Comments on: 10 iPhone Apps You Haven’t Heard Of

By: Joseph

Joseph — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:14:40 +0000

Hi, ICE is mainly for paramedics. If you get sick or fall unconscious it is easy for the medical team to call your family or someone you know. This is a very good idea. If you go outand have a heart attack or something, it would be very stressful for your family to find you. To give you an example, I have a disability and am on medication and my family has knowledge of my condition. If I suddenly lost consciousness or became ill, I would ideally like my family to be contacted so the doctors could be informed as soon as it is practicable for my family to relay information about my health. Now, people on the comments section here are also forgetting that the UK health services encourages an ICE number, and apart from four or five people in the whole country who may have a malicious intent, it is very unlikely that the ICE number will be used for anything more dangerous than waking up a cantankerous parent from their slumber. I can’t believe the ridiculous paranoia of people on this forum. ICE is supposed to help famillies and people who may require emergency medical care. Where the hell does police, surveillance etc come into it? If someone loses their consciousness, why on earth would the paramedics look at random files on their phone? Go figure. ICE does not authorise anyone to look through unrelated files on your phone and if they did, without a VERY good reason, surely that would be an invasion of privacy, and they would cop hell. In any case, if you suddenly fall unconscious after a stroke, and you do have an iPhone in your pocket, it’s likelier someone will steal it than call someone you know. If you have more than one phone, it is best to carry either an insured device or your second best unit, since thieves always lurk in the shadows and won’t hesitate to take something valuable when you are vulnerable.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:04:38 +0000

Here ICE is mainly used in cases where the patient for whatever circumstance is unable to communicate. Even then they are required to contact the shift supervisor for approval prior to ICE lookup.

By: Christopher Price

Christopher Price — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:08:24 +0000

Chris, I don’t want to get into the politics of FISA, but it’s much more complicated than that. The government must still get a warrant if the communication is purely domestic, and that includes “pulling” info from a cell phone.

Now, if you’re calling people in the Middle East all day, your calls can be temporarily subjected to warrant-less wiretap, as a part of spying on foreign communication. Any prolonged observation (several days) still requires a FISA warrant.

Please continue discussion on FISA wiretapping in the PhoneNews.com Forums, thanks.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:43:11 +0000

In case you haven’t heard: Congress passed the wiretapping bill yesterday. I don’t think they will be needing warrants to search people’s phones anymore (in the U.S. anyway).

By: Christopher Price

Christopher Price — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:06:29 +0000

ICE is predominantly used in Europe, where they are trained to look for it. In the United States, it has been quite a bit hit-and-miss… mostly because major manufacturers have yet to adopt it (and the FCC has made no requirement for it). LG has taken the largest lead, and Verizon has integrated it into their standard UI.

The ICE app is useful though for situations where someone may be feeling sick, and want to hand off important information quickly. You are right though, it would be nice to see the app add a feature to quickly disable the passcode lock in an emergency…

… It would be even better if Apple let you have a static note page that could be accessed from the home screen. That page would allow you to list ICE info, in addition to contact info for a lost/stolen iPhone.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:44:49 +0000

I’m sorry, but I have been a Paramedic for 18 years and we have never been trained to look at phone for “ICE”. We never look through a phone of a patient. Police may do this later, but most likely this could be considered an invasion of privacy, and I bet a police office would need to be very careful because if they found anything incriminating could it be used or did they need a warrant.

I actually read an interesting article about ICE in a emergency magazine, and one thing they said is that you should be very careful if you do look for ICE on a phone, as in a terrorist activity it could be a setup. They could have done the first very small explosion to get everyone at the scene, and then one someone looks at the person’s phone and calls the ICE number that number is wired to a bigger device that kills all the rescue workers.

I just want people to make sure they don’t rely on something like this, and if people lock their phones like they should we couldn’t get to this information anyway.