California fires: smart speakers and emergency alerts

Mon Oct 16 02:52:06 UTC 2017

Someone do a kickstarter already. I'll contribute.  ;)

-A

On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Oct 2017, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 18:50:51 -0700, Joe Hamelin said:
>>>
>>> I would think that Amazon knows where my Echo is since it's the same IP
>>> that I order (way too much crap) from.
>>
>> It knows the usual delivery address.  That's not necessarily the same
>> thing.
>>
>
> First, need to figure out if any smart speaker manufacturers have any plans
> to add emergency alerts to their product. Only need to solve the other
> problems if they do, otherwise it doesn't matter.
>
>
> While VOIP phones needed exact addresses for 9-1-1 purposes, emergency
> alerts are rarely as specific as a city or county.  An exact
> longitude/latitude would be nice to have, but probably not necessary for
> most emergency alerts. All the smart speakers ask for the user's location,
> at least a zip code, during the installation. And they seem to use the
> typical advertising network IP address geolocation.
>
> It would be creepy if an emergency alert was too targetted.  It may be
> better to keep it larger than a mile radius, rather than a single house.