I want to contribute to community efforts at finding missing kids and be ready for local disaster situations. But as someone who wears headphones my ears are often rattled for hours by these alerts.
This can't be an isolated issue as google indicates multiple lawsuits about this. https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/17/apple-hit-with-lawsuit-over-ear-shattering-amber-alert-volume-through-airpods-pro/
The link is for apple, but as an android user I face the same issue. What I don't understand is why
emergency notifications don't respect media volume? Can someone explain the technical logistical reasons for this?
Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.
We get them every single time a thunderstorm sniffs at anything in the tricounty area.
There may be a way to turn off the "Watch" alerts and still keep the "we are gonna die" alerts. The one time we got the green sky of doom the phone did explode in a way not normally seen, so I assume they know something about crying wolf.
As for amber alerts being useless - something like 90% (?) of the time it's a custody dispute where one parent hasn't returned the kid at the appointed time.
I have a weather radio in our bedroom with only two alerts enabled: tornado warning (not watch), and the nuclear power plant 6 miles away just had an incident, whatever that’s called. Weather radio alerts are very granular and most radios will let you configure just the ones you want to hear.
It's always fun to watch the new people near the plant when the emergency alert warning system is tested. Most people do NOT expect a "voice of God" to start yelling at them out of nowhere, even if it is only a test.
Once you know about them, they're relatively easy to spot (look in areas near power plants, downstream of dams, etc).
By "voice of god" do you mean an outside PA system (like air raid sirens)? I didn't know that they had these anywhere in the US other than for tornados.
Depends on where you are. In Canada, our system sends everything as "National/Presidential Alerts". We don't use the different levels at all. So AMBER Alert, Weather Alert, etc are all Presidential/National Alerts.
Canada doesn't have a president, but until it passes a law that requires phones sold in Canada to have Canada-specific features in the alert display, it will say what it says in the USA. And in USA the Presidential Alert is switching to National Alert.
I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state.
I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off.
The system may have started with good intentions, but it was mismanaged and abused so much that it became useless.
"When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off."
To be honest I wonder if the people in charge were starting to get a kick at waking up so many people, or if they were engaging in some sort of malicious compliance, e.g., maybe the people responsible for sending the alerts out are also pretty pissed off at being woken up to send them out. The stated reason for them existing leaves no room for there to be any reason to be sending these out at 3am, if neither the abductee nor the putative abductor were known to be nocturnal.
I suspect it's all automated, and since the vast majority are custody issues, there's probably something like "you were supposed to hand over your daughter by 10 PM, but we don't count it as late until after midnight, and THEN your ex-wife has to call and complain, and by the time it's in the system it's 3 AM, and the system automatically sends the alert".
And then they don't even send another alert saying she was found safe and sound sleeping at her dad's house.
There is nothing automated about originating those alerts. The actual procedure for transmitting the alert is manual. The incident has to meet state criteria including likelihood of harm to the child, criminal activity, information about the vehicle and other facts.
A missing child in a custody dispute alone is rarely enough to trigger an alert.
One of the leading types of child abductions leading to alerts is vehicle theft with a child in the vehicle. Not a custody dispute.
> One of the leading types of child abductions leading to alerts is vehicle theft with a child in the vehicle. Not a custody dispute.
"The vast majority of child abductions are carried out by a relative or close acquaintance of the victim, often a divorced parent who was not granted custody... about 20 percent involved a kidnapping by a stranger or slight acquaintance of the child. In the other 80 percent of cases, the youngsters were taken by a relative (most often a parent) or an acquaintance (frequently a babysitter)."
Sorry, my fault for combining sentences! it was 80% of the amber alerts they studied.
"Presumably because of that need "to make an intuitive, rapid decision," as Griffin puts it, AMBER Alerts often turn out to be false alarms. Of the alerts the UNR team tracked, about 20 percent involved a kidnapping by a stranger or slight acquaintance of the child.
