Android or other device manufacturers had equivalent features, they can have that too. We can discuss what the maximum false positive rate can legally be obliged to be, but I think having it be 0% is not a net positive for society.
Flooding emergency services with fake incidents can easily start killing people due to help being called just because some idiot manager thought 'this is good marketing so lets get this done quickly' and pushed half-baked solution. I ain't talking about theory, read this thread about feature disabled and still calling 911, imagine if you had phone in trunk of the car.
Glad it doesn't seem to be enabled in Switzerland, my wife is a doctor, worked on emergency and also as a doctor with ambulances so has perspective from other side. This is outright criminal behavior from Apple, easily to get sued for billions in each bigger market (not saying they would automatically lose, they can play well meaning idiot at the courts but PR effect is nevertheless properly bad).
In this case, the pertinent benefit to weigh against is the benefit of fall detection, particularly for elderly people, but also for active folks e.g. falling while cycling.
Obviously we’d rather not make false emergency calls, all else being equal. But it could be worth it on its face, we need to analyze the benefits to know.