>"Google says the system is supposed to be supplementary and is not a replacement for national systems."
Before immediately going into the classic "but SOME people say otherwise!"
That said, I think the more basic problem I have with this article in terms of education of the reading public is the failure to touch on the false-postive vs false-negative tradeoff that is so core to tuning warning algorithms. It's easy to cherry pick with 20/20 hindsight after the fact and it feels clear when a warning that might have saved lives isn't sent. But in reality, constant warnings can be as bad as no warning because they have the same basic effect of people "not getting the message". The mechanism (people tuning warnings out, boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome) of course differs, but the end result is the same. And outcomes should be the focus when it comes to public health and security. I think this is a super important thing for reporting to acknowledge, because without at least a somewhat educated public understanding there is a systemic incentive by a lot of governments and organizations to lean into false-positives due to being better at ass covering and blame reversal. They can say "well, we warned you, and if we were wrong other times that was just being cautious, and it's YOUR fault that YOU turned off the warnings!" If Google had set off the alert for that quake, but had also set off the alert for lots of smaller quakes previously, even if the end result was the same number of deaths I suspect this article would not have been written. Or, as you say, simply not trying in the first place and keeping their virtual heads down.
Walking the fine line of balance in mass scale public safety is just very, very hard. And to achieve a systemic approach to safety that really maximizes good outcomes takes a good faith, no fault sort of environment (short of actual malice) vs finger pointing. We can see that play out in areas of life like commercial aviation which has been incredibly successful at reducing fatal accidents over the decades.
> After the earthquake Google's researchers changed the algorithm, and simulated the first earthquake again.
> This time, the system generated 10 million Take Action alerts to those at most risk – and a further 67 million Be Aware alerts to those living further away from the epicentre.
So, basically, Google learned from the data, improved the algorithm, and they are blamed for not having done that before the earthquake.
The headline makes it sound like Google had the good model before, and something went wrong in the notification system so nobody got the alert.
Median price of phone went from couple of hundred in Nokia era to a thousand or more today, justified by all the features including this one , meaning they certainly made money of providing all these value added services.
It’s no different from a fire or burglar alarm . Yes they are not substitutes for the police and fire departments .
However the alarm company cannot turn around and say you shouldn’t depend on us. The government shouldn’t depend/expect them to do anything for emergencies yes but buyers of their product can.
IF a company sold a product and advertised features for it, then it is a problem when said features don’t work especially when said features are designed around emergencies.
https://blog.google/products/android/earthquake-detection-an...
Completely changed my perspective
Countries and the general public shouldn't be relying on private technology firms to provide this service, nor should they be defunding the public agencies that provide it.
Like the internet is the merest speck on Human history and yet it is considered so ridiculously critical that people will make death threats when they have minor issues accessing it.
That's amazing. How incredibly encouraging for the future.
IMO this is the most interesting part: Postevent analysis revealed several limitations to the detection algorithms that have since been improved. First, the duration of monitoring has increased. At the time of the event, the algorithm only allowed updates to earthquake parameters for 10 s after first detection. The number of allowed updates was limited because there was a trade-off between more updates providing additional information for larger earthquakes and more updates introducing outlying single-epic data causing a large overalert. We now allow updates for 30 s and use other checks on the rate of variation in earthquake parameters before updating an alert. Second, there were a large number of noisy phones in the monitoring pool at the time of the Türkiye earthquakes. These high-noise phones triggered late, particularly after the P wave for the M 7.8 event, which had a slow start and complex rupture (31–34). The AEA system is now more selective about which phones are included in the monitoring pool. Individual phones determine their noise level when they become available for monitoring, and this noise level is factored into the detection algorithm. Third, many phones were receiving a BeAware alert and vibrating, which prevented them from triggering on the earthquake ground motion. The alerts now issued by Android EEW no longer cause phones that are detecting to vibrate.
But I wouldn’t have guessed that over 50,000 people were killed by that earthquake.
Why doesn’t Google invest in relay communications that doesn’t rely on a central server, like some on HN have done? One developer here had a really good implementation.
Not sure if Google is reinventing the wheel here?
"...sets off a loud alarm on a user's phone - overriding a Do Not Disturb setting - and covering their screen"
I'm already at war with my smartphone to make all the alerts stop buzzing and squelch the intrusive notifications (e.g. apps that think they're important, amber alerts that seem in most cases to be accidentally blanketed due to user-error, test alerts, false alarms, etc).
I'm fine if Google wants to experiment with it, and I even applaud the effort, but at the end of the day I want control of my device, thank you very much. That means this sort of thing should be opt-in, not foisted upon on me.
Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning
