European emergency agency requests Apple enable AML location tracking in iPhone for first ...
The European Emergency Number Association is asking that Apple go beyond it's Apple Watch emergency location sending feature, and requests that Advanced Mobile Location be integrated into iOS and the iPhone to assist in locating people in an emergency.
The organization made the call for Apple to implement Advanced Mobile Location (AML) technology on Thursday. The group claims that it has tried to directly contact Apple regarding the matter, and has had no success.
The group does note that the Apple Watch can tell a phone to send the wearer's location to a specified contact. However, the group wants the functionality extended to the iPhone itself, and the data send to emergency services and rescuers.
"Recent news about the 'panic command' on iPhones, including a location function, is also a step in the right direction," said EENA in a statement. "But it is not sufficient: accurate location information should be sent during all emergency calls."
AML is open source, and any smartphone manufacturer or operating system provide can integrate it. Google has done so with Android, starting with Gingerbread -- and calls it Emergency Location Service.
Not all Android phones are compatible with the technology, however. Samsung, for instance, doesn't support the feature across its entire line of smartphones, but does in its flagship Galaxy S8.
When an emergency call is made with a smartphone where AML is enabled, the phone establishes its position and sends this information via a text message to the 112 and 999 service in the UK. Accuracy is within a radius of 50 meters or less for most calls.
The UK, Belgium, Estonia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Sweden, and the state of Lower Austria have already implemented the service, with 10 other countries looking to deploy it before the end of 2017.
The organization made the call for Apple to implement Advanced Mobile Location (AML) technology on Thursday. The group claims that it has tried to directly contact Apple regarding the matter, and has had no success.
The group does note that the Apple Watch can tell a phone to send the wearer's location to a specified contact. However, the group wants the functionality extended to the iPhone itself, and the data send to emergency services and rescuers.
"Recent news about the 'panic command' on iPhones, including a location function, is also a step in the right direction," said EENA in a statement. "But it is not sufficient: accurate location information should be sent during all emergency calls."
AML is open source, and any smartphone manufacturer or operating system provide can integrate it. Google has done so with Android, starting with Gingerbread -- and calls it Emergency Location Service.
Not all Android phones are compatible with the technology, however. Samsung, for instance, doesn't support the feature across its entire line of smartphones, but does in its flagship Galaxy S8.
When an emergency call is made with a smartphone where AML is enabled, the phone establishes its position and sends this information via a text message to the 112 and 999 service in the UK. Accuracy is within a radius of 50 meters or less for most calls.
The UK, Belgium, Estonia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Sweden, and the state of Lower Austria have already implemented the service, with 10 other countries looking to deploy it before the end of 2017.
Comments
The question is will Apple take the step and integrate it into the iPhone? It makes sense to me but I know nothing.
Open saurce (format) and vulnerability in this case have nothing to do with each other!
The format of the message - is open source. Basically, the specification on the format of your location. Put in easier terms, e.g. date format: dd-mm-yyyy or ddd-mmm-yy are two different formats. You should send the data in only one of these formats.
Wehether it is dd-mm-yyyy or ddd-mmm-yy - there is no volnurability involved.
It's nice that a NGO is trying to do something but it's not an official EU standard...partly because the EU wants (or wanted) to require that Galileo be used for E112 while in US E911 is tech agnostic and has performance requirements that must be met by certain dates by handset and network operators.
Maybe AML is open source. Maybe it's not:
Intellectual Property Rights
IPRs essential or potentially essential to the present document may have been declared to ETSI. The information pertaining to these essential IPRs, if any, is publicly available for ETSI members and non-members, and can be found in ETSI SR 000 314: "Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs); Essential, or potentially Essential, IPRs notified to ETSI in respect of ETSI standards", which is available from the ETSI Secretariat. Latest updates are available on the ETSI Web server (https://ipr.etsi.org/).
Pursuant to the ETSI IPR Policy, no investigation, including IPR searches, has been carried out by ETSI. No guarantee can be given as to the existence of other IPRs not referenced in ETSI SR 000 314 (or the updates on the ETSI Web server) which are, or may be, or may become, essential to the present document.
That being said this particular function looks reasonable, as long as Apple can do it securely I would support it.
difficult to say. Good can be used for evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1
But none are right.
If the code is newish and everyone who touches it truly understand how the many parts interact together which is easier if the code doesn't have too many legacy dependencies that no one wants to touch, that may be the case.
But, in cases were it is a sprawling mess of disparate code, which is the case in many large open source that have been running for more than a decade, security is certainly not improved measurably.
In theory Open source has more eyes,
but those eyes are more interested in developing shiny things than plowing through tons of poorly designed and documented legacy code.
Bugs have stayed hidden in old Open Source libs, even very popular and critical ones like OpenSSH for many years.
Having a company actually responsible if something happen, legally, financially and reputation wise, makes the difference in those cases.
The bad security in companies happens for the same reason than in open source software, nobody wants to pay for a old program; the client wants the new stuff.
So, companies have to take profits from their new stuff and plow them into legacy code that the client won't care about until something real bad occurs.
So, for the company, it is a numbers game; how much money, reputation and all is delaying the fix worth.
For companies sitting on loads of cash like Apple, it is obviously not worth the risk of reputation hit to not fix things, but for companies with a very low profitability it may be.
People that buy products from those thin margin companies unconsciously make the same tradeoff : security vs paying more.
We'll talk again when America accepts the internationally recognised dd(d)-mm(m)-(yy)yy format instead of it's inane mm(m)-dd(d)-(yy)yy format
Also, do you guys call them Zed Zed Top?
Yes, because in the English language you would totally say, “Today is tenth March, twenty seventeen.”
Of course every country had before the arrival of GSM a emergency code (911 in the US, 100 in a lot of other countries). There is nothing wrong with it, but these are national numbers. With the arrival of mobile phones with roaming functionality, a national solution was not suffcient, and hence the 112 number
911 is better for mobile phones as butt dialing 911 is less likely than butt dialing 112 given the separation between the 9 and 1. Avoiding false positives is why the very first emergency number was 999 and not 111. Wet tree limbs could tap out 111 in a storm back in the day with unshielded copper lines.
America might like to think that their version of English is the closest to colonial English but truthfully there is no such thing. The reason British English uses "colour" instead of "color" has to do with the fact that much of the words in English are taken from French and Spanish as a result of conquests. So by dropping these letters America actually makes themselves further from colonial English than modern British English. Also English is a constantly changing language so there literally is no right or wrong English. English itself is such a mongrel language that to believe in a standardised English is a bit of a misbelief. I mean you've got a Germanic language using words from French, Spanish, Hindi/Gujurati/etc, Latin, Greek, Mandarin, African, and basically any other language that England came into contact with with their own conquests that you can't actually say English has a standard. Even within England there are different forms of English and different ways of using words that getting pedantic about grammar and spelling is a fool's errand. Hell, we still use in some form words that were made up by William Shakespeare so English literally contains made up words and people get all up in arms about how to properly use them? Fool's Errand indeed.