How an app can help Canadian emergency services locate you with just three words
Seven organizations in this country already use what3words, based on GPS technology, and the Ottawa Police Service is "looking into it."
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Two hikers called 911 after getting lost in Manitoba’s Whiteshell Provincial Park, near the Ontario border.
A 911 operator in Brandon, Man., couldn’t determine the pair’s whereabouts using traditional methods, including the familiar technique of triangulating location with cellphone tower signals. Due to incomplete coverage, the procedure didn’t work well in that area, and in fact indicated the duo was in Ontario.
So the call operator sent the hikers a text message link to a mobile app and online geolocation site called what3words, which used the phone’s GPS technology to generate the word string “beloved.cashew.interception” designating a specific three-by-three-metre spot south of West Hawk Lake, nearly 400 kilometres east of Brandon. The 911 operator relayed those co-ordinates to RCMP and the hikers were quickly found safe and sound.
The May 23 rescue was one of the first Canadian successes for what3words, which a half-dozen emergency services in this country are using already and the Ottawa Police Service is also mulling over.
“I guess the answer to the ‘Why Canada?’ question is that we now have over 80 per cent of U.K. emergency services using what3words, and it has really started to take the interest of emergency services abroad because there are a lot of positive case outings coming out of the U.K.,” Chris Sheldrick, what3words co-founder and CEO, says from London.
Once a music promoter frustrated by repeated misdirections, Sheldrick started musing with tech-savvy friends about those issues in January 2013, and what3words launched six months later. Only in the past year or so has it been introduced in Canada, with users including the rural Manitoba 911 call centre and Brandon police, police in Winnipeg, Bathurst, N.B., and Halifax, RCMP in North Vancouver, the Oshawa Fire Service in Ontario and 911 dispatch in Alberta’s Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
Ottawa police are “looking into it” for 911 in the capital, a spokesperson says. It’s not used yet by the City of Gatineau, either.
In some respects, Canadians are arriving late to the party since what3words is in use in 170 countries overall and 44 languages.
Its English “dictionary” has 40,000 randomly allocated words to account for all three-by-three-metre spaces on a grid covering the surface of the planet, although only about 25,000 are needed for land surfaces. The prime minister’s official residence at 24 Sussex Drive is “erupted.reapply.liners,” while “civil.lifters.breezy” designates Parliament Hill.
Homonyms such as “hear” and “here” are eliminated to reduce confusion, with similar retractions made in other languages, including French.
Oshawa deputy fire chief Todd Wood started follow-up research after clicking on a Twitter link in 2018. Over the next two years, a memorandum of understanding was tweaked to account for variations between the U.K. and Canada, and approved by City of Oshawa legal services before taking effect July 7.
“We don’t have to use this and people don’t have to open up the links if they don’t want to,” Wood says, “but I just thought it was a great tool in those remote areas or in those chances where you don’t know where you are and you need assistance, that we could provide that assistance and the appropriate response in a timely fashion.”
What3words says its three-word strings are as accurate as GPS coordinates, but easier to communicate, more precise than street addresses lacking global standards and more reliable than triangulating location from cell towers.
The three-metre grid standard represents something of a tradeoff.
“At three-metre squares, you’ve got just about the right number of words in a dictionary to be able to cover the world surface in three words,” Sheldrick says. “I think we’d have run out of words if we’d have gone to two metres or one metre, but also a phone’s GPS accuracy never really gets much better than about three metres. So, even if we’d done one metre, you wouldn’t have been able to feel the benefit.”
Wood says covering gaps between cell towers is one reason Oshawa has adopted what3words, with another being the city’s total of 410 hectares of trails and other green space.
“We also have Highway 401 running through our city, and Highway 407,” Wood says. “What if there are people coming from different parts of the country through our region and they witness an accident and it’s late at night or early in the morning? They don’t really know where they are. They passed an exit three kilometres ago. If they call 911 and get pushed to us, then we can have them pull over and we‘ll send them the link and they can open it and tell us those three words, and then we can send the resources and get fairly close.”
The app is available for free for iOs and Android devices, and the program is offered for free to emergency services. Sheldrick says revenue comes from selling clients such as Mercedes-Benz and Ford a commercial service to convert the three-word strings into GPS co-ordinates.
Even if an individual hasn’t downloaded the app, the company says, a 911 call operator can text a link to their mobile phone, as in the Manitoba case.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has received no complaints about what3words or any matter involving a similar context, a communications advisor says. Provincial privacy commissioners have oversight responsibility for laws applying to municipal police, fire and paramedic services.
Sheldrick says the company has received no pushback about privacy because the code given to emergency services is used offline.
“If you’re a control room, you can install it in your software, that software can never be connected to the internet, and you can run what3words totally locally there,” Sheldrick says. “So we would never even get that data from the services, if they install it in that way.”
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