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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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It is apparently used for emergency location https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/746-imsservice-system-app-accesses-location-consistently
Probably useful for people living in constant fear of being kidnapped, but personally I think I’ll just revoke location on this one.
It’s for any emergency services. If you get in a car wreck on the freeway and someone calls an ambulance, the location service tells them where on the freeway to send it, and where to send the closest firetrucks from.
9/11 really made people realize being able to locate cell phones accurately is critical. In a crisis, being able to fing where people are buried under rubble, or where exactly in a forest they’re lost, is really important.
But, stuff like that only ever happens to other people, right?
I feel it would be kinda my own fault if I got in a car wreck on a freeway. What was I even doing there without a car or a licence?
And if I got lost in a forest, I obvisously wouldn’t need emergency services if my phone knew my exact location, would I?
Jokes aside, I could just toggle the permission on or off anyway, and I grew up without a cellphone to begin with. Yeah, there are risks, but to me this is phobia levels of precaution in exchange for giving out my exact location at all times to who knows. If that’s what kills me, that is entirely on me, but it very likely won’t.
Sorry, I’m not sure why it would natter who’s fault it is when it comes to emergency services being able to locate people.
The thing is that in crisis situations, people tend to act in unusual ways. Fumbling with a phone to adjust settings while someone is bleeding out seems like an unnecessary waste of time that could result in avoidable harm. If the stress is high enough, a person could easily forget they need to turn on GPS, or even forget how. Maybe there’s a concussion involved[ and even just placing a call is a challenge, much less finding and changing phone settings. Maybe you’re unconscious, in a ditch, and some loved one is trying to locate you. They’ll be able to tell whereyou are in general, but if your phone is in a rural area, cell toner spacing can be a 3 mile radius. If you’re in an urban environment, it’s even worse - the tower spacing is closer, but urban density makes locating an unresponsive person far harder.
Being lost in a forest alone isn’t the issue; it’s being lost, hurt, and maybe unresponsive that’s the cancern. Hypothermia will absolutely fuck up your ability to think rationally; you can forget dicking around with your phone settings.
My thing is, why go to “kidnapping?” There are so many, far more likely things that can happen to a person where you’d want emergency services to be able to find you as accurately and as quickly as possible.
OP was asking about an OSS phone, right? Not one controlled by Google[ or Apple. It’s less likely that information is being harvested for nefarious purposes, and there is real value to having that information accessible to emergency services.
If I didn’t bring my phone with me to begin with, which I often don’t, I would be in the same situation. I’m not saying the emergency service is useless to everyone. But the risk of it being off causing my death is so insignificantly small, the risk of someone tapping into my location far outweights it for me. We didn’t have phones when I grew up, and it should be OK not to rely on it for everything today as well. If that kills me (which it won’t), that is on me.
I could argue then that everyone should carry a first aid kit with them everywhere they go, or a rape whistle, then since it would save at least someone somewhere, but that’s a high burden to prevent something of low risk.
More importantly, why can’t it check the location when I actually make the emergency call, rather than every 10 minutes? It does not need my daily routine to locate me.
Now that I think about it, location is disabled globally on my phone by default anyway, and has always been. I turn it on when I have to, and immediately turn it back off when I don’t need it anymore.
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I doubt anyone would want to kidnap me, but if they did, trackers would probably help them.
Yes, that’s definitely the only time emergency services are useful.