In the other 80 percent of cases, the youngsters were taken by a relative (most often a parent) or an acquaintance (frequently a babysitter). While such incidents can be traumatic to both the child and the custodial parent, they are routinely resolved peacefully."
> To be honest I wonder if the people in charge were starting to get a kick at waking up so many people, or if they were engaging in some sort of malicious compliance
I doubt it. The messages were just incremental additions of information as it was added: First message had something about the area. Second message had the color of the vehicle. Third one added another detail or a correction or something, I can’t remember.
I just remember that everyone in my local office was visibly tired the next day and we all shared the information to turn the alerts off.
Like most government websites I've used, they're junk with no thought to UX.
Maybe go with the UX best practice of allowing the user to choose how they want to be alerted? Is that so hard? Government can't get basic shit like this right, I wonder how they're handling the rest of it...
I made an effort to look them all up for a while, almost all of them are custody disputes and the child isn't in real danger. I mostly ignore them now. We did have a girl nearby that was actually missing and they couldn't issue an amber alert because it didn't meet the criteria. It took them a few days to decide to issue one in exception to the criteria and within that day the girl was found (due to the amber alert).
The vast vast majority of "child kidnappings" are just a divorced set of parents bickering, or one parent ignoring court orders and trying to just run away with the child.
>I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away.
Isn't part of the issue that when a child is taken, the assumption is that the kidnapper will immediately flee the area? I think hundreds, plural, might be excessive, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to notify people within a certain distance based on high speed and how much time has passed; maybe 50-100 miles?
I can see getting annoyed at multiple messages, but it's also important to remember that working with time sensitive emergency services is a extraordinarily difficult thing. It's like, everything is important all at once, and your mind can only process it all so fast. It's extremely time sensitive, and if you mess up any of the details, you are directly delaying the proceedings.
I haven't had to issue anything like an Amber Alert, thank God, but I did have to relay some information from a victims family to a supporting organization, and basically screwed it up the first time around. I ended up having to end the call with the family, call the organization to see what they needed, call the family back, then call them again with the relevant details. It was an incredibly brutal thing. You can feel the rawness of the emotion through the phone for the people. In my own experience, like, I could hear people crying and screaming in the background. It's this insanely personal moment for them, but you kind of have to force your way in the middle of it to make something happen. The person who I started off with had to hand the phone over because they thought they were about to pass out. It's really a very difficult to communicate in the midst of a crisis.
Anyway, I'm not sure which area you're in, but from my own experience, the very few times I've gotten one, it was always very succinct and clear. Child's name, description of their clothes, make/model/license plate of car, which direction they were headed, and when it happened.
I certainly don't blame you for turning off the alerts, or for being annoyed at the emergency services. The point wasn't to finger wag or whatever, it was just to say that it's extremely difficult to do, let alone do well.
The problem is that very few are actually "stranger danger" kidnappings; they're almost always custody disputes. And if you live anywhere near a major city, you will get them relatively often. If there was a way to turn off "parent kidnappings" and leave the rest on, I'm sure most people would take it.
It doesn't matter whether the cause is a custody dispute or something else. Custody disputes of themselves do not meet the criteria for AMBER alerts. Danger to the child and criminal activity are among the criteria that have to be met for the alert to be sent.
States vary as to how effectively they run their alerting systems, and how well they follow best practices, but that is ultimately an issue for the voters.
Although I agree with the premise you are making, that many Amber Alerts are regularly caused because one of the parents takes the child without authorization, it is important to remember that sexual and physical violence, including murder, is more likely to be committed by someone known to the victim rather than a stranger. The perpetrator is largely immaterial. To suppose that a child is therefore somehow in less danger because they were taken by a parent does not appear to make much difference, based on my rudimentary understanding of things. A parent who is prone to stealing a child to "get revenge" on the spouse is one who is willing to harm and abuse their own flesh and blood as part of a revenge plot.
