"Through this incident I've learned people should instead contact their home insurance company and get an approved list of vendors to choose from."

I don't agree with this. Never contact your insurance company unless you plan on filing a claim, just asking for this list is equivalent to a claim.

If you have a valid claim, your insurance can't force you to use a list of vendors. You can choose any vendor you want to. The vendors work/cost must be appropriate.

This can be a sleazy industry. Servpro is the big corporate side, but the New York Times reported a few years ago about actual criminal intimidation in the industry (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/nyregion/fire-truck-chase...)

So if I understand this correctly, this company gets certain information about 911 calls, and then sells it to third parties?

I wonder how much information they get, because this could get a lot darker. Imagine if calls to the police reporting domestic violence resulted in advertising material from divorce lawyers. (A domestic violence victim might well want a divorce lawyer, but unsolicited material showing up in their mailbox may put them at risk by enraging their already-violent spouse.)

I highly doubt Matt Haughey is correct about pulsepoint being the source of this information. The source was almost certainly services that scan the public radio broadcast of emergency communications. As a first correction, pulsepoint isn’t a company. It is a nonprofit. Obviously nonprofits can sell data, but it is clear Haughey didn’t go very deep in his research to get such a basic item wrong.

It seems like it would be very, very easy to make these Servpro salespeople unreasonably busy undertaking sales calls that do not have a worthwhile rate of return.

> That's a sleazy business model but it's not illegal

I feel bad for folks who live in countries without a GDPR equivalent.

The ICO's guidance says "You can rely on legitimate interests for marketing activities if you can show that how you use people’s data is proportionate, has a minimal privacy impact, and people would not be surprised or likely to object"

I refuse to believe people would not be surprised or likely to object to this sort of marketing. It's creepy and invasive, and preying on people who may have lost their possessions or the house they've lived in for decades. I would be completely outraged if I received a visit of this nature after making a call to the _emergency services_. That's completely insane!

Without being able to rely on legitimate interests, there would not be an opportunity for data to be legally shared and processed in this way. None of the other lawful bases would apply, in my view.

“ 911 calls are mostly public information since they involve public services who all need to communicate with one another.” Umm not in Europe. First of all Tetra/Dimetra calls are E2E encrypted (with some famous vulnerabilities) then there’s privacy laws etc. It’s surprising that in the US where you have the right to protect your home and privacy even with lethal means, the same measures don’t extend cybernetically.

Thank you for sharing. I particularly enjoyed the call out where you highlight what you learned from the incident. Took the post from fear-brain to information-brain for me (don't mind my curiosity haha).

I had a much less intrusive incident but equally "alarming" ;). The apartment I live in has hard wired smoke/carbon monoxide alarms (with backup battery). One night, ~2am 1 of them starts beeping that the battery is dead. I confirm the breaker didn't flip or anything...finally decided to complete disassemble it and get some sleep. 4 of these in the apartment. Head hits the pillow and a second one goes off! Take all 4 down and live dangerously for an evening.

In the morning I do my research - turns out these things just start doing that after 10 years. "Get a new one!" it peeps incessantly.

Shame me please - as I bought replacements. I'll save this post for myself in 10 years so at least I can be the one to say "I told you so".

ServPro is actually one of the less bad ones. BELFOR are even pushier, and take advantage of the fact that building owners and building renters tend to have different priorities in fire cases to gain unlawful access to damaged units. I had Belfor people in my smoke-damaged home without my knowledge constantly, and they made off with a bit of valuable stuff during that unsupervised time. I was renting back then, and of course my say meant nothing to these people.

Very scummy industry overall, everyone we interacted with in the wake of that fire left a bad taste in our mouths. ServPro was the original company on the job before Belfor somehow took the contract from em, and they were at least professional and understanding of the awful circumstance people were in.

If my heater goes out, while its below freezing outside, and a salesman offering to fix it shows up at my door two hours later, whether or not its sleezy/ethically wrong is entirely dependent on how much they're charging for their services. I understand the angle that it could be interpreted as exploiting someone in a tough spot, but that's a no-more-valid interpretation than helping someone out of a dire, potentially life-threatening situation; it just comes down to how much they're charging.

The angle that they're finding clients by ambulance chasing public 911 records is interesting, but ethically neutral.

It is repugnant that this is able to happen at all. To the extent that the government contracts with a third party, the legal requirements should be none of the data is shared without a warrant.

Something similar happened to me. A piece of cardboard packing material fell in to the furnace when they were installing it, and it just sat on top of the heat exchanger slowly carbonizing until one day it decided to start smoking. The firefighters spotted the source right away with an IR camera and extinguished it with a shot of CO2, then the furnace guy came and got it out.

This sorta thing could happen without the API integration, police radio calls happen on the public radio waves, anyone can listen and go to the address too. If the police encrypt their radio, they usually rebroadcast with a delay, in the interest of transparency, so it’s still possible.

Servpro charged me $35,000 for work they never completed, then did $30,000 of damage to my house, then threatened to sue me

Never, ever under any circumstances

Things like this are pretty much why I don't answer my front door anymore unless I'm expecting someone. Too many ads.

