*quality for the last bit. That was funny.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by eric3579.

And you want government to be in charge of healthcare.

The Government controlled FAA is still using 40-Year-Old Tech running America’s Air Traffic Control.


Government run anything is bad.

I would have thought there was a fairly simple answer as to why 911 doesn't get location data from smartphones... privacy.

The reason uber, dominos, etc have access to your location is because they have an app on your smartphone that has been explicitly granted access to your location by you. 911 is just a simple phone call and so it can't read the location data.

To do so reliably across cell phones would require development of some kind of emergency location standard that all manufacturers could implement. Technically, it's not that difficult, but getting everyone to agree on a standard?

Not that easy

Couldn't (shouldn't?) somebody make an android / iOS app that has permissions to force turning on GPS tracking, dials 911 and lets the user talk as normal, and uses text to speech to repeat the lat/long coordinates from the GPS at a low volume every 15-30 seconds or something?

That wouldn't require a technological standard -- from the 911 dispatch perspective, it is all just analog / audio information. It would require people to download/install a 3rd party app, which isn't great since most people don't exactly plan ahead for emergencies like that. But, if it worked well enough and was unobtrusive enough, Google/Apple would probably be well served to adopt it as a standard feature of Android/iOS.

Probably possible on android, but I'm pretty sure that iOS apps can't use the phone functionality like that.

It's a good idea though and I think Apple/Google should integrate it into the os.