9 ms·

Don't squander public trust on bullshit

284 points by NavinF 2y ago

NavinF 2y ago
>I don’t know who Seth Altman is, nor do I care. Why? Because Seth Altman’s offense took place in Lubbock, Texas. I live in Austin, Texas. Four hundred miles away. What I do care about however is the misuse of emergency alert systems and public trust. >Sending out a screeching alert to 30million+ people over 250 million square miles in the middle of the night should only be used in the absolute DIREST OF CIRCUMSTANCES… circumstances like “Texas is under threat from hurricane/chemical leak/nuclear weapons, seek shelter now!” It should never be used for something that’s utterly irrelevant to 99.99% of people.
ungreased0675 2y ago
I couldn’t agree more. Add amber alerts into this bucket too. Emergency, emergency little Deborah Smith was kidnapped by her mom Sue Smith! I’m sure there’s usually more to the story, but half of them sound like custody disputes. I’m not sure public officials understand how fragile public trust and support is. Stop chipping away at it please.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  I've seen numbers as low as 80% and as high as "over 90%" of kidnappings as being by a parent. It's not easy to get good numbers since we have to estimate what fraction of "missing" children are actually "abducted" children. For children reported missing: Over 1/4 of are abducted by a family member, about 8% are kidnapped by a non-family member. You'll note that this leaves nearly 2/3 of missing children as not being classified as abducted. > I’m sure there’s usually more to the story, but half of them sound like custody disputes. I mean if you classify forcing a minor to live as a fugitive while telling them that their other parent doesn't want them and will hurt them as a "custody dispute" then yeah.
  - atq2119 2y ago
    > I mean if you classify forcing a minor to live as a fugitive while telling them that their other parent doesn't want them and will hurt them as a "custody dispute" then yeah. Regardless of how you want to label it, that doesn't sound like a case that merits use of a public emergency broadcast system.
Triphibian 2y ago
It is standard operating procedure to abuse a contact once you acquire it. They're just doing what every other business and institution does on the Internet.
unsnap_biceps 2y ago
I've never heard of a "blue alert" before. Turns out it's a department of justice thing. https://cops.usdoj.gov/bluealert https://cops.usdoj.gov/bluealert While my heart goes out to anyone hurt in the line of duty, I'm in total agreement that this is a extreme over-reaction to the public.
- tdeck 2y ago
  The purpose of blue alerts is to broadcast copaganda, period. It's not a solution to any problem.
  - 123yawaworht456 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - burner_in_ma 2y ago
      I promise you there are and your country is better for it.
  - ryaneager 2y ago
    100%, this alert went out because an officer was injured and for some reason that means that they get to see blood and just kill anything in sight legally.
didgetmaster 2y ago
[flagged]
- TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
  [flagged]
RecycledEle 2y ago
Texas Cops do not care about causing a few heart attacks and a few traffic accidents when they are mad about someone hurting a cop. Source: I live in Texas.
- saywhanow 2y ago
  They’re not that mad; they’re only offering $10k for information leading to his arrest. That’s less than Texas brings in via civil forfeiture on an average day.
- 20after4 2y ago
  This attitude is not unique to Texas. Pretty sure it's nation-wide. Actually, without evidence I would still presume that it's pretty much world wide.
throwaway81523 2y ago
I gotta wonder if some of this is liability CYA. Like if the guy in the alert runs amuck and kills someone, the agencies will get asked "why didn't you do X to stop him", such as wake up everyone in Texas at 5 in the morning. I had a buddy who worked as a lifeguard at a local swimming hole. If there was a major accident (person needs immediate medical attention), they'd call an ambulance "code three", i.e. lights and sirens and run over any pedestrians in the way, or something like that. If the situation was less dire, they'd call it as code two, getting a less risky intervention. So of course at some point, someone in a minor accident got taken in on a code two call and developed some complications that might have been avoided with slightly less delay. IDK if there was a lawsuit or what, but from then on, even minor incidents had to be called as code 3. This is why we can't have nice things.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  These are Texas public alerts. I don't think they are CYA. I think they are due to lack of investment in government.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  The only solution to CYA is a written policy: this is the criteria for when we Code Three, and only then. "Why didn't this incident get Code Three?" "Because it didn't meet the criteria." You'll still get complaints, but at least it's in writing.
