What do you have on your phone to tell emergency services where you are accurately ?

[cakeorwine]

I know there is What3Words - although there have been cases of people mishearing words so they can't find the location.

I have 2 things on my phone - one is OS Locate - which gives an OS Grid reference.

e.g. Scafell Pike is NE215072

I also have an app that has a compass on it as well as the latitude and longitude indicator.

I think both these work without a mobile signal...

Never had to use it "in anger" but I hope they could be of use if I had to give a map reference to emergency services.

Just thinking about this in relation to previous news cases

What3Words

Never heard of this

If I was gone for any time my battery would die as my iPhone is pretty crap. Do location tools work when the phone is dead?

They show where you were when the phone died.

Good idea

What I would always advise is downloading a map of the local area to your phone before you set off. That gives you much more reliable ability to see where you are using GPS even if you don't have a 3G sign. It's the first thing I do on every holiday.

They show where you were when the phone died.

Thats something I guess

Yes. Used what3words on a hike when my mum had a fall. Needed a bit of a walk to get a signal but it worked and mountain rescue arrived soon and were able to administer first aid bring her to an ambulance.

I’ve always found the way we do location services in the U.K. during an emergency to be rather stupid. In the US, a cab driver can find my location down to literal metres. Call 999 when you don’t know your location and you’re in for a delayed response as they don’t have access to your mobile GPS / Galileo data.

As for the question, I’ve nothing to say additionally other than describe so maybe it is a good idea to get something?!

Certainly What3Words has been criticized in the past, though I guess it might perhaps be better than absolutely nothing..

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57156797

Interesting

If I told them I was at Grid reference NE215072 or at Latitude: 54° 27' 9.11" N
Longitude: -3° 12' 24.90" W, would they know where I was?

Well yes but if you didn’t know, they can’t locate you via your mobile location. Which is barmy considering other countries do it as standard and the US does it with commercial services like taxis.

edit: my spelling 😒

The person on the phone to you - no, probably not, but they'd get someone else to look that up while they carried on talking to you.

I think it’s a given that there’s scope for foul up in any system which actually relies on the user reading out info by voice to another party, be it a Grid ref, Lat/Long or What3Words.

An automated system which allows the emergency services or whoever to locate the phone user simply by locating the phone makes much more sense to my simple mind.

Sorry - a taxi company can get your location when you ring up because they have access to your mobile phone location if you ring them?

Well, no they can't actually immediately triangulate you via the phone signal - your phone signal bounces off a phone mast and not necessarily the nearest one depending on a number of factors.

The signal strength and direction can give an approximate location, but the more rural you are the less precise that location is. I've had officers searching a square mile of marshland based on the best data we could obtain.

Sometimes you get it this information in a few minutes, sometimes it takes hours to get it - depends on the phone operators.

I would assume US taxis have location data shared somehow - unless you have location switched on on your phone and permit someone to access that information, the police have to work with what they can get from the operators.

Authorisation is needed from the Control Room Inspector in order to triangulate the phone number for the location, for data protection reasons, otherwise rightly or wrongly it would be too intrusive for police to know the location of any caller to police

If what 3 words was any good there would be a button in the app that sent your location to the emergency services without having to call them.

I don't use it so I don't know if it has this feature.

DPs bike computer has a function where if it detects a crash an alarm goes off and if you don't cancel it in time it calls either your ICE number or I expect it can call 999. As it also has GPS tracking it will also be able to transmit his location.

What 3 words
I also have find my on my iPhone so my sons can find me

Oh and if you press button on the side of an iPhone x3 it emits a loud alarm and calls emergency services

X5