I don’t have the option yet on my iPhone, but when I do - I will be sure to deselect it. I can not stand these amber alerts when I see them on cable. So far all of them have been license plates to look out for. Exactly what do they expect me to do?
Go outside and look for the car? - I’m watching TV.
White it down and look for it later? Yeah - ill also read the terms of service for the next website I sign up for.
It makes sense to have these on the road signs - or even highly targeted based on GPS location, but I’ve seen people getting these like 600 miles away and stuff. At 4:30 am when you are in bed? That is just stupid and is going to turn people off.
If it saves one kid? Yeah - right. How about when it distracts one driver and they kill someone.
I don’t really mind as long as you can opt out - as I tend to think more stuff would serve society well if it was opt out. But it sounds like this is poorly thought out - and many would keep it on if it just acted like a regular text message rather than something that suggested the world was ending.
At least with cell phones you might be out and about and the perp could actually be nearby.
But we get these on our DVR. Sitting in our family room. And the alerts are incredibly vague: “3 year old girl last seen in a white car” type stuff. And they cannot be disabled, cannot be turned off. All you can do is mute it or turn off the TV for a bit.
Look, I’m not going to see a 3 year old in a car in my family room, okay? It’s not being heartless, just practical.
(The current DVR does the alerts in real time as well as adding them if you are recording. So you sometimes get an alert that’s a week or two old. Not such a bright idea either.)
They already have a bunch of freeway signs that show this information. Those are great, because they’re passive and they’re in the place where people are most likely to actually see the car. Mass alerts to phones are less effective and way more annoying.
I work for a wireless service provider. We have 30 live display phones in the store. A few months back some bad weather moved through the area. The weather service sent out six alerts that day. Every G-D phone went off. Annoying.
We now have the alerts disabled. Except for the Presidential ones. So now if the phones go off I’m just going to put my head between my knees and kiss my ass goodbye.
I hope they don’t decide these alerts need to be tested on a regular basis, like the ones on the cable television are. Someone needs to come up with a way to turn this off.
I have no problem with getting Amber Alerts on my phone. Send me a text and I’ll be more than happy to read it.
My problem is having something activated on my phone, without my knowledge and then having that thing send off an alarm that is loud and jarring enough to potentially scare me while driving, especially since this particular alarm is hugely worse than the regular EBS alert that we get for weather alerts.
I got one of these alerts a couple weeks ago when there were tornado warnings for my county. My phone (an older model Droid) made a noise I had never heard before and what looked like the Red Cross logo flashed on the screen. I was already jumpy from the sirens going off, I nearly peed myself when the phone went off.
I found out after the fact that I have a pre-installed app on my phone that let me turn off everything but the Presidential alerts, and like someone said upthread if we ever get one of those I’ll be kissing my ass goodbye.
I already get text alerts for weather, Amber alerts and other breaking news from a local news station. One alert’s enough, thankyouverymuch.
I did a quick search on these and came upon an article that said a Presidential Alert has never been issued. Yeah, if we ever get one, it’s time to either duck and cover, or bend over and kiss your sweet arse goodbye.
You’ve missed a key point. Yes, Amber Alerts are generally a good thing, and I can certainly keep my eyes out for that silver 1981 Toyota Corolla with license plates XYZ123.
But when an alert is forced on your phone without your knowledge and it’s defaulted to ON, and when it goes off late at night and sounds like the world is ending and you have no idea where that godAwfulNoise is coming from, you likely won’t be so understanding.
The first 24 hours of an abduction are the most crucial. Delaying an alert until morning can be the difference between a live person and a dead one.
I’ve never gotten an Amber Alert to my TV, but I have to my radio, and it sounds alarming for a reason! You want people to notice.
Yes, having it opt-out and loud is an inconvenience for the, what, maybe 3 times a year you’ll get one? But like I said in my original post, if it was your kid/relation, you’d want everyone to be hearing it immediately.
This kind of argument shows up all the time, and it’s simply wrong.
Yes, if my kid or my friend’s kid were missing, and I had the power to buzz everyone’s phone, I’d do it. In fact, forget the phones. Shut down the airports. Call in the National Guard. Nation-wide manhunt.
But, obviously, those latter responses are not reasonable. Which is why we don’t set policy based on “what if it was your kid”. That leads to a disproportionate response that causes more harm than good.
So, is it reasonable to alert millions of phones to be on the lookout when a child goes missing? Maybe. Let’s have that discussion while thinking rationally about the benefits and the costs, not about how someone would react emotionally to their own child’s disappearance
Benefits: How likely is the alert to lead to saving the child?
Costs: How many people are going to be woken up? Not getting enough sleep leads to worse driving and more car crashes, for one. There are almost 40 million people in California and a bit less than 3000 auto deaths a year. If you buzz the whole state, are you adding 1 more death? 10? 1/100th of a death?
I agree in theory. I would leave it on if it were a text message. What is the point of a loud noise? Either I’m awake and I can view a text message and take action. Or I’m asleep and there is fuckall I can do about it until morning because the car in question is NOT in my bed.
I live in CA and was woken up at 11:30 a couple of nights ago by my first Amber alert on the phone. It was a very loud scary noise, I woke up fumbling with my phone and the baby monitor until I woke up enough to determine what was happening.
When I left for work the next morning, the same alert for a blue Nissan Versa was visible at my entrance ramp to the highway. The Amber alert on my phone was completely useless in this case.
Horseback riders spotted the suspect and teenager in Idaho, but Idaho hadn’t put out an AA yet. Once the riders saw a news report that night, they called it into police. But I’m thinking if Idaho had put out the AA on time, cell phone alerts would have been perfect, because if the riders didn’t get the alert until they got to a TV or digital road sign, there’s a greater chance they’d see it via cell phone and every second counts. Pretend the sighting was in California - someone gets the text message alert in the middle of the night, realizes they saw them in the woods earlier, calls it into police immediately. Otherwise they wouldn’t get the alert until morning when they turn on the TV. That ~6 hour time window could be the difference between life and death.
I know I’m sounding stubborn on this point, but I follow a lot of missing persons cases, particularly children. The amount of people who could have been found alive if the public knew sooner bothers me.
"Rigorous empirical support for AMBER Alert’s effectiveness has been lacking, but since its inception program advocates and public safety officials have lauded the system’s ability to “save lives”, often basing their optimism on AMBER Alert “success” stories. However, in this paper quantitative and qualitative analyses of 333 publicized and celebrated AMBER Alert “successes” suggest AMBER Alerts rarely result in the retrieval of abducted children from clearly “life-threatening” situations, and that most of the publicized successes involved relatively benign abductors and unthreatening circumstances."