  - Analemma_ 2y ago
    The problem is, written policy doesn't count for anything if you can still be sued for obeying the policy. And if you can't be sued for following the policy, that's guaranteed release from liability, and the public haaaaates that. Vaccine companies have release from liability, for example, because otherwise nobody would make a product which is more-or-less mandatory and guarantees at least some complications over a large enough sample size, and this has spawned an entire culture of angry conspiracy theories. There's no mechanistic way around this problem other than user education.
123yawaworht456 2y ago
I had a similar thought when they were testing alarm sirens (like these https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/f9/Motorsirene_-_Feuerwehralarm.ogg/Motorsirene_-_Feuerwehralarm.ogg.mp3 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/...) in my city recently. they do it every few years, and I doubt anyone pays attention at this point. it's the proverbial wolf-crying boy kind of thing. how did it not occur to the people in charge of that alarm system is beyond me.
- night862 2y ago
  Cya and everything looks like a nail syndrome from my position. There’s no downside for cops to do this, they get free publicity and these are federal programs to lean on. Apparently there’s little oversight accountability or basic constraints as well. Oh well!
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  That's kinda funny, they test ours monthly around here and I still trust them cause every few years they go off for real tornado conditions
  - Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
    I concur, not sure how annual testing would dilute the significance unless the fact it was a test wasn’t disclosed at all.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > every few years The tornado sirens here get tested at noon on Saturdays.
  - NavinF 2y ago
    Why? I doubt they break often and it's easy to buy two of them. Testing them more than once a year seems kinda pointless
    - 2y ago
fijiaarone 2y ago
Willing to bet this wasn’t a shooting as claimed, but a personal squabble. He probably got pulled over by the police, talked back, and then drove away, bumping the officer with his side mirror. Officer got mad because he didn’t get the last word, and sent out the alert.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I'll take your bet, and I'll trust you to be honest in retrospect about how much money you'd have wagered. > Just after 11 p.m. Thursday, investigators say Plant and another officer were serving an arrest warrant for burglary when Altman opened fire and ran away. > Investigators report Altman ran out the back door, shot Chief Plant and fled the scene. Chief Plant was transported to a hospital here in Lubbock, where he is stable. https://www.kcbd.com/2024/10/04/texas-police-chief-brought-lubbock-hospital-manhunt-underway-shooting-suspect/ https://www.kcbd.com/2024/10/04/texas-police-chief-brought-l...
santoshalper 2y ago
But he injured a police officer, which according to the police, is the second worst crime is existence.
wakawaka28 2y ago
Why is this coming up only now? Amber Alerts and various other fringe alerts have all the same issues as a general warning about a violent criminal. What I really hate is when the weather alert system is abused to communicate other information. Weather is relevant to my life. All these other alerts are irrelevant to me because the probability of a homebody in a big city spotting a person or car based on a generic description is exceedingly low. I should be able to elect to receive only alerts I am interested in.
- missingcolours 2y ago
  2 unique things: - Texas, unlike other states, seems to blast all of their emergency alerts statewide (and it's a big state) - Unlike other alerts, this was sent as a public safety emergency alert (not amber alert, which most Texans turn off due to the aforementioned point) and sent at 4am, meaning it woke up almost the entire state
chaps 2y ago
City of Chicago did some strange geofenced text messages to folk in westside Chicago to get people to go inside during the early COVID days. From leaked emails: Hey folks, We have a situation on Westside neighborhoods (specifically CPD 11th District) where folks between the ages of 16-25 are congregating outside in groups and not heeding the shelter in place message. Mayor would like to know if we can do a targeted texting in that geography to spread the following messages: [...] 3. CPD will do a verbal warning but if you repeatedly disregard the warning, CPD will issue citations and/or arrest. 4. By not following these directives, you are putting yourself at risk but also your family members, particularly those who live with you who are elderly or sick. Not sure who is in charge but I think I have included all relevant people here. If not, please add. Can you tell me if such a geo-coded texting is possible and when we might be able to put it out? We probably need to do it on a regular basis for the message to sink in. Let everyone on this chain know. ========== I'm sorry, but WEA is not intended for that type of usage. It is supposed to be used in dire emergencies only. People have the ability to opt out of messages at any time. If we inundate them with messages they do not find useful, they will opt out and won't be alerted the next time we have an Active Shooter Incident, Tornado Warning, Ordered Evacuation, Amber Alert, or some other extreme situation. ========== Anna and I spoke. CPD believes Saturday at 5 pm would be a good time to send out the next one. Perhaps once a week but we will monitor the dispersal orders to see if this is a continued need. Thank you for flexibility. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20652293-re_-geocoding-the-text-message-for-westside_31-03-2020_5929pdf https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20652293-re_-geocodi...
