True, but (depending on the size of the cell) it’s still a difference between “our target is somewhere in that borough surrounded by 100k other people” and “he/she must be standing on this specific corner, let’s cross reference with CCTV to be sure.”
Baby steps.
Regulation now forced the devlopment for the OS of every smartphone to react to remotely defined events.
They require turning on (and off) GPS and WifI to switched on.
The next iteration of the standard (prediction!!!) will require the microphone (and camera because why not) to be activated as well, because of course the poor victim in need of emergency assistance may not be able to do that themselves. (This is already present in car “infotainment” systems.)
And while we’re at it, why not send any available health data of smartwatches and associated apps? They can only be beneficial in a medical emergency right?
Oh, and we may need to notify next of kin, lets send the phonebook along, surely one of the numbers will be next of kin…
Oh yeah, that kind of data doesn’t fit in an SMS message. If only AML specified transferring of data over HTTP…
Officials in Brussels make EU citizens just the numbers they want to know everything about, they want to take away their privacy so they can guide them and lead them where they need to go.
I prefer personal responsibility, I want to decide for myself to whom I will provide my personal data, whether I will call an ambulance and by whom I will do it. I do not want an official from Brussels to decide for me.
Ha ha ha, Thank you @nephros. Short. Precise. Funny said. So correct.
So close to the actual ambient atmosphere.
All this stinks, really. EDIT: Clarification: this ambient “control atmospere” stinks. Nothing else, not Jolla, not you, not this thread
I hope you are aware that people, especially people in distress, are generally not very informed of, or capable of informing others of, their location, and this kind of features are something that, any emergency worker agrees, save lives.
Operators are already obliged by law to keep records of communications data, actually they are paid to do so (old news). There are clear rules how the data will be stored and access to that data needs a very specific and limited permission.
In case of emergency I do not mind share some data that might save my life.
The main question with AML is then who remotely can instantiate the collection of data …
It actually does according to Advanced Mobile Location - Wikipedia
so yeah, modified ofono might not be enough to ‘opt-out’, shame any testing of what exactly gets triggered/executed/called has to be done in a faraday cage, maybe jolla could give us some more info on the implementation so people who want to hack it out don’t lose the ability to call 112 due to crashes, that’s not forbidden by EU I hope, my understanding is they cannot provide a switch in the settings, but community patches should be enough
they could provide a dbus filtering functionality. Let’s say a firewall for dbus. This way we could implement blocking on our own
I suspect the medium to long term solution for this and similar issues is: hardware switches.
Would be a great application for the good old “other half” of Jolla 1. Librem 5 has it (but not for GPS).
Hmmm, remove dbus access to that service through SailJail?
Hoist them by their own petard (to quote the Bard)?
I find it quite sensible that you want as much location information of someone who calls an emergency number. What i dont get, is why that must be invisible. What do we need to do, to get notifications when this happens? Just listen to the dbus?
Of course emergency calls are useful and save lives.
But we should be able to be informed/disable these functions (and enable them easily).
At least this is a clear solution.
Are they more efficient than virtual switches/buttons in a GUI?
If one is not SURE they are connected to the components power supply, they can also be software bypassed.
The shematics must be verified and the application of the schematics must be verified on the motherboard.
I guess the culprit is, how do you make sure it wont be used otherwise?
Meaning, can we make sure, now that there is an open api on dbus, that it won’t be used unintentionally?
If it can then it will. Like the Amazon Ring that was supposed to be an innocent doorbell with a camera to record when your neighbor’s dog leaves a poo on your doormat, but turned out to be “the largest surveillance network the US has ever seen” with “the police now having access to videos from millions of privately owned home security cameras without any warrant and without the owner even knowing”.
I guess one could always force the DBUS permissions?
A notification would be nice… but many reactions here are really quite out of proportion.
Not one technical argument to why/how this could be abused, nor be worse than anything else.
The intended functionality really is a feature in the true meaning of the word.
No question about it. But it really doesn’t contradict having the option to turn it off if/when one wants to. Of course, with all the measures to assure that less tech-savvy people don’t do it unconsciously/mistakenly.
On a device with SFOS 4.3 without a SIM card, I called the emergency number 112, the connection was established and the entry “112 Emerg.Link” was created in the call history. I expect the same with the sent emergency SMS. The notification of the sent SMS as well as its text in the SMS history is the minimum that I expect by implementing AML. Also the ability to disable/enable AML in the GUI.
Because a cell operator can track you over time, but an emergency call is a short timeframe event. As such using all positioning methods will be more accurate. At least in Germany your network operator is already required to store what cell ids you used over the last 3 months. AML is not needed for government tracking, but for emergencies it is very useful.