this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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I live in Turkey and know numerous folks who were in the quake, or had family members in the quake. No one got any sort of alert.
Weird flex, Google.
It's nice that an ad company lets us know when we might accidentally die but, yeah, not a first line of defense. Local government should be beating commercial sources to the punch every time vital information needs to go out.
I hope everyone you know is doing okay but I don't think Google is really flexing that the alert system didn't work. Tech isn't perfect but the system has worked with other earthquakes. If anything we can hope the tech gets better because this event will highlight gaps.
Personally I don't think they have any responsibility to build such a system, or even have it function properly. By "weird flex" I was specifically referring to the "We are confident that this system fired and sent alerts" line.
Obviously my view is anecdotal (especially the whole "No one got any sort of alert" part of my original comment), so take what I say with a grain of salt!
Is this something Google regularly does? Release alerts about earthquakes?
Is it specific to Turkey or global?
Idk... Tbh I am not sure what they aree talking about.
Here in Spain and I think applies to Europe aswell the government can sent alerts per region or globally for any reason , Android and iOS handle it but I wouldn't exactly call it a Google alert of course if Google fuck it up it wouldn't work on Android phones. That said until recently at least here it had been barely tested, recently they did tests and finally seems to work fine but initially some phones didn't receive anything, but as far as I know it was ISP provider issues, again not sure how the delivery is done so you get the alert
Okay, thanks. I got some quake alerts in Japan before, but I also thought that was a network message, not a specifically Google alert.
I'm just curious why Google is specifically taking the blame here, like if they took responsibility or announced intention to report on future quakes and then dropped the ball or something.
Google is not taking any blame. Google prepared an optional Earthquake alert system, it did not work, and they're claiming it did.
No one asked for such a system in the first place from them, and while it's nice they'd go about doing something like that in Earthquake prone parts of the world, if it doesn't work they probably shouldn't get up and start declaring "No no, it totally did work, dunno what those survivors are on about."
From the article (which you should read, it's quite short):
If you read between the lines of their 'earthquake system', it is obviously polling your phone on a very short and granular basis and pulling movement data, which is something no one seems to be talking about. This is the kind of data collection that pisses me off, and they get away with this by trying to pass this off as some sort of wonderful life saving system that I bet no one even knew they were contributing data to.
Gross, you have a point.
My Librem phone finally arrived (to a friend in the US), I guess I'm going to have to try using it the next time I'm there.
I think if you create an alarm service like this, you do have a certain responsibility, because people will start to rely on that.
Nah. Relying on an ad subsidized service to alert you of danger is a bad idea both for the end user and the local government.
There is a already an emergency alert system baked into every iPhone and Android device, the government is responsible for using it regardless of whether there is commercial service working in parallel to theirs.