- jart 2y ago
  Oh my gosh these government workers. What were they thinking? "Hey guys! If minorities don't fear COVID then we'll abuse the emergency alert system to threaten them with something they do fear: cops. Just be extra sure it's geofenced to the economically disadvantaged sectors."
jampa 2y ago
In the same vein, I think the same happens with my corporate email, which "potential vendors" abuse so much that is just spam now. I receive so many emails directly to my inbox, where it seems like a legitimate reason to contact me and then I realize that they want just to sell me something. And if you don't block them they send emails every day with something dismissive like: "If you cannot make the decision, redirect to someone in your company that can", or "I guess you are too busy now but...". With AI, the emails are becoming even worse, someone mentioned the college I attended and tried to get a fun fact "I saw you attended X, did you enjoy the winter festival?". We never had that.
- abound 2y ago
  > With AI, the emails are becoming even worse, someone mentioned the college I attended and tried to get a fun fact "I saw you attended X, did you enjoy the winter festival?". We never had that. I just got one of these for the first time today: > Saw on LinkedIn that you attended <my university>. Did you ever experience the Sustainability Festival? This is my corp email as well, and the spam filter only catches maybe ~80% of these types of spam. Very frustrating.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  The one Microsoft AI which I wouldn't try to immediately disable in the registry is if they added something to outlook to auto-reply and waste these people's time.
  - wombatpm 2y ago
    I still believe that spam bots vs anti spam bots is how we’ll eventually evolve true artificial AI
missingcolours 2y ago
The root of the issue seems to be the longstanding deficiency that Texas either cannot or does not localize their emergency alerts at all. I've lived in 2 other decently large states including California and left Amber Alerts enabled because they were infrequent and caused me no trouble - and they were infrequent because you only got alerts for your immediate area. As soon as I moved to Texas I had to disable them because they're all statewide, so your phone just gets blown up with them if you disable them. Alerting a 5 mile radius about a killer on the loose is reasonable. A 600+ mile radius is not.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  Similar to your earlier experience, I have only ever gotten alerts that were proximate to my present location, though I do live in a state smaller than Texas. I probably get about one amber alert per quarter, and severe weather alerts a few times a year. I’ve never gotten a “blue” alert in my life.
- ndiddy 2y ago
  Texas definitely can localize their emergency alerts. This alert got sent over the same channel as emergency weather alerts, which get localized per county. It's more that they choose not to localize the alerts.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - bburnett44 2y ago
      Oh boy, having worked w government/elected officials a lot, I can tell you that this is just for sure not true. Sometimes bad behavior really is just incompetence
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Even if it was ‘just incompetence’ 95% of the time it would still be irrelevant to the average HN reader, since the remaining 5% would still be too much to ever feasibly track. As there are tens of thousands of government departments, offices, committees, etc… with some amount of decision making power. And as there are an exponentially large number of subtle ways the 5% of bad apples could influence the 95%, via a few degrees of separation, that cannot be easily reasoned out.
changing1999 2y ago
This is very unfortunate. I had to disable all emergency alerts on my iPhone because of similar misuse that #1 has no effect on me personally (the way e.g. a tsunami potentially would) and #2 is completely unactionable (a missing person of some vague description in a different city).
rdschouw 2y ago
You can turn them off. I used to live in NJ and they sent these types of alerts all the time. AMBER alerts in the middle of the night, "Flash Flood" alerts after two drops of rain. It made no sense and I turned them all of off. I live in IL now and I turned them back on because tornados are actually a thing here but also I haven't received any other irrelevant alert.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  The whole point of the text was that you should not misuse public trust or else people will do that. It was only like two paragraphs...