In my own assessment, I classify that person to be dangerous. A stranger takes a child for an unknown reason. A parent takes a child, willingly harming the child physically or mentally in hopes of doing harm to a person they hate. I would assume they are willing to do far more than mere mental harm to the child, if it means "winning" the fight. I don't have any data to back that up, and it's entirely possible I'm wrong. I just don't see an Amber Alert being raised because a parent took the child to be any less serious than if a stranger took the child.
I would imagine that some number of Amber Alerts are a kind of "false positive", something like failing to drop a child off on time (out of gas, severe traffic, etc.) and their phone dying, turning into a big ordeal, but I just wouldn't discount the situation just because the suspect is a parent. Maybe that shouldn't meet the threshold, but I just personally don't see it as being a big enough nuisance to be bothered by it. Again, it is easy for me to say that though, since I don't get those sorts of alerts very often, maybe 2 to 3 times per year, if that.
I do also completely agree though, that as it relates to headphone usage it should be changed. I think that if you are listening on your headphones, it shouldn't come through your headphones at all. Just play the noise on the phone speaker - it'll probably still draw the users attention. I might be asking too much though, as there was that 911 bug [1][2] a while back.
Beyond the nuisance factor, there is literally nothing helpful I can do. I turned the alerts off. Knowledge of something does not mean we can control it - kidnapping, earthquake.
I agree, insofar that the integrated cellular emergency alert system is not good. I disabled all but presidential alerts (which should theoretically never happen until ICBMs are flying over our heads, except that one time in Hawaii), and signed up for City/County EMA texts for weather and hazards warnings. I also have a weather radio sitting in the corner with SAME alerts enabled.
Sure, that might not work well when I'm on travel, but when I'm on travel I'm typically in places with a ton of built-in mass notifications systems (airports, metro & train stations, roadside state DOT banners) so I don't feel I'm missing out.
It didn't help at all that phones suddenly had this feature and defaulted to ON (for awhile you couldn't turn off Amber alerts without turning off "They just launched the nukes, kiss your ass goodbye" alerts).
If we're discussing uselessness, I'm pretty sure warnings of impending war are the peak of this. They've actually killed someone in Hawaii. Let me live my final moments in bliss without worrying about that kind of stuff.
A child was abducted, and in some cases - as happened just a few days ago - the noncustodial parent threatens to kill the child. And does. The fact that the abduction involves a custody dispute is only one of the factors that goes into the decision to send an alert.
Many abductions are vehicle thefts where the thief takes off without noticing or caring that there is a child in the car.
In one recent case, the thief threw the baby out the window into a ditch. Citizens who received the Amber alert found the child.
Almost everyone owns a phone. Amber alerts go to all phones by default. It is therefore statistically unremarkable that "Citizens who received the Amber alert found the child". It's akin to the observation that they were all born after the Civil War. It has no relevance.
Some areas have weather patterns where warnings are frequent, but actual damage is rare. Cincinnati is like this from personal experience. We get far more injuries and damage from high winds and ice than tornados.
If you live in a place prone to tornadoes, there should be real citywide outdoor tornado sirens that you'd hear from miles away. Also sending it to your phone doesn't add much unless you're a recording artist in a soundproof studio.
I was actually surprised how well a modern insulated house blocks the siren. We have one that is on a hill a mile away (there's a second but I don't think I've ever heard it) and it's hard to notice inside (they run a check every month).
It IS fun to get the weather warning and then run outside and hear the air-raid siren begin to warm up.
If you live in the path of water coming through the air from the Gulf of Mexico, you're in popup thunderstorm country. These confuse prediction systems, so you end up with warnings all day, every day for large parts of the year.
Full disclosure: I pulled this information out of my arse, but perhaps it's to avoid the situation where you leave them connected without realising? If it plays at max volume through the headphones you have a better chance of hearing it even if you're not actually wearing the headphones
I appreciate the attempt to help, but it just gives Facebook, Twitter, and Inatagram links to follow, none of which I use. I click on the link to the Amber Alert .gov website, and they don't offer any (sane) ways to get notifications.
