Android’s Emergency SOS just gave a pixel owner my worst privacy nightmare – here is how to avoid similar embarrassment

A Reddit -User accidentally activated emergencies and shared a naked video of themselves with their emergency contacts
This embarrassing (and funny) story has made some people consider turning off emergency SOS on their Android phone
Instead, you can change your SOS settings to make it harder to enable or set it not to share video and audio

Emergency SOS features on our phones have been mentioned as being life-saving, but unintended activations can be life-shiny if you have an experience like an unhappy Reddit user who accidentally sent their 12 emergency contacts a naked video of themselves. Fortunately, you don’t have to turn off to set up to help you avoid the same embarrassment.

The test took place on the weekend when in an attempt to turn off their morning telephony alarm, they say that user assistance spetend668 accidentally activated emergencies – suspects by pressing their phone’s on / off button five times. The alarm became a swirling siren, and their phone screen warned them that it called 911 and issued information to their emergency contacts.

They shrinked to cancel emergencies, but picked up their phone without knowing that the feature is starting to collect a video that it then sends to all their emergency contacts. Combine this with the fact that the user says they are sleeping without clothes on and the result is that their contacts were sent a video of their friend completely naked.

If you want a good laugh, the full post on Reddit and the answers in the thread worth reading – especially to know that after the situation was explained that everyone involved also found the fun – but you may wonder what you can do to avoid finding yourself in a similar situation.

To change your emergencies

(Image Credit: Samsung)

Some obvious but not overly useful, suggestions would be to turn off emergencies, use another device like your alarm or always sleep with clothes on, but there are some emergencies you can change instead of helping you avoid disaster .

One is to set your phone to require a secondary action after pressing your on / off button five times before it goes into emergency mode, rather than being automatic. At Pixel, this requires you to touch and have an icon on your phone screen for a few seconds, while this on Samsung requires you to push up on the phone symbol on the screen as when answering a call.

Another option is to change what detailed emergency contacts receive. If you prefer, you can set it so that your device does not send audio recordings, pictures or video of your emergency for contacts. The disadvantage of turning off this is that these auto recordings make it easy to show and explain your situation without having to write a tailor -made message – so remember if you are thinking of turning it off.

A third option is to change who is on your emergency contact list so that you limit who receives your details and videos. All three of these settings can be fine-tuned in your setting app search after emergency situations and then change the settings in the emergency SOS and emergency submenus.

One last suggestion is to turn on your phone’s ability to turn off an alarm by simply telling it “stop”. This risks that your still half of the self -cutting of your alarm early, but because it is a hands -free approach, you risk accidentally entering your emergency. While it can be temperamental and if “stop” does not work, you will still have to take a more convenient approach to turn off the alarm.

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