EdwardDiego 2y ago
This happened when I was in LA for work, everyone's phone went off with the emergency notice noise, I thought there was a big quake happening. Nope, it was an elderly person who had wandered off from a rest home, in some far part of LA. Scared the shit out of me.
csharpminor 2y ago
I find it fascinating how communication channels are subject to some form of Goodhart’s law. Channels that are recognized as valuable by subscribers become more desirable by publishers, receive more noise, and then cease to be useful.
- thwarted 2y ago
  Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
- gavmor 2y ago
  A crowd at the gym makes the gym less useful, so fewer people attend the gym, and it oscillates. A negative feedback loop. A crowded channel grows noisier, but there's no feedback. Can a gamed metric become valuable again, or does it likewise expire? "Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback."
  - josephg 2y ago
    The reaction is that people disable notifications. Only, it’s really hard to get data on this as a publisher. You just, silently, get decreasing click-through rates on subsequent messages. “This app would like to send you push notifications!” -> Deny. “It’s just for (legitimate reason)!” Fine. “And marketing!” -> Uninstall app. “Are you sure?” - I’ve never been more sure in my life. There’s a setting in chrome & Firefox to block websites from even being able to ask for the ability to send notifications. It’s one of the first things I set when I setup a new computer.
    - eastbound 2y ago
      I literally subscribed a professional software for accounting ($400pm). In it, there is a chatbot. It’s horrible enough. The chatbot popped out an ad. What do people think, we’re on Netflix?
  - oehpr 2y ago
    It's funny because in a group crowded channel there is feedback so long as you are part of the channel. But I think even in those circumstances, the feedback you get from the noise of everybody else, you don't interpret that as the same thing as you sending just "your one message". Humans are really bad at understanding distributed harms.
lmaoguy 2y ago
After the mess the USG has made out of Helene recovery, I do believe public trust is dead and buried.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  I remember after Hurricane Katrina, the silly notion I had in my head that the government can protect us in emergencies evaporated and never came back. I anticipate that any large nationwide emergency such as a nuclear attack would be total chaos for a very very long time.
  - immibis 2y ago
    For me it was when the (German) government kicked my door down and said hey you, you're homeless now.
- burner_in_ma 2y ago
  You misspelled "when Bush Jr. and Cheney stole an election in broad daylight."
Rocka24 2y ago
I wonder if they could send the messages to certain counties that are actually relevant to the "breaking" news. Geography based sorting of phone numbers to what I assume must be addresses could be a security issue though so not entirely sure. A better solution could be alert settings that would alert for violent crimes/amber alerts/natural disasters(which should never have the option to be disabled) and maybe a downtime period during the night similar to do not disturb mode on iOS devices that only have exceptions for natural disasters. A system that robust would need integration with individual phone manufacturers like airplane mode which has proven to be efficient.
- bigiain 2y ago
  They can do that here in Australia. I've had 6 SMS messages from the Police in the last 12 months, all for missing persons, every singe one of which is in my suburb or an adjacent one. But cops are gonna cop. I'd bet if they were chasing someone who'd shot a cop they'd SMS blast the entire country, because fuck you civilians! ACAB
- mook 2y ago
  They can limit messages based on which cell towers you're connected to. Of course, over here they do Amber Alerts on the main emergency channel for things the next state over instead…
  - Rocka24 2y ago
    I wonder if folks get amber alerts if they only use satellite based connectivity. I'm willing to be that Apple will have it automatically enabled in iOS 18.