I don't know which phone you're using, but on my pixel if I have my ringer volume on silent, and the phone on "do not disturb" mode, amber alerts come in silent. I'm not sure which one, or the combination actually silences it since this is usually how I keep my phone when the alerts happen to occur.
These are obviously complete trash. Waking people up in the middle of the night for some random child that was abducted half a Belgium away with no real call to action even if it were in the same very small town.
What we need is political pressure for a pay-to-play solution. You fire an alert at my phone, that's $100 deposited within a week against my phone bill or offered via mail for the pay-as-you-go burner phone types.
Then if the phone goes off I know its something real. Right now it's just a waste of resources and annoyance, probably killing more people than it is saving via sleepy or distracted drivers or medical professionals.
Never had the misfortune of receiving an alert when wearing headphones. And this topic is terrifying because I have already configured the EQ on my phone to boost a bit the sound and around 80% is already really loud. I'd prefer if the alert had at least the option to bypass the jack output and instead use always the speakers.
That's interesting, it looks like there is already a setting available to do this but the ability to control it (or even view it) is behind config setting "show_override_dnd_settings", which is only true for Japan (MCC 440): https://cs.android.com/search?q=show_override_dnd_settings&s...
Is it possible it's only a specific combination of hardware and software that's having this issue?
We don't have amber alerts in my country (or at least I never got one). However Mi wireless earbuds + Nokia X10 for some reason reset to a painfully loud 100% volume when receiving a call. I can lower the volume in settings, but on next call it resets to 100% again. Same phone with a different Bluetooth headphones and same headphones with different phone work fine.
I don't know the whole software stack to point fingers whose fault it is, but there must be a bug either in this specific phone's Bluetooth implementation, Android 12 or the Mi earbuds.
It’s likely one of those edge cases that nobody cares to solve. It probably involves some scoping issue where one system doesn’t know the conditions of the downstream system.
Emergency volumes are supposed to be loud, and override the volume settings.
The thing making that override doesn’t know what the actual audio output channel is, or what “loud” means on that channel.
Users “reverse opt in” to amber alerts by not turning them off. Most people just these off. There’s way too many of them, and the vast majority of these are a custody dispute escalation. Don’t feel bad for shutting these off.
With this fact pattern the issue never makes it to the top of the stack to solve.
Yes, see the other comments in this thread about receiving alerts for places 8 hours away by driving, or the other comment where a user researched the alerts for a while.
It's a US-specific system for alerting people to missing children. It's named after Amber Hagerman°, a 9-year-old who was abducted and murdered in the '90s. On smartphones they can appear as (very loud) notifications with details about the missing child, potential abductors, vehicle, etc. You'll also see the same info on electronic message boards along the motorway.
Thank you for the info. I think I found the equivalent on my Android phone, seems it's the "Emergency Alerts" section of the Settings app. I've never received one though.
An Amber alert is an alert sent out by the local authorities in the US to all smartphones (and maybe radio? I'm too young to use a radio often) when a child is missing / suspected to be abducted.
A Silver alert is very similar and is sent out when an elderly person (esp. with memory issues) is missing.
At least in the US, they almost always involve a custody fight.
(A divorced parent actually kidnapped their own kid, or is late dropping a kid off.). Less commonly, it will involve other family members. (A parent is a drug addict, so the grandparents/uncle take the kid.)
In a vanishingly rare subset of the alerts, it is a kidnapping where a kid is taken by a stranger.
The phone settings are usually called "emergency alerts" or similar.
I very much doubt that there is any technical reason for the alerts always being loud. It's a deliberate decision. Like the whole idea of amber alerts, it is a matter of authorities taking decisions that make them feel good, without considering the consequences.
