I just got one at 11:00 o'clock at NIGHT. It was the second I got today. Those air sirens scare the hell out of me. why cant they just reserve the warning noise for natural diasters. I'm okay with getting amber alerts notifications on everyone's phone but theres so no need to play such a spine chilling sound effect.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I want to opt out of amber alerts. Unless it is targeted to a geographic areas and I consent, stop wasting my time and trying to kill me.
100% of the time, I have not seen your child.
I honestly fucking hate these alert texts. They're noise. Theyre disturbing. They're distracting. And they are never EVER relevant to me.
It makes me so fucking angry that the government has some control over my phone that is a direct detriment to my life and yet there is nothing I can do about it.
I'm so sick and fucking tired of you assholes pissing and moaning about amber alerts. Someone's kid is missing. If it was your kid I would want to get the alert in case I was the person who just happened to be standing in front of them in a convenience store or on the street.
Pull your head out of your ass and grow up.
Relevance matters or everyone stops listening. It is not appropriate to spam an entire province.
No, only the self-absorbed entitled navel gazers do.
Thanks for keeping the discussion civil and respectful. Have a great day!
So when you get an amber alert do you jump out of bed and start running down the street looking for children?
I didn't think so.
No, I take a quick look at the alert and if it doesn't apply to me I go back to sleep like an adult, why, what do you do?
I am a light sleeper, whenever I have been woken up by these alerts I've been unable to sleep again for the remainder of the night. Not everybody can fall asleep easily like you do.
And since you feel so angrily about the subject, perhaps you wouldn't be so grumpy if you had a good night's sleep.
No, I'm simply not a self-absorbed navel gazer. I don't expect the government to cater to my every need. I understand that sometimes I will be inconvenienced and I don't throw myself on the floor wailing and tearing at my clothes while lamenting such a minor inconvenience when it happens. Grow up.
I don't throw myself on the floor wailing and tearing at my clothes
But that's exactly what you're doing right now.
"I know you are but what am I?"
That's pathetic.
No, I'm not. I'm pointing out that the vast majority of us are well adjusted functioning members of society who understand that the extremely minor inconvenience of getting a few alerts can, and often does, make the difference between someone getting their kids back and not and were sick tired of the tiny, whiney minority of delicate snowflakes who just can't function if their sleep is interrupted once in a while.
Get over yourself.
The standard that the alert system is based on has different levels of severity defined, but for unknown reasons the implementation that Canada settled on only uses the most serious level for all alerts.
The mechanism for differentiating types of alerts exists, it just needs to be used.
Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue is a fundamental concept in HMI design. I deal more in the industrial side of things, and I've been in the field long enough that I remember when management figured every alarm should always be #1 priority, because why else have alarms? Only thing is if an operator is getting 1000 alarms in a 12 hour shift, the truly important alarms will just be lost in the noise, and a wood chip gets stuck in the acknowledge button while they deal with alarm #382.
My #1 complaint with this amber alert though was that silencing it involved clearing it. There was a fair amount of text in the alarm body, but my phone was screaming at me, so I hit the OK button to silence it… and all the text is gone. The second alarm at 11 pm wasn't any better, but at least I had searched the alarm. This is (I believe) a function of the phone software though, not the government body pushing the alarm. I don't think alarm fatigue is too much of an issue, these were the first two emergency alerts I've gotten on my phone in a while.
Having said that, considering the time the mother and children had been missing, they could easily have made it to my corner of the province, or I might conceivably have seen the vehicle or something earlier in the week when I was in the Okanagan. I would have just appreciated it not continuously wailing at me while I desperately grab my phone. Regardless of what anyone considers about the validity of them receiving this Amber alert, at least on my phone, the Emergency Alert system is absolute rubbish. Even if it were a large scale natural disaster in which immediate action by me could have saved my life, my all too human reaction was to silence the screeching alarm (you have my attention), and then try and recall any snippet of text from the alert so I could search the internet for what the wall of text said. If I am ever in Tofino when a tsunami alert goes out, I'll be looking on my phone searching "BC emergency alert" when the wave washes over me.
There should really be a "Silence" and "Acknowledge" two step for all Emergency Alerts. This system is objectively poorly designed, and I can't help but suspect that it was designed by government bureaucrats and software engineers without any industrial experience. Just about any industry should have a better alarm management philosophy than this.
why cant they just reserve the warning noise for natural diasters
It's your phone software that decides what kind of noise to make, not your province's emergency alert system.
In Ontario anyway they broadcast every emergency at the highest ("presidential") level, so unfortunately I decided to completely remove the emergency alert software from my Android phone. I didn't really want to but I feel it was abused here.
TIL those alerts respect 'do not disturb'.
I keep that on while I sleep.
Unfortunately I can't, because I'm on-call for work so the poorly targeted alerts do nothing but interrupt my sleep.
There is more granularity built into he system, but the Canadian implementation chooses not to use those for some reason.
I'm pretty sure that on most phones you can allow calls from specific callers through on do not disturb
Sadly it doesn't work well on iPhone (with certain apps, anyways). So I don't trust do not disturb/sleep focus mode when on-call.
You can allow apps or individuals to punch through DND/Sleep mode… I guess you’re using some app that doesn’t expose contact, and mixed usage (ie personal and work share same app, but app doesn’t tell iOS who triggered the notification)?
I am incredibly saddened, but not surprised, by the complaints about a loud warning on their phone to watch for missing children in their province.
Some ceiticism is justified. A missing child is an emergency, no doubt. However, within the category of emergencies, there are varying levels of urgency. The cell phone emergency alert system has different levels of urgency, but Canada's implementation always uses the highest level, called "Presidential". Have you ever heard the expression, "if everything is high priority, then nothing is high priority?"
I'm not sure that waking a sleeping person is helpful to the goal of returning a child home safely. However, a sleeping person probably should be woken up if, for example:
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a tornado, wildfire, or hurricaine is heading towards them
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there's an armed and dangerous person in their area
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another nation has launched an attack in their area
My concern is that people are finding ways to mute sounds on all alerts just to avoid having their sleep disturbed by emergent but not top-urgency alerts like missing children alerts, and they may miss missing children alerts during their waking hours as well, or even be put at risk in the case of natural disaster, dangerous manhunt, or foreign attack – the intended use case for the highest, Presidential priority of alert.
I suppose one benefit of waking everyone up could be that someone saw something earlier, and contacts authorities with the information they have sooner, rather than waking up and seeing the alert in the morning.
I'm curious to know your thoughts. Do you think it's more helpful than harmful to have missing children alerts sent on the highest possible priority? I'm keeping an open mind here.
Over here in Ontario province wide amber alerts are sent out a few times a year. Usually in the middle of the night.
I ended up needing to mute the sound on the alerts because there was never anything I could do at 2am, and that way I could still see the alert in the morning.
But now I also don't get the tornado alerts...
It's perfectly valid for people to be frustrated with a good idea that was poorly implemented. The alert system in phones support the ability to have different levels of alerts. But the mobile carriers in Canada didn't want to support that, so instead every alert is sent out at the highest level.
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