Your phone now helps detect earthquakes

Most people’s personal experience begins with seismometers and ends with simple scientific experiences in childhood. Watching the pendulum place irregular marks on a piece of paper while your co-workers pound the table gives you an idea of ​​how the machine works, and there’s an excellent chance that this is the last time you’ve thought a lot about the concept. Even among hackers, whose equipment generally tends to be more technologically equipped than usual, you are unlikely to find a dedicated seismograph that works.

But this is not because the basic technology is difficult to obtain or that it is particularly expensive. In fact, one can almost say with certainty that if you weren’t actively reading these words on a device with a sensitive accelerometer, you had one (or maybe several) at your fingertips. Modern smartphones, tablets, and even some laptops now have sensors that can be easily pushed into service as large-scale seismometers; They just need the software to collect and analyze the data.

Or at least they did. By the time you read this article, Google has already started rolling out an update for Android devices that will allow it to use on-board sensors to detect potential earthquakes. With billions of compatible devices in operation across the planet, it will easily become the largest distributed sensor network of its kind ever in operation. But that doesn’t mean you’ll get a notification on your phone to turn around and cover up anytime soon.

Fair weather sensor

Obviously, the accelerometers in our mobile devices were never intended to detect earthquakes, but as any hacker knows, the intent is often irrelevant when it comes to hardware. The idea was for these sensors to determine the direction of the gadget, or perhaps even detect gestures, but they definitely can detect subtle vibrations as well. Unfortunately, the use of this sensor to detect earthquakes is hampered by an outside influence: the owner of the device.

Just imagine how many times a smartphone is moved or shaken on a daily basis. Or consider how the average user would react if their battery life suddenly drops because Google has been constantly pushing their devices up with accelerometer data.

Google says it will compare data from multiple devices to filter false positives.

For these reasons, among other things, smartphones in active use are not as good as seismic sensors. So Google will only poll the sensors in the connected devices and they are not used. In many cases, this means that phones will not provide any useful data until their owner falls asleep.

Even so, there will always be a question about where to put the phone. A suitable seismometer should be securely attached to the ground, but you cannot expect smartphone owners to put their devices downstairs every night. The phone can end up lying in bed with them, or set on a table with a fan that vibrates all night.

So even when the phone is not in use, the data received from these devices will need to be analyzed, filtered, and rigorously reviewed with other sensors in the area. One phone vibrates No earthquake occurs; It will take a complex algorithm to figure out what meaning from the tea leaves are the millions of accelerometers chirping away at night.

Resistance is useless

Obviously, the biggest hurdle in setting up a system like this is getting everyone to install and configure the app on their phone. It’s the same reason why voluntary COVID-19 contact tracing apps are only limited in use. If you can’t get more than a small percentage of the population to install an app that can tell them when they have been exposed to Coronavirus, good luck getting them to install the Earthquake Sniffing app.

Which is why Google doesn’t bother giving them a choice. Not directly, at least. On devices running Android 5.0 or higher, the new Seismic API will be installed automatically as part of the Google Play Services framework and not as a system update. This means that even phones that have reached their EOL will continue to gain new capacity. You might not get security updates from the manufacturer of your device anymore, but you will.

In the hierarchy of invasive intrusion, a company can do on your mobile device, the collection of anonymous seismic readings while charging appears very low. Google indicated that there will be a certain mechanism for the phones to trigger a seismic event rather than directing a hose of accelerometer data to the server when the charging phone is idle:

If the phone detects something that it thinks might be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our seismic server, along with an approximate location of where the vibration is occurring.

However, it is unclear if there is a way to opt out of this program other than completely disabling the website services. There is no clear incentive for Google, and any agencies that ultimately partner the system with them, to pull anything more than the accelerometer data and the overall location of these events. However, if this data has been compromised, it is impossible to determine what may also be useful.

Being part of a huge network of sensors for scientific research is a really cool idea, regardless of the privacy issue. It is fair to say that if you own a smartphone with an internet connection, more serious violations of your privacy have already occurred.

Who are the data, anyway?

Although our devices may be producing data, it does not appear that there are any immediate plans for us to access it. Ultimately, we might see a public API that allows developers to use the Android seismometer network, but for now, Google says the data will simply be incorporated into the search. The idea is that if the user feels the ground is shaking and turns to Google for more information, they will be able to see the size of the area affected. After they have had time to improve the system, the plan is to start pushing earthquake warning notifications, which is something they have already tried as part of the ShakeAlert US Geological Survey.

For those who would rather not wait on the friendly neighborhood megacorp to provide the public with this potentially life-saving data, there are options. On the same day that Google started rolling out its system, the Linux Foundation announced that it would help support the OpenEEW project.

OpenEEW sensor panel

This system gets its seismic data from open-device sensors that combine the ESP32 with the same type of MEMS accelerometer found in smartphones, which you can either build yourself or (ultimately) buy as a ready-to-use product. While the project can never hope to compete with Google in terms of the number of active sensors in this field, these devices have the advantage of being permanently installed and operating 24/7.

Whether it’s in your smartphone or your DIY IoT device, these low-cost accelerometer networks seem poised to change the way earthquake is detected. When a few seconds advance warning is the difference between life and death, we will take all the help we can get.

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