However, you COULD say it's sort of 'Snapmaps for Emergencies' -- except with much better security (i.e. you won't summon a stranger who might mean you harm).Here's a snippet from the whitepaper that addresses your questions:
Less than half of the world has 9-1-1, a government centralized emergency response system. Invented in 1968 for a world of landlines, it has not advanced significantly.
John Oliver, Last Week Tonight: “9-1-1 Sucks” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs
Emergency services, particularly in remote areas suffer from these problems:
● Antiquated: 9-1-1 operators do not know your location 90% of the time if you call from a mobile device. (See 9-1-1’s Deadly Flaw in USA Today2).
● Congested: In March 2017, 9-1-1 was completely unavailable nationwide3 on AT&T mobile. In that same month, a child died4 because a caregiver was put on 9-1-1 hold for half an hour.
○ Here is an blog post5 with more details.
● Expensive: In Africa, the largest employer on the continent now is private security. The rich can pay
for safety ... but the poor can't pay for it and they're left unprotected. Guardium can put security within
reach of the poor for the first time.
● Corruption: In India, it is common for victims of sexual assault to be assaulted yet again by the very
police they call to for help. The solution is clearly not ‘more police’.
● Lawlessness: In his 2015 TED Talk6, Gary Haughan argues that the number one cause of poverty
worldwide is not a lack of food or water, but lawlessness, which is a direct consequence there being no adequate protection grid. He demonstrates this with the example of a 12-year-old girl named Griselda:
“... perhaps the most powerful thing that Griselda and her family can do to get Griselda and her family out of poverty is to make sure that she goes to school. The experts call this the Girl Effect. But when we met Griselda, she wasn't going to school. In fact, she was rarely ever leaving her home.
Days before we met her, while she was walking home from church with her family, in broad daylight, men ... just snatched her off the street, and violently raped her. See, Griselda had every opportunity to go to school, it just wasn't safe for her to get there ... Around the world .... victims of the everyday violence of domestic abuse and sexual violence ... account for more death and disability than malaria, than car accidents, than war combined. The truth is, the poor of our world are trapped in whole systems of violence.”
Problems of Centralization
1) Proximity of help: Emergency services are dispatched through a central switchboard, and local resources are routed to the scene of the emergency. Emergency resources may have a long distance to travel, especially for people in remote areas. In many emergencies including sudden medical crisis or violent crime, this is an unacceptable time delay.
2) Location of Emergency: Emergency responders need a detailed explanation of the location of the emergency, in many cases this location is not automatically available through the device GPS when calling a traditional 9-1-1 service
3) Scalability: Centralization reduces scalability. In disasters such as recent hurricanes Irma and Harvey, emergency response was swamped with calls and those calling would often be faced with a busy signal. During hurricane Irma, CNN announced that 9-1-1 calls would simply go unanswered in Florida for the duration of the storm. The inherent centralization of current emergency response limits scalability.
4) Distribution: Four billion people on earth have no access to 9-1-1 services.
5) Knowledge of responder: In many cases, first responders are entering into situations where their
knowledge may be extremely limited. This may limit their ability to provide appropriate care.
6) User Interface: Typically emergency response is handled through a 9-1-1 phone call. In cases where the
person cannot speak (for example if they are having a stroke), they will be unable to summon help. For those conditions where the person in crisis has foreknowledge of a possible problem (a person on a heart pacemaker, or someone with life threatening allergies, etc), creating a “panic button” that doesn’t require a detailed phone conversation can be a life saver.
Worse yet is the condition of the four billion people on earth who have no access at all to 9-1-1 emergency services.
The widespread availability of smartphones provides a precondition for solving this problem, and the emergence of ride-sharing services like Uber provide a model of user interaction where distributed providers and consumers can interact and create a multi-sided marketplace for transportation.
But the provision of worldwide emergency services is not only beyond the scope of any individual government, but also beyond the scope of a traditional corporation like an Uber. An inherent part of the problem is the creation of a new organizational system for delivering protocol-based decentralized marketplaces.
