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  • 2016-12-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Telling Siri to 'Charge My Phone to 100%' Summons Police (en)
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  • A common theme in crime and safety urban legends involves little-known tricks or codes enabling victims to surreptitiously contact help, such as the (false) rumor that entering one's PIN in reverse at an ATM will automatically summon police. These modern bits of folklore speak to our fears of situations wherein we are awake, aware, and have the ability to summon help but cannot do so because of the circumstances under which assistance is required. One rumor of this genre asserts that in threatening situations, iPhone users can ask the virtual assistant known as Siri to charge my phone to 100 percent as a furtive way of dialing 911 or summoning emergency services, a seemingly benign request that would seem innocent to whoever was threatening the holder of the iPhone. (Although, as with many secret code safety urban legends, the iPhone ploy would work only if the situation's aggressor remained unaware of the function.) Before investigating the claim further, we picked up an iPhone to determine whether requesting Siri charge the phone to 100 percent indeed initiated dialing emergency services or 911. We made five attempts, to which Siri responded by doing nothing more than issuing an apology for being unable to comply: Twitter users were similarly unsuccessful in activating Siri's secret 911 call feature: Normally at this point we'd file such a claim along with all the other coded call rumors as mere wishful thinking; a security blanket-like belief to provide a plausible but unfounded feeling of safety. But a July 2015 Verge article suggested that the rumor evolved from what was once supposedly a little-known — and quickly-amended — bug associated with Siri: As the Verge noted, the earliest versions of this claim seemed to stem from social media users pranking one another into trying it: The Verge noted that there was no mention of the purported coded help feature anywhere online that readers reported the claim wasn't as clear cut as it appeared. Command combinations of phone and a number led to Siri's attempting to dial different numbers: The glitch was first widely reported by the Verge on 16 July 2015, and by the following the bug appeared to be resolved: So, for a brief period in July 2015, social media users reported that the command Siri, charge my phone to 100 percent summoned police. Contemporaneous reports suggested that even when the bug occurred (unreliably), similar voice commands involving the word phone and numbers elicited responses that did not dial emergency services. And within one day of the rumor's making the news, Apple ostensibly fixed the phone issue (without comment). As of this writing, some of the original news reports about the issue from July 2015 have not been updated, fostering the notion that the reported Siri behavior might still be true. But more reliable methods for contacting 911 without alerting a dangerous individual nearby are available to the public. (en)
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