Amber Alert: Californians confused, angry and startled

The problem seems to be a misunderstanding of scale - This system was designed for natural disasters, nuclear wars, and large-scale public address. Mass dissemination of mundane information is quite frankly unwarranted; Even if everyone should receive this alert, they should simply get a buzz and notification, not a full warning and reading of text.

I got this alert last night, woke me any my wife up and we were irritated and confused. The level of the alert was vastly disproportionate to the relevancy and severity of the issue. It was a very poor implementation of a reasonable idea.

The idea of getting more eyes on Amber Alerts is a fundamentally good one, I think we can all agree on that.<p>I think a far superior option to these kinds of active, &quot;HEY LOOK AT ME&quot; alerts would be something that could fit in passively but draw just as much viewership, and not just on phones.<p>Imagine if, when an Amber Alert was out in your area, the alert showed up in your Twitter and Facebook feeds, your phone&#x27;s lock screen, and maybe even above your email inbox. Sure, some people would probably mentally (or actually) filter these out just like they filter out ads, but it&#x27;s preferable to everyone getting annoyed by the alerts and turning them off entirely.

That seems like an incredibly odd system to be deployed, and to be used for that particular incident at that time.

While I understand why they made this system on by default and opt-out, I feel like that&#x27;s unethical and should have been opt-in. Adding such things to people&#x27;s phones without their permission is a bad action done with good intentions.<p>Making it impossible to disable Presidential alerts is even worse.

Discussion last night (&quot;Just got an Amber Alert ...&quot;): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6165026</a> had predominantly &quot;think of the children, how can you complain about your minor inconvenience&quot; prevailing tone.<p>I wonder what makes this thread so different. More people are focused on the costs as well as the benefits (I agree that the costs are significant). If it&#x27;s not just a random difference in the initial seeding of comments, I&#x27;d have to guess that it&#x27;s the authority of latimes.com talking about how (many!) Californians are startled etc. Now this is a safe, approved line of thought.<p>This calls into suspicion the independence of the typical HN comment. If you&#x27;re just posting to be seen on the prevailing side, why comment at all? The less deeply you think before talking, the more you&#x27;re swayed by subtle priming and attention-focusing trivia.<p>Also interesting, a years-ago attempt to shame Apple into enabling Amber alerts: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509741" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=509741</a><p>It sounds like a less intrusive amber-alert UI (a regular text, for example) would be accepted by most, although I&#x27;m sure if you tally up the attention spent vs. the increased odds of catching a criminal vs. increased harassment of near-matches, it&#x27;s not a clear win.

If the goal of the iPhone Amber Alert feature was to wake people up, induce panic, then get them to turn alerts off...it&#x27;s working.<p>A good example of the law of unintended consequences.

&gt; Most newer phones are automatically set up to receive the alerts -- which look like text messages but are free -- meaning customers must contact their cell service provider to opt out of the program.<p>FWIW, on the iPhone, AMBER is a switch under notifications; you don&#x27;t have to contact anyone to turn it off. (The alerts also come with a &quot;Settings&quot; button to help users turn them off if the notification was unwelcome.)

About a week ago my phone went bonkers with a weather alert, warning of potential flash floods. I would say this was roughly as distracting as an air raid siren... it wasn&#x27;t raining and to my knowledge no flash floods actually came to visit destruction upon the Philadelphia region that day.<p>It seems absurd that there&#x27;s no setting in iOS to disable this nonsense without calling up the phone company. Can we at least have a graduated system of alert terrifyingness out of which to opt?

The way Android does Amber Alerts, which IIRC I have been getting for at least 2 years now, seems much more agreeable. That said I am surprised this just came up. I get an Amber Alert on my phone every couple of months or so.<p>Is this a regional based thing where it was just enabled in California so for whatever reason something that has been going on for awhile now finally hit the national news? Or is this alert format new to iOS? Basically, why haven&#x27;t we heard about people in other cities complaining? (Or were they just ignored?)

This is what it sounds like. I had no idea my phone make that sound. lol<p><a href="http://youtu.be/y2tj4vz8qX0?t=55s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;y2tj4vz8qX0?t=55s</a>

I was asleep when it went off and my immediate thought was that my phone had some sort of LiOn-battery-about-to-explode warning system. It freaked me out.

Was this Amber Alert geo-targetted? I never even heard of Boulevard, CA, which is 500 miles away from my home.

Um... I received that this morning but my phone was on silent so I didn&#x27;t hear a damn thing. I did see it on my phone when I looked at it, but no big deal. Android was nice enough to say &#x27;You just received an emergency alert. Do you want to continue receiving these? Yes&#x2F;No&#x27;.

I admit to not knowing how effective Amber Alerts are. Perhaps the cell phone alerts are overkill and should be opt-in. However, are the commenters here really claiming the abduction of two children after their mother was slain to be &#x27;mundane&#x27; or &#x27;trivial?&#x27;

My girlfriend got this last night. Scared the shit out of us with a bunch of beeping and buzzing. Then just went away as soon as we looked at it...we still don&#x27;t know what the actual alert was for.

If a alert sounded like that in Brazil, people would instantly panic and think we are under attack by US.<p>Using a alert like that for something trivial is VERY, VERY, VERY stupid.<p>It should be just a normal SMS...

People are actually angry over this? If you are sleeping put your phone on silent or do not disturb. If you aren&#x27;t how inconvenient is one text message?

tl;dr An amber alert went out to people&#x27;s phones, here are 5 tweets about it.