Wall Street Journal – by RYAN KNUTSON
Amid all the privacy concerns about cellphone tracking, one important group is arguing that location data isn’t precise enough: emergency responders.
Police and others say 911 dispatchers are having trouble sending help to callers who use cellphones. The reason: unlike a landline, cellphones provide just a rough estimate—with a possible radius of a few hundred yards—of the caller’s location.
Data released this summer renewed attention to the problem and set off a debate over the adequacy of the tracking data that cellphone carriers share with emergency dispatchers.
“The location of the caller is the most important thing,” said Eric Parry, who oversees 911 calling technology used in Utah. “If I have a ‘what,’ that helps me know what I need to send. If I don’t have a ‘where,’ then the ‘what’ doesn’t help me in the least.”
The proliferation of cellphones has been both a blessing and a headache for law-enforcement officers and other emergency responders. More people with cellphones means it is easier than ever to make a quick call for help.
But if a caller can’t speak or isn’t familiar with his or her location, cellphones make it harder to find them, particularly if they are indoors. Around 38% of households have ditched landlines and rely solely on cellphones, according the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more people are using them for 911 calls. In California alone, 75% of 911 calls placed in the state during a recent 18-month period were made using cellphones.
In reaction to the shift, 911 dispatchers in recent years have begun asking callers first where they are, rather than the nature of their emergency.
The tracking technology used by wireless carriers is imperfect, and a recent shift has added new complications. Older technology was less accurate but provided location data immediately. Now, cellphone location data typically gets to 911 dispatchers in two stages. It initially provides the location of the cell tower being used by the phone, but such towers can cover wide areas that overlap buildings in cities.
The second stage comes from GPS technology, which is much more accurate outdoors, but takes roughly 15 to 30 seconds before it is available to dispatchers, a big delay given that many 911 operators try to dispatch responders within 60 seconds.
“Right now, there is no high-yield, high-accuracy, zero latency 911 technologies out there,” said Eric Hagerson, senior regulatory affairs manager at T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS +0.98%“There are tradeoffs.”
It isn’t clear whether the tracking information is the same as what is collected in call “metadata” that has been at the center of federal surveillance programs, such as phone numbers people dialed and the location from which they were calling. But it isn’t the same technology used by smartphone apps such as Google Inc. GOOG -0.43% ‘s Google Maps, which rely partly on Wi-Fi hotspots they have mapped to help determine a phone’s location.
About two years ago, Danita Crombach noticed that an increasing number of 911 calls coming into her dispatch center in Ventura County, Calif., lacked detailed information about the caller’s location.
This summer, Ms. Crombach examined a little known database of 911 calls in five jurisdictions across California and found the situation was widespread. Roughly 55% of the 911 calls placed using a cellphone in California during March included only information about the location of the cell tower transmitting the call, with a radius that could extend for miles, and not the caller’s actual whereabouts.
Ms. Crombach’s report raised alarms in the public-safety sector, and regulators asked 911 centers across the country to examine similar data. Agencies across seven states now have done so, and the data show that in some places as many as two-thirds of wireless calls end without dispatchers having received specific location, or “phase II,” data.
Wireless carriers say they are providing accurate phase II data more than 90% of the time, but dispatchers aren’t refreshing their systems during each call to access the updated data, which is available only after a lag of about 30 seconds because of the recent change in technology.
“This is not some indication of a major problem,” said Donald Brittingham, vice president of public safety policy at Verizon Communications Inc. VZ -0.34% “There may be some time issues associated with it, but we’re also improving in that area.”
Carriers say location data has actually become more accurate in the past several years, as more of them have switched to GPS-based technology that can locate callers within around 50 meters, or about 55 yards. With older technology, it could be within 300 meters.
Even so, location accuracy is “nowhere near where the public needs it to be,” said Steve Souder, who runs a 911 call center in Fairfax County, Va.
In 2009, Julius Genachowski, then head of the Federal Communications Commission, visited Mr. Souder’s call center to get a better understanding of how the 911 system worked. When he called 911 from the dispatch center using his cellphone, the system said Mr. Genachowski was located inside a Costco store, about a quarter of a mile away, near the meat section. After waiting for the system to refresh with more accurate information, the dispatcher’s computer said he was closer to the store’s pizza and hotdog vendors.
Finding callers indoors where GPS signals aren’t as strong is a particular weakness of the current system. “We fully acknowledge that indoor is not going to be as accurate,” Verizon’s Mr. Brittingham said. But the carrier is “working hard to make sure that we’re doing the best we can to keep the improvements moving along.”
Scott Freitag, who runs a 911 call center in Salt Lake City, estimates that the percentage of callers who aren’t able to say where they are is less than 5%. But with more than half a million 911 calls to his call center each year, “We lose people, because we can’t find them fast enough,” he said.
Questions about 911 tracking ability gained national attention a few years ago, after 21-year-old Denise Amber Lee was kidnapped outside her home in southern Florida and later found murdered, despite having managed to make a nearly six-minute call to 911 from the back of her kidnapper’s vehicle.
Her husband, Nathan Lee, has spent the past five years arguing for improved accuracy in fixing the location of 911 calls made using cellphones. “It’s extremely important,” he said.
In November, one of Ms. Crombach’s counterparts at a nearby call center received a 911 call from a woman in Oxnard, Calif., just after 7 a.m. Call takers couldn’t understand what she was saying because she was tied up and gagged. Yet emergency responders arrived within three minutes.
“The good news is she was calling from a landline phone,” Ms. Crombach said.
Write to Ryan Knutson at ryan.knutson@wsj.com
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