What scare you? That by calling 911 you allow them to see and hear what you do? It's easy to extrapolate and use the "slippery slope" argument but that doesn't make sense here.
It's an emergency, you are calling an emergency line. That line should have priority access to information while you are calling for help.
Don't want any of that?... Well I guess don't call the emergency line... or whatever...
There are valid reasons to call the emergency line when you are not the one experiencing the emergency, and thus you don't wish your privacy to be compromised.
I'm reminded a bit of the sanctuary city debate. Sanctuary cities are doing their best to let anyone call for help without worrying about whether immigration will be the first responders.
Anyway, I think there's some excessive paranoia in this discussion, but there is nonetheless a kernel of a valid point.
In fact the only times I ever called 911 I was calling for someone else, and I wanted my identity protected. If 911 would have broadcasted my identity I would not have called.
How can I be sure that the underlying mechanism doesn't have a back door that allows anyone with access to track me all the time?
Your argument is very similar to the argument advanced by the government for key escrow and other backdoors in encryption systems: this mechanism will only be used with proper legal safeguards to catch "bad guys". Don't you want that?
How can you be sure your phone doesn’t have such a back door *now?
I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.
> How can you be sure your phone doesn’t have such a back door *now?
I can't.
> I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.
I didn't say that it's completely unacceptable. What I said was that talking about expanding this kind of data sharing is if there were a consensus that only good things could result scares me.
The reason I'm OK with my cell phone today is that the default assumption today is that my location is private, or at least under my control. There could be a back door, but that is a risk I'm willing to take.
What scares me is that we seem to be oozing slowly towards bringing up a whole generation who have never known privacy, and so have no idea what its value is.
I believe you are assuming that this feature would let the government request your geolocation on demand, but I don't think this is what they are actually suggesting: the idea is to make your phone automatically send your current coordinate after you make a call to 911.
That's the feature described in the original article. But the comment I was responding to advocates expanding that capability without any specified limits (except, perhaps, that it be limited to "emergency" situations, but "emergency" is a very malleable word).
I'm pretty sure they were describing a system where that additional information would be sent when calling 911, not that it could be activated remotely on command.
Yes. That's why 1) the story you linked to describes how users are prompted for consent and 2) the leakage of this data is sufficiently scandalous to be newsworthy.
You should give me spare keys to your car, in case you can't find your current pair. It's okay if you're uncomfortable with that, because I might have already made a copy without your knowledge, so you should give me a copy anyway.
I don't understand this analogy. I'm not giving keys to anything, I'm just having my phone do some more stuff when I call 911. It's like saying I should have the ability to give you the keys to my car (which, I do!) or I should have the ability to make a video call (ditto).
It's an emergency, you are calling an emergency line. That line should have priority access to information while you are calling for help.
Don't want any of that?... Well I guess don't call the emergency line... or whatever...