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National emergency alert system outed prisoners hiding phones
- notwhereyouare 3y agoAlso caused some amish people who were/are considering leaving that had phones to get shunned by the community
- SilasX 3y agoI remember seeing an online poster circulate that warned victims of domestic violence to turn off their secret phones during that time window.
- hyperliner 3y ago[dead]
- cuteboy19 3y agoSuch a stupid system. No alert should bypass specific instructions for a phone to be silent. Or at the very least they should do a silent alarm before doing this
- qball 3y ago>No alert should bypass specific instructions for a phone to be silent. Why? Don't you know that bitter custody disputes qualify as national emergencies on par with the outbreak of a natural disaster or nuclear war? Surely the fact that 99.999% of the time it's only used for the former increases the chance the alerts will be taken seriously.
- lithos 3y agoNah the alert system has made itself known more for being utterly necessary to mute. You really don't need to wake up a metropolitan area at 2am because a grandparent "escaped".
- nanoxide 3y agoThis depends on the country though. Here in Germany the system is only used for actual emergencies, like fires or blackouts. It's not used for missing persons and the like. Though there was a warning about an allegedly escaped lion in the wild this summer. Turned out to be just some boars.
- olliej 3y agoAmber alerts and similar can be disabled.
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y agoUnless you're in Canada (possibly only some provinces) where our government has, in their infinite wisdom, decided that all alerts must be broadcast at the presidential level.
- jtokoph 3y agoI have disabled what I thought was all emergency alerts on my iPhone. That was three separate toggles. This alert still came through.
- mmh0000 3y agoVendors aren’t legally allowed to provide a means of disabling “presidential alerts”, which is what the test was. You can disable amber and emergency and public safety alerts, which is what it sounds like you did. Running rooted android with graphene it is possible to disable them.
- jrace 3y agoI wonder how many cheating spouses with burner phones just got outed?
- mikhailfranco 3y agoThe technology exists to monitor and/or block phones in prisons. It's trivial. The authorities in most countries prefer to monitor, rather than ban or block. Presumably the intelligence gain is worth it, or the risk of riot is not worth it.