Amber alerts are bad. We get them now and them in Ontario at 3am, sent to the entire (rather large) province. This is idiotic. The probability that someone would be awake and in a position to observe an abducted child at 3am is negligible. The probability that someone woken at 3am will not be able to get back to sleep, drive to work in the morning when drowsy, and consequently get into an accident that kills someone, is not negligible.
Such alerts should be confined to warnings that people really do need to pay immediate attention to. Like a train accident that has released toxic gas, requiring immediate evacuation, even if it's 3am. As it is, an alert at 3am will be ignored, since the system has been abused by the idiots running it.
It's getting worse. Most US states [1] have started to use the phone siren system for injured cops as well. Regardless of your politics on this, what exactly am I supposed to do with a notification at 2AM that a cop was shot 400 miles away? Seems like the phone alert system is being used to push public perceptions rather than public safety.
> Seems like the phone alert system is being used to push public perceptions rather than public safety.
Yes, they absolutely are. Just a couple weeks ago, local law enforcement sent out an incredibly vague shelter-in-place active-shooter alert across the entire Twin Cities area for a situation in a suburb that was resolved about five minutes later[1]. Schools were locked down, buildings closed, etc. And wouldn't you know it, there's an election in two weeks where the Republicans, who the police unanimously endorse and campaign for, are running on a "crime is out of control" narrative! Crazy coincidence, that.
I was in my car in St. Paul at the time when the message went out. I heard the alarm and assumed that it was an Amber alert. When I got to the next stop light I glanced at my phone and saw two messages. One telling me to shelter in place (why?) and the next saying that the suspect was apprehended.
This was completely useless and actually distracting considering that I was in heavy traffic at the time.
That shelter-in-place alert did not follow well-established practices that require more details in the content and more geographically limited alerts. The agency that sent this alert got an earful afterwards and presumably will update their training.
If you think this was an accident or result of poor training, I've got a Stone Arch Bridge to sell you. Law enforcement here is unsupervised and completely out of control and regularly interferes with elections.
I have no trouble perceiving the point that the problem is intentional vs unintentional misuse of a facility.
An honest mistake is an accident that isn't repeated, or if repeated, happens in a random manner rather than exhibiting any particular pattern (seems to express neither a conservative nor a liberal worldview, nor any other potential agenda, consistently).
If someone has a desire to do something like use some position or tool they happen to have access to for some purpose of their own rather than it's intended use, and lacks the integrity to avoid doing so on their own, that desire and that lack of integrity doesn't change or stop even if they get chastised for some misdeed. They still want to do things like that, and they still don't see what the problem is, and they still do the same things, merely trying to do a better job of camoflage and deniability.
The two instances where alerts are typically sent statewide are Blue and Amber. The theory in both is that the perp may be many miles away from where the incident took place. And that is often the case, especially with child abductions.
Some states will not send alerts overnight and others will; it is a matter of state policy - and ultimately an issue for the ballot box.
Ontario is worse than most places because, at least as of a couple of years ago, they send all alerts as Presidential alerts, meaning they can't be turned off at all.
Don't forget the 3am alert is often because of a huge delay by countless bureaucrats too. Reading the message and finding out the incident or whatever happened 8 or 10 hours earlier is utterly ridiculous.
Part of the problem is that now the system is in place, if you don't use it and later it turns out that maybe perhaps possibly it could have helped, you've got the possibility of a career-ending hurricane of piss coming your way, civil and maybe even criminal suits, and all of that. Sending out an alert is in many ways a very rational choice, even when it doesn't really make any sense.
Look how parents who don't handcuff their children to their wrists so they can keep an eye on them 24/7 are often treated.
There is no such thing as Phone/Mobile AMBER Alerts in Ontario.
The US system has different levels of alerts: Presidential/National Alerts, AMBER Alerts, Extreme Weather Alerts, Dangerous Weather Alerts, etc. On my Pixel 6, everything but the Presidential/National Alerts can be disabled. Same with my wife's Galaxy S22. I assume the same for iPhones.
