When everything becomes a profit center…

A few days ago, the smoke alarms in my house went off at 3am, so we got up and took it seriously when we smelled smoke everywhere. But after 20 minutes of searching high and low, we couldn't find a source, so as a precaution, we called 911 to let our fire department stop by to check things out too.

The fire department was great, first a fire marshal showed up and walked us through everything before the trucks arrived. We poked around inside and out for about an hour and couldn't find anything electrical or smoldering in the walls, so all was good and they left around 5am.

In the end, it seems our HVAC system is sort of burning up internally, and once we turned off our heat pump, the smoke smell dissipated. Days are below freezing right now, so it's not ideal but as we get our heater fixed, but it being turned off for now isn't the worst thing.

Then things got weird

Around 9am someone was rapping incessantly on our front door. This is pretty unusual since we live in a rural area, way off a main road, in a place where we usually get driveway camera motion warnings ahead of anyone's arrival.

I didn't get the door but overheard my wife talking to a guy saying he was from a fire abatement company and she thought it must be someone from an alarm company. Our previous house had an alarm system through a local outfit and they'd call you immediately whenever something got reported or logged in your house. Our current home came with an alarm system, but after ten years of mixed utility from the last one, I decided not to sign up and unplugged the main brain of the unit soon after we moved in.

I told her as such, then it dawned on us that this was an ambulance chaser type situation, and she politely declined his "help". The guy was pushy as hell and insisted on leaving his pamphlet and card. He was from Servpro.

Disaster business models

Servpro is the "#1 Choice in Cleanup and Restoration" and I guess they get there by reaching out as soon as they can. And I get why they do that, because post-fire when your life is in chaos, normal people have no idea who to hire to begin fixing things so they can get back to normal.

Still, it felt invasive and aggressive, since we didn't ask to be contacted by a strange company and the guy at your front door pushing services just a couple hours after an unsettling event didn't feel right.

How'd they even get my information?

911 calls are mostly public information since they involve public services who all need to communicate with one another. Looking at my local agency's website, it's basically a wrapper around a company called PulsePoint, who makes apps that show you what is happening with all of your local 911 calls in the past 24 hours.

I would venture to guess, based on my knowledge of local agencies and their grasp of technology, that PulsePoint gave my local agency a free website they could drop onto their server, which ultimately funnels new customers to their PulsePoint apps. I know we don't have the IT chops locally to do this, so they went with this PulsePoint vendor.

Consumer protection is what we really need

An unintended consequence of emergency information is that by its nature you share people's full home address to as many agencies as possible because it's an emergency and time is of the essence. But as Americans, we basically have no real rights to privacy, so my home address showed up in the PulsePoint logs and then a guy from Servpro read it and promptly arrived at my door hawking his services.

There's probably a Salesforce plugin to do this for the Servpro rep every morning automatically.

That's a sleazy business model but it's not illegal. That there's a whole company around 911 calls and another company that acts upon those is more of a indictment of capitalism, but I do wish we had some consumer privacy protections that made this kind of business impossible.

No one likes to have their personal, traumatic, family emergency turn into a sales lead on someone else's system, but here we are and there are multiple software companies built to support it.