Google will help Android phone manufacturers prevent fake emergency calls

June 23 (Portaltic/EP) –

Google has assured that it will offer mobile device manufacturers information and guidance on how to disable its SOS Emergencies application, which recently reported hundreds of automated or silent calls, according to UK police forces and the European Emergency Numbers Association (EENA, for its acronym in English).

Google SOS Emergencies is an app that launched on Android 12 Pixel phones that issues an automatic emergency call when is pressed five times or more the phone’s power button, as explained by Google in your Support page.

This feature is not exclusive to the phones that Google makes, but it requires original equipment manufacturers (known as OEMS) to also implement it in their terminals.

For this last reason, a wave of emergency calls generated automatically by this system has recently been detected and not related to an emergency event, as indicated by police forces in the United Kingdom and the EENA.

Google, for its part, has indicated that the manufacturers of Android terminals have at their disposal information on how to disable this functionality to prevent more cases such as those reported by these organizations from occurring.

“To help these manufacturers to avoid emergency calls unintentional on their devices, Android provides them with additional guidance and resources,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. collected by BBC.

With this, it has advanced that these OEMS “will roll out updates Please address this issue shortly” and that users who continue to experience this issue with Emergency SOS should disable it until it is deployed.

PROBLEM ALSO ON IOS

It should be remembered that this Android functionality is not the only one that causes false emergency calls, since this problem has also been identified in the operating system developed by Apple, iOS.

Accident detection is integrated into some models of iPhone 14 with the latest version of iOS and Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) and Apple Watch Ultra, also running the latest version of Apple’s operating system. It is also a default functionality.

In the event that users make sudden movements and as long as it has not been previously deactivated, this help system automatically makes calls to emergency services so that users can receive the help they need.

At the end of last year, the 911 Emergency Center of different towns in the state of Colorado (United States) notified that, due to an error in this feature, they had registered hundreds of automatic alerts from different ski slopes.

This was not the first time that something similar had happened, since a similar error was detected in this same iPhone application with Crash Detection, which generated a series of emergency calls by confusing the movements of a roller coaster with traffic accidents.