We get them, maybe, four times a year. Usually 50% of the alerts are for nowhere near where I live, usually on the other side of the state. Theoretically the suspect could drive their car to my area on the one freeway that cuts across the state, or drive on one of the three other freeways in the other direction for the same amount of time and be in one of four other states.

Yeah.

I disabled Amber alerts after I got a notice about a family abduction two hundred miles away.

(and, most of the Amber alerts seem to be family squabbles.)

It is texas, so yes. lol.

What else?

It is Texas so I think as soon as you get an alert, you are obligated to not only grab your gun and saddle your horse, but you also need to round up a dozen or more of your neighbors with their guns and horses and form a posse to cut the offenders off at the pass.

I say in a loud voice: "I didn't do it this time", when I hear those alerts at work. lol.

You can't disable the "Presidental Alerts".

This one wasn't an Amber Alert. It was an Emergency Alert, the type that's supposed to be used for tornados and floods, where there's a serious risk of significant damage and/or casualties in an area. Those aren't supposed to be sent state-wide, and certainly not over a wanted suspect, almost no matter what they've done.

A cop getting shot is the equivalent of 10 civilians.

Years ago, I was awakened by one of these alerts at 2am. I learned immediately how to turn them off and have done so since. I am sure there are plenty of people who have learned the same way.

I was at a Gabriel Iglesias (a comedian, for those who don't know) performance, a few years back. He had just asked everyone to silence their phones, and 15000 phones all went off at once for what was probably the most hilariously timed Amber Alert in history.

It's a bad system. They need a way of adding lower-priority follow up messages without repeatedly triggering the same notification level.

Possibly the Smartphones should do a software update so the "Alert tone" cannot be triggered repeatedly over a set period of time. For example: 2-hour Cooldown on the Amber alert alarm noise, and additional messages during the cooldown are treated as normal text messages.

> That was the day I realized people have no business FORCING these on people and I promptly disabled that shit.

Aside from that, the alerts are ineffective. Multiple studies have found that while Amber alerts do help in recovering children quickly in a minority of cases, those are also the cases in which the child was in no danger (e.g. abducted by a non-custodial parent with no intention of harming the child) and in which the child almost certainly would have been recovered anyway. Silver alerts are probably no different, but research seems not to have been done.

It also doesn't appear that any studies have been d

As the article says, it seems like a Texas thing. It is really annoying to me.

> Apparently, this is only a thing in the US? Do iOS and Android have a special US edition?

Every country/region has it's own unique regulatory requirements for mobile phones that are going to be somewhat unique.

But yeah, in this case, it's part of a replacement for the old US [1]emergency broadcast system [wikipedia.org] ( [2]example test broadcast [youtube.com]), which could take over TV and radio broadcasts in the event of an impending emergency. The special alert sound they played is a combination of 853Hz and 960Hz tones and is illegal to reproduce in any other broadcast. The original intended use was for incoming ICBMs or oth

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdpLWML_tDU

The capability (pushing messages to peoples' phones, as a requirement imposed on carriers and handset providers) exists in the US (and probably other countries).

Without someone to push back on it... I suspect it will just get extended to more and more items over time, defaulting to opt-out.

[1]https://www.igeeksblog.com/how... [igeeksblog.com]

From that article, there are possibly 4 alerts enabled by default here in the US ( emergency alert, amber alert, public safety, test).

Apparently they're required to test the national syste

[1] https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-turn-off-emergency-alerts-on-iphone/

I remember that!! LOL. People were climbing into the sewers to try to keep safe.

That was what the emergency alert system was originally for when first proposed. Trying to save like an extra percent or two of people from a nuclear strike, letting the US "Win" by having more surviving population to conscript.

Now they bug us every time someone with a gun makes some smoked pork.

I am guessing that there are license plate readers (cameras) everywhere here. So telling me to look for a car, and a license plate just seems stupid.

I do hope that whoever does this shit looks at results, instead of just feeling good about notifying everybody when some random incident happens. How effective are the alerts? I'm guessing 0%. Most of the time it is just a mom or dad going on a joy ride with their kids.

Great idea. Terrible implementation.

Just make it a push notification like everything else is. You can then prioritize it.

In other words, your priority is not my priority.

> Let me know when they have an "incoming missile, seek shelter immediately" alert.

That's the sort of thing the [1]Presidential Alerts [time.com] are intended for.

[1] https://time.com/5400574/presidential-alert-donald-trump-fema/

> If the President wants to contact me he can call or text, just like everyone else.

He might also choose to just activate the military to hunt you down.

It's a shame because they can be useful when not abused. Japan uses them to warn you about natural disasters, where they are timely and useful. Knowing several seconds before an earthquake hits gives you time to get to a safe position, and knowing about tsunami gives you a chance to get to higher ground.

By the way, don't ignore tsunami warnings. Even if it says it's 30cm, that is still more than enough to knock you off your feet and sweep you away.

You can do it if you have a rooted Android device.

Yeah, that's an irritating bar, but at least it's possible somewhere in Android-land. You can't turn them off if you are using iOS, period.

It is crazy to have such government mandate, they do not have a right to your phone or your attention if you do not wish to be disturbed and want to opt out.

We here in Canuckistan use the same Wireless Alert System that America does; it's baked into the 3gpp protocols.

What we do wrong up here, however, is ignore the 'emergency' alert level, that one would typically use for something like this, or a tornado warning, wildfire, etc, and ignore the 'amber alert' level, that one would use for amber alerts, and send out EVERY GODDAMN ALERT at the 'Presidential Level' alert that would typically be used to announce something like, I dunno, Nuclear ICBMs inbound.

Which m

I thought this was a joke, but apparently it's not. This raises all kinds of constitutional issues regarding equal protection.

[1]https://www.chp.ca.gov/Pages/E... [ca.gov]

...An Ebony Alert is a resource available to law enforcement agencies investigating the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of a black woman or black person.

[1] https://www.chp.ca.gov/Pages/Ebony-Alert.aspx