Ramsey Sullivan
ECB Publishing, Inc.
In 2019, a Virginia Beach woman was attacked and nearly sexually assaulted when she used her iPhone to call emergency services using the iPhone “SOS” feature. After she used the buttons on her phone to activate the feature, law enforcement was called and came to save her just in time.
These days, the world can be a scary place for all people, especially women and children. To give you, your family and your friends a sense of security, Apple has embedded a safety feature into their iPhones.
To make the most of the “SOS” feature, start by adding emergency contacts to your phone’s health app. Many people use their parents, spouses, children, siblings or even friends as their emergency contacts.
To add emergency contacts, follow these steps:
• Open the health app and tap your profile picture.
• Tap medical ID.
• Tap edit, then scroll to emergency contacts.
• Tap a contact already in your phone, then add their relationship to you.
• Tap done to save your changes.
After adding your family members or close friends to your emergency contact list, you are ready to make an emergency call if needed. However, do not use this feature unless you are in a true emergency. When you use it, all of your emergency contacts will receive a text message and law enforcement will be called.
To enact the “SOS” features and call emergency services on an iPhone 8 or newer, follow these steps:
• Press and hold the side button and one of the volume buttons until the emergency SOS slider
appears.
• Drag the emergency SOS slider to call emergency services. If you continue to hold down the side button and volume button, instead of dragging the slider, a countdown begins and an alert sounds. If you hold down the buttons until the countdown ends, your iPhone automatically calls emergency services.
To enact the “SOS” feature and emergency services on an iPhone 7 or older, follow these steps:
• Rapidly press the side (or top) button five times. The emergency SOS slider will appear.
• Drag the emergency SOS slider to call emergency services.
After your emergency call ends, your iPhone will send your emergency contacts a text message
with your current location. If you have turned your location services off, it will temporarily turn on. If
your location changes, your contacts will get an update and you’ll get a notification about ten minutes later.
In these difficult and unprecedented times, it is more important than ever that we use all of our
resources to keep ourselves and our families safe. Enabling these features as soon as possible could protect you or your loved ones from possibly dire circumstances.
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