MADRID, June 23 (Portaltik/EP) –

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

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

This feature is not exclusive to phones manufactured by Google, but 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 as demonstrated by police forces in the UK and EENA.

Google, for its part, has indicated that manufacturers of Android terminals have information on how to disable this function in order to prevent more cases like those reported by this organization from happening.

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

With this, this OEM has stepped up “will launch the update Please address this issue immediately” and users who continue to experience this issue with Emergency SOS should disable it until implemented.

PROBLEM ALSO ON IOS

Keep in mind that this Android function is not the only one causing fake emergency calls, as this issue was also identified in the operating system developed by Apple, iOS.

Crash detection is integrated into several models iPhone 14 with Latest version of iOS And apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) and Apple Watch Ultra, also run the latest version of Apple’s operating system. This is also the default function.

If the user does sudden movement And as long as it hasn’t been deactivated beforehand, this help system automatically places calls to emergency services so users can receive the help they need.

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

It’s not the first time something similar has happened, since a similar error was detected in this same application iPhone with Crash Detection, which generates a series of distress calls by confusing a roller coaster motion with a traffic accident.