Both Cook and Stearns County have encouraged residents in the past couple weeks to check the settings on their devices, and turn off the automatic emergency call features when taking part in activities such as snowmobiling or skiing, or when it isn’t needed.
Source: 9to5Mac
Crash Detection or Emergency SOS triggering a false positive is annoying, but the advice to turn it off, outside of a small handful of controlled scenarios, is not the answer. Every technology is going to have some growing pains and Apple is doing what they can to improve the feature over time. I understand the strain this puts on law enforcement agencies in smaller areas, but unless the resources these false positives are taking are costing more lives than the feature saves, I can’t get behind this mentality.
The part that bothers me the most about this, however, is the advice to turn it off “…when taking part in activities such as snowmobiling or skiing, or when it isn’t needed.”
Now I don’t ski or snowboard, I never have a day in my life, but if I’m up in the mountains doing extreme sports with an insane number of risks to my safety (crash, fall, loss of consciousness, avalanche, etc) I’m going to be checking to make sure the feature is on before I make my first move.
I can only hope people in these areas do not follow this advice, because just one life lost because this advice was followed is going to backfire on these agencies spectacularly.
Dan Stransky 