Hey You, Your Car Alarm Is Going Off
It's on my bucket list to drive to the house of the guy who invented the car alarm at three in the morning, bring lots of people with me, and we all hit the "panic" button that sets off our car alarms. (It's low on the list, but it's there.)
Most websites have a system administrator, whose role is to maintain the servers that are hosting the site and make sure that if anything goes wrong, they get a notification about the problem so they can deal with it. In the era of smartphones, this is actually a very simple thing to set up.
What surprises me is that the auto industry hasn't devised a standard way for this to be set up in place of the traditional car alarm. Instead of a loud noise blaring whenever the car senses someone broke a window, why not send an alert message to the owner of the phone letting them know someone is trying to break in? Let them get the notification so they can deal with it. No reason the rest of us within earshot need to be crowdsourced to call the police.
"But," I hear you begin, "car alarms go off an awful lot. I don't need to be notified every time my car alarm goes off." Really? Then why do the rest of us need to care, exactly?
I think the point of a car alarm is deterrence. If you're a car thief, and you break into a car and an alarm goes off, you flee and move on to the next car. (Or perhaps you just cut the power to the alarm...not a difficult task.) So a car alarm really says to the thief, "You can steal a car...but please don't steal this one."
Fair enough...but imagine a world where car alarms are silent alert messages sent to people's mobile devices. Let's say one car in four has such an alarm on it. Since the auto thief wouldn't have any way of knowing which cars have these alarms and which don't, wouldn't that act as more of a deterrent?
Most websites have a system administrator, whose role is to maintain the servers that are hosting the site and make sure that if anything goes wrong, they get a notification about the problem so they can deal with it. In the era of smartphones, this is actually a very simple thing to set up.
What surprises me is that the auto industry hasn't devised a standard way for this to be set up in place of the traditional car alarm. Instead of a loud noise blaring whenever the car senses someone broke a window, why not send an alert message to the owner of the phone letting them know someone is trying to break in? Let them get the notification so they can deal with it. No reason the rest of us within earshot need to be crowdsourced to call the police.
"But," I hear you begin, "car alarms go off an awful lot. I don't need to be notified every time my car alarm goes off." Really? Then why do the rest of us need to care, exactly?
I think the point of a car alarm is deterrence. If you're a car thief, and you break into a car and an alarm goes off, you flee and move on to the next car. (Or perhaps you just cut the power to the alarm...not a difficult task.) So a car alarm really says to the thief, "You can steal a car...but please don't steal this one."
Fair enough...but imagine a world where car alarms are silent alert messages sent to people's mobile devices. Let's say one car in four has such an alarm on it. Since the auto thief wouldn't have any way of knowing which cars have these alarms and which don't, wouldn't that act as more of a deterrent?