However the Canadian system (which is heavily based on the American system) is setup differently. All alerts are sent as 'National/Presidential Alerts'. None of the other alert levels are used.
I'm not talking about AMBER Alert in General, I'm talking about the mobile phone warning system.
The Canadian is based on the US system with different levels: National/Presidential Alert, AMBER Alert, Extreme Weather Alert, Dangerous Weather Alert, etc.
However in our system, all alerts are sent as 'National/Presidential Alert'.
Which provider are you with? They show up as Amber alerts for me and can be disabled from my unlocked pixel (stock os, not rooted) with bell. I have confirmed this by being with other people when an alert happened to go off. Usually though I leave them on and silenced (seems to respect my ringer volume and do not disturb settings).
We have the option to disable 'AMBER Alerts' on both our Pixel and S22 phones. However it does nothing as the alerts all come in as National/Presidential Alerts.
I wonder then if it's an error on the providers side? Because I had Extreme and Severe on, AMBER and Test off, and Vibration On (under alert preferences for wireless emergency alerts). The only other data points I have are iPhone users (bell and telus) where I am unsure of their configuration, only that they hear the alerts.
Not sure if you'll see this, but I stand corrected, just received a test alert on my new pixel 7 despite having those turned off. I used to not receive those (or they were at least silent, I forget since I didn't receive any in at least a year and now suddenly with my new phone) with my og pixel, both are unlocked and not-rooted with stock android. Only other difference is I also needed a new sim card because for some reason it wasn't working in my new phone. I had that sim for over 10 years, used it in my old pixel and was still registered with bell as belonging to a blackberry.
> However the Canadian system (which is heavily based on the American system) is setup differently. All alerts are sent as 'National/Presidential Alerts'. None of the other alert levels are used.
That's the dumbest thing ever. A presidential alert basically means "nukes incoming."
Here in the states, the Trump administration sent one out as "a test". I was not sober at the time and I genuinely was very nervous for the few seconds it took to open my phone and read the message.
> Here in the states, the Trump administration sent one out as "a test". I was not sober at the time and I genuinely was very nervous for the few seconds it took to open my phone and read the message.
That's kind of understandable, though. If the nukes really are incoming, you want to make sure your alert system actually works, and the only way to really do that is to test it.
It was pretty widely publicized before it happened, and I think it even got delayed a few days, during the business day. Honestly, I can't imagine it will ever be used for reals[1], but testing it once seems reasonable.
[1] few disasters, man made or natural, reach national scope. Even a grid failure would likely only reach half the country, but do you need a national alert for that? What useful content could it have?
Many inbound nukes is about all I could see it used for, but I expect that would cause more panic and be less useful than not sending a message... And I'm not convinced a decision to send a message would be made in a reasonable amount of time. State or local messaging seems more likely.
> Many inbound nukes is about all I could see it used for, but I expect that would cause more panic and be less useful than not sending a message..
What now? Sure it would cause less panic--in same the way shooting someone in the head unannounced would cause less panic than giving them warning to duck. If the nukes are incoming, "avoiding panic" is the wrong priority.
> And I'm not convinced a decision to send a message would be made in a reasonable amount of time. State or local messaging seems more likely.
IIRC, they're triggered directly for NORAD (or whatever it's called nowadays). There was actually a false alarm alert in the 70s, and it did get out quickly (google "code word hatefulness").
> There was actually a false alarm alert in the 70s, and it did get out quickly (google "code word hatefulness").
Well it got out quickly, but the cancellation was slow.
I have no doubt that the alerts would go out quickly, if there was a decision to send them (and assuming the means to send them is still around). More and more of these systems has gotten automated so there's no one at the local stations who would need to decide to send or not. I'm just not sure that the 25 minutes or so between detection and impact is enough time to decide to send an alert, amidst all the other activities that would certainly need to be done.