I happened to be seated behind some people on an aircraft who were in the business of doing these sales pitches and discussing it without shame. But in their case, they were targeting people who called the police regarding property crime, and then trying to sell them alarm systems.

Nothing they said was illegal, but it felt immoral and like they were taking advantage of people in vulnerable situations. Although I feel like we aren't meant to discuss morality when there is money to be made, if it is capitalism and business, then anything and everything is fair game -- even this.

This reminds me of the recent "service" that somehow front-runs police reports and tries to sell them to car accident victims who are motivated to get their insurance claim going.

That said, I don't think the API is to blame here. You could accomplish the same thing by listening to the FD on a scanner and converting the voice to text.

I recently got my car totaled by a distracted driver. Somehow, within the week, I had 4 different law firms cold-call me and ask if I needed representation. Some were more unscrupulous than others, but I got pretty livid that something or someone shared my information with them.

Even worse, after I bought a new vehicle I've received 4+ "extended warranty" junk mail letters that look very official. It comes off as very predatory and leaves a generally bad taste in my mouth with how bad data protections are.

> 911 calls are mostly public information since they involve public services who all need to communicate with one another

What? No...

the European mind can not comprehend this high level of capitalism

Meta but why are there seemingly random full-size images inserted every few paragraphs in the article?

> It’s surprising that in the US where you have the right to protect your home and privacy even with lethal means

What do you mean by protect your privacy (with lethal means)? You certainly do not have a right to lethally protect your privacy from a neighbor pointing a camera at your house, or similar, for example. You do have a right to protect yourself and your property using lethal means in my state (Texas). But they most certainly had better be both clearly on/in your property and an active threat to your personhood/possessions(property)--extra points for it being nighttime and/or you are female. I am not sure how protecting your physical things or self from an imminent threat is suppose to translate to a space where boundaries and jurisdiction are not as clear cut as your physical self/home.

*Had to take a class (for a concealed carry permit) that laid out in no uncertain terms when the use of lethal force is protected. And it is not as wanton & broad as people like to make it out to be.

I'd guess most municipalities in the US still use unencrypted analog radio, so all you need is a guy with a scanner. You don't even need a scanner where I live, they have a live feed available on the county website. When we had a house fire about 20 years ago, guys showed up to sell "board up" and restoration services before the fire trucks had left. It's a sleazy business. We went with the restoration company our insurance co. recommended, they were clear we could go with whoever we wanted but their preferred one guaranteed the insurance payout would fully cover the work. They were fine to work with and did a good job. There are also companies (at least in California where we lived at the time) that offer to take a cut of your payout to catalog your stuff and negotiate a claim with your insurance company. They make grand promises and seemed super sketchy.

> It’s surprising that in the US where you have the right to protect your home and privacy even with lethal means, the same measures don’t extend cybernetically.

Americans do have a constitutionally protected right to use cryptography. You don't have the right to force someone else to use it.

It's about having transparency. If the public can't monitor what 911 centers and police are doing, how can the public trust them?

that’s because those lethal means have been written into the amendments and people have been brainwashed by the NRA to care about those amendments, especially the one to bear arms.

This lethal defense thing has been all about pushing more and more guns on people for financial profit, if there was a way to sell internet guns you have to use to shield your privacy, they would, their number 1. focus is money, everything else is number 2.

Fixed lifetime suggests ionization rather than optical sensor? If so yeah, they have a specific lifetime, it's just physics. There's an Americium-241 source, a tiny, tiny amount of radioctive material in a sensor which is decaying constantly, and once it has decayed a certain amount too bad, buy a new smoke detector.

There are arguments for or against both types, but ultimately "Make sure you replace it every ten years" doesn't feel like a huge problem. If you really can't do that, then the optical sensors don't have this property - they will still need new batteries, but of course you can just swap those out on a schedule when it suits you, they're typically a cheap household 9volt battery (yes even for a mains smoke alarm, fires don't magically stop when the power goes out)

10 years, you're lucky, one of mine just started doing it after 4 years, it comes with a 5 year guarantee but of course I don't have the receipt and even if I did I don't have the will to fight for a replacement. I think these new alarms are designed to fail early I've never had one fail before but after checking up on different makes and models they all seem to fail randomly.

I would love the wired ones to just have a built in super capacitor; enough to give it 5-10 min (minimum) runtime during a power outage. No Battery. ONLY alarm loudly for sensor detects possible smoke (known positive detection), very softly for sensor broken (failed self test).

Two in the same night? I wouldn't have been so quick to dismiss it as "it just happens". Scary.

same thing happened to me at about 3 am one morning. I'm thinking the house is burning down. Eventually find out there is no fire. Get the ladder, take down the smoke alarm. Go to remove the battery. On the back it says "non replaceable battery, unit can not be serviced". So sledge hammer + trash can it is!

The next day I tell my landlord I destroyed the thing and need a new one. His reply was that I had vandalized his property.