The latest incident in the Cometa system, which administers anti-abuse bracelets, has once again caused discomfort and questions among sexual violence survivor groups, calling into question the service’s credibility. Byodosha warned this week that a new technical incident will occur in the early morning hours of 2019. … At 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, security forces and security agencies were alerted, invoking enhanced victim protection protocols. Service was not restored until 3 p.m. It didn’t recover properly until 5:25pm yesterday. However, Equality Minister Ana Redondo reported that women were always protected by complementary systems and that no one needed a panic button.
The problem was in the router that distributes alert information. Equality explained that 10% of these messages caused incidents and were lost. A source from the Redondo team explains that the servers are part of the services provided by Vodafone-Securitas. They claimed that everything has now been fixed and no information was lost, and added that incidents had occurred with all their services, in response to a question whether the incident had also occurred with their previous contracting company, Telefonica.
Gregorio Gomezsecretary and spokesperson for the Alma Society, which serves more than 900 women a year, described the episode as “just a failure.” Redondo said no woman needs a panic button, but Gomez believes the words “the alarm may not have been detected” are not reassuring words because the system is causing problems. If the consequences weren’t so serious, he believes it’s because it happened at dawn, but added: “If it had been during the day, it could have been unfortunate.”
cello alvarezA spokesperson for the Alana Foundation noted that Cometa “sometimes proved insufficient to prevent actual dangerous situations, as failures in data update systems created potentially fatal vacuums.” Each mistake, he says, “challenges the confidence of those of us who have called for help and risked our lives to come forward.” He called for greater “empathy” and “responsibility” from departments and agencies, saying “security systems cannot be dehumanized or reduced to automated protocols.”
Alvarez welcomes the fact that Equality has taken this opportunity to notify victims. But she argues that women are increasingly fearful and we need to invest more in protection systems. “The pressure from those who deny gender violence is making each victim very scared, and so are the failures of the system.”
From the spokesperson of the Women’s Foundation for Victims of Gender Violence anna bella It warns that this will only create a sense of lack of protection and calls for more investment in monitoring security and protection measures. “These failures take away the confidence of women who feel unprotected. What’s happening is that many women don’t trust the bracelet. They would need to invest more money to make it a fool-proof system or a state-of-the-art system. And if they were ‘politicians’ or ‘football players,’ they would have a much more cutting-edge system than what is available,” he criticizes.
“This takes confidence away from women and makes them feel vulnerable. What’s happening is that a lot of people don’t trust bracelets.
In that respect, Encarni IglesiasThe Chairman of Stop Digital Gender Violence positively praised Equality’s actions in notifying the victim and taking the reins in communicating the incident to prevent further uproar, saying: “They have done a good job. We must learn that machines can make mistakes. Intelligence is demonstrated by recognizing that and confronting it to solve the problem.”
Trying to hide it or not reporting it rigorously, as happened in September, will be a problem because it creates more mistrust, Iglesias said. “What they are trying to hide for me is the mistake they learned with the bracelet issue,” Iglesias said briefly, praising Cometa management’s quick response. “The outage didn’t last long either, which also means that the emergency system worked well.”
About The Author