> Amber alerts are bad. We get them now and them in Ontario at 3am, sent to the entire (rather large) province. This is idiotic. The probability that someone would be awake and in a position to observe an abducted child at 3am is negligible. The probability that someone woken at 3am will not be able to get back to sleep, drive to work in the morning when drowsy, and consequently get into an accident that kills someone, is not negligible.
That's why I disable them totally. In my experience, they're always just a description of a car, and realistically there's literally nothing I can do with that information. When I'm at home, I'm not going to check license plates, and when I'm driving I'm not going to check my phone (nor remember a random license plate number for more than 10 seconds to check anything).
They're also always "non-custodial parent took the kids," and I'm pretty sure the police in that case can quickly discover much better information than I could ever give them. There was one recently in my area that a friend of mine received. Later I read in the paper that they just tracked the guy's cell phone to find him.
If you aren't setting all alerts off, you're setting yourself up for a failure of the next day several times a year. (Way too many pointless midnight or worse alerts going on).
The low power warning noise is also painfully loud when I'm just using them without audio playing. Bose also have this issue, and there is no way to change the warning sounds.
On a similar note to the linked article: the low battery alert of the AirPods Pro can be ear-shattering, and there's no means of reducing the volume. I suspect it tries to scale volume with environmental noise because it ranges from "startling" to "painful".
We have them in the Netherlands as well, but not nearly as many. You get about 1 or 2 per year that happen as a message to everyone, only used for life threatening situations. And then around 15 per year for which only an app notification and social media are sent.
The Netherlands apparently has 17.5 million people, presumably some of which are children.
The USA has 332 million people, at least 3 of which are children, and gets about 200 Amber alerts/year (usually not nationwide, only locally, which can be an entire state).
The numbers line up if you count the "app notice" only ones.
For anyone hearing the term 'Amber Alert' for the first time:
> An Amber Alert (or child abduction emergency alert) is a message distributed by a child abduction alert system to ask the public for help in finding abducted children. The system originated in the United States. [1]
Alerts are distributed via "pagers, faxes, emails, and cell phones with the information immediately posted on the Internet for the general public to view" and have the aim of "ask(ing) the public for help in finding abducted children".
Reading this thread, I’m not sure what’s worse. The USA, where phones apparently randomly go off at any time for no good reason at a loud volume level, or Germany, where our alerting system is so broken that at the last testing round half of us didn’t get any alerts (these are supposed to be for actual emergencies, not custody disputes), and the rest received them over a time frame of several hours.
> The USA, where phones apparently randomly go off at any time for no good reason at a loud volume
FYI, this isn’t unique to the USA. Canada has serious problems, too, especially in Ontario. There are also various references to Belgium and other countries in this thread.
It's really weird to me to see so many people discussing Amber Alert spam when I can count on one hand the number of alerts I've received in my lifetime
I've had them on a flight while flying over Ohio. Really terrifying when there's suddenly 100 phones screaching in the cabin and it takes a few seconds to realize that distributed alarms like that must be an amber alert.
Didn't even realize you could get them on a flight. Must be because of the in-flight wifi.
It has nothing to do with Wi-Fi. If people leave their phones on, not in Airplane Mode, while in the cabin they could well receive the alert from any cellular service area they are flying over. And it doesn't have to be an Amber alert, it could be a wireless emergency alert for anything.
When an amber alert pops up, what happens 100% of the time is I'm like "holy shit wtf stop that loud noise!" and then after the message is dismissed and untrievable I try to read it, resulting in me having no idea what it said.
Title 47 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Section 10.500(h) requires the alert to be preserved "in a consumer-accessible format and location for at least 24 hours or until deleted by the subscriber."
Do the people who get these alerts really act on them at all? I know the second after I read the license plate number that its gone out of my head, and I usually don't know what the make and model of the vehicle would actually look like since I don't pay attention to what most cars actually look like.
