Unwanted exposure: When your phone sends nudes to your contacts

There is a very good reason for having an Emergency SOS feature on your phone — it can quite literally save your life. It can also land you in a rather embarrassing predicament, as one Reddit user learnt. The user, who goes under the name of AssistancePretend668, shared his story of fighting, and ultimately losing, a battle against an alarm clock in a thread on the Google Pixel subreddit just over a week ago.

The user shared that, not wanting to get up one morning (we all can relate), he frantically tapped his Google Pixel in a failed attempt to silence the annoying alarm clock signal. But instead of the much sought-after quiet, a siren blasted from the phone. In panic, he grabbed it — only to find it was already dialing 911 and notifying all of his emergency contacts. That wasn’t the end of the disaster, though. While he was desperately trying to let everyone know that he was OK, the phone had also begun capturing and sending videos of him in his current state to everyone on his emergency contacts list. And by “videos,” we mean technically his nudes, since he has a habit of sleeping commando.

So, what happened? After the chaos, the user figured out that in his groggy scramble, he must’ve hit the power button five times, triggering the phone’s Emergency SOS feature. This protocol automatically calls 911, notifies your emergency contacts, and — here’s the kicker — captures and shares a video of your surroundings. The idea is that, in a serious emergency, you might be too incapacitated to type or explain things yourself, so your contacts get a snapshot of the situation. Unfortunately for him, the snapshot was a little… too revealing.

So if you’re a proud owner of a Pixel phone and also despise confining yourself with unnecessary layers of fabric during the night, you might want to know how to make sure no SOS-related accident results in you becoming Reddit's next man or woman of the hour.

How not to get stripped of your privacy

As with so many things in life, by gaining something in one area you often lose something else in another. In this case, the trade-off is between privacy and safety. By enabling every possible emergency option you inevitably lose some in terms of privacy, and vice versa. It's up to you to decide where the sweet spot is — I'm here to provide you with the options.

First things first, if the Emergency SOS never goes off on accident in the first place, there's no risk of sharing what shouldn't be shared. So one possible solution is to go to Safety & emergency → Emergency SOS on your Pixel, scroll down to How it works, and tap the Settings button. Once there, add a confirmation step by selecting Touch & hold to start actions — this way you will better insulate yourself from launching the emergency sequence on accident.

It's understandable if you don’t want to go this path. After all, emergencies are called that for a reason, and in a dire situation there may not be enough time to touch and hold a button for several seconds. If that's the case, you may want to opt for disabling Share automatically after backup in Recording Settings instead. If you do that, no video will be shared without your explicit action. By the way, even if you keep automatic sharing on, there is still a time window to cancel it when recording ends. For the more drastic solution, you can disable the video recording completely on the same settings screen, just keep in mind that it potentially severely cripples the effectiveness of the entire ‘Emergency SOS’ operation.

One of the milder, yet possibly more effective solutions, is to limit your emergency contacts to only the closest friends and/or family. In AssistancePretend668's story, according to his own words, he had over 10 emergency contacts. Perhaps it is better to settle on three or four, but only select the ones that you won't mind sharing your most intimate details with.

And finally, there are ‘non-measures,’ in the sense that they are tongue-in-cheek suggestions that don't address the problem itself, but rather the symptoms: don't sleep naked, switch off the alarm verbally (yes, phones can do that; no, of course, I knew that before gulp)… or, if all else fails and you've sent your nude video to a bunch of colleagues again, maybe consider giving the Emergency SOS feature a break.