neilv 2y ago
I think it's three times so far that I've removed myself from a gov't emergency alert service, due to poor use of it. Once I was awaked by an ungodly alarm noise that I didn't know my smartphone could make, and which should only be used for something apocalyptic like a tsunami warning (e.g., you have 3 minutes to get to the top of the hill, or you will probably die). Some kind of Amber Alert, to the greater metro area of millions of people. So I disabled it. And, on a local emergency alert thing, someone used it to announce a city street cleaning or routine snow removal. I then went some trouble to opt-out of the alerts, more than it took to opt-in, like they wanted me to waive liability. (Speaking of street cleaning, if only I could get the city to stop routinely driving a truck up and down the street in early morning, blaring numerous times over loudspeakers that there's a street cleaning sometime in the next couple hours, and any cars should be moved before they are towed. Rolling through the streets, making stern announcements on loudspeakers, to be heard inside homes, is what you do to announce that you have invaded the city with tanks, and anyone caught outside will be shot. Not to repeatedly wake up a neighborhood of sleep-deprived students and researchers and hospital workers, who mostly don't even own cars.) I'd think we're incapable of handling any real emergency, except I spent awhile listening in on local emergency services radio (police, fire, ambulance), and it's really impressive how on the ball in an emergency some can be. I wish some others -- who don't seem to have that training, experience, and discipline -- wouldn't grab the emergency alerts ball, and drop it.
- c22 2y ago
  I had to disable these alerts on my devices after some similar spurious experiences. It's too bad there was no way to simply change the alert sound or volume because I might have done that.
  - boneitis 2y ago
    I just can't comprehend why there isn't more general backlash on this (rhetorically speaking). If the ability to disable all alerts outright wasn't a thing, I would very seriously entertain the idea of going back to a dumbphone. If given the means to change it to my normal notification sound, or heck, even my regular alarm... then sure, why not keep the alerts enabled.
csours 2y ago
These phone alerts (including Amber Alerts) have the WORST UX. To make the noise stop, you have to hit the "ok" button, but as soon as you hit the "ok" button, they disappear. So if you want to actually read it, you have to endure the loudest and most distracting noise your phone makes. It is technically possible to find the messages after dismissing them, but you have to dig through a bunch of menus, they don't show up in any default messaging app (at least on stock Pixel Android)
- wombatpm 2y ago
  Amber Alerts in general seem broken. It was sold on the promise of mobilizing the general population to look for missing children as soon as possible. But there is no feedback. I never get a notification that an alert has been canceled. No statistics about effectiveness. Did the alert generate tips, help solve the case? Was it something other than a custody dispute?
mdale 2y ago
I was in a co-working space where it said "earthquake take cover"; on everyone's phone at once and then the earthquake hit very soon after. I guess it was enough time to get under a desk but everyone was just confused and then maybe even more stressed by the time the earthquake hit.
woleium 2y ago
Good old alert fatigue, the killer of many people.
landedgentry 2y ago
These alert systems could definitely be abused. In January 2024, the Taiwan government issued an erroneous "presidential alert" to the entire country of 23 million people, warning of a "missile" from China. Occurring just days before a presidential election, some allege that sending the alert was politically motivated. Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/world/asia/taiwan-alert-chinese-flyover.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/world/asia/taiwan-alert-c...
rjmill 2y ago
I turned off the alerts, and felt like an idiot after the storms here in NC. Until I realized that the "severe flooding" warning would have been indistinguishable from the one that goes off whenever there's a nontrivial amount of rain (which is quite often during hurricane season.) Luckily, it ended up not mattering for me. At best, it would have just explained why my trash cans had wandered into the neighbor's yard.
mrandish 2y ago
I very quickly disabled all the different levels of alerts that I could. There was one I couldn't disable but I've also never gotten one of those.
- greenavocado 2y ago
  That would be the presidential alert
vages 2y ago
Visiting Seoul, I would get alerts several times a day, written in Hangul. Seoul being close to the border with North-Korea, I first suspected that they were about missile tests. When I got an app to translate the messages, they were all about lost elders. Seoul is a city of 10 million people.
crimsoneer 2y ago
This seems to be a specifically American problem? Here in the UK, emergency alerts were tested once and not really seen any use since
- fredoralive 2y ago
  The UK has only just gained an emergency alert system though (suspired they didn't test it twice because of the "except for users on Three, who will be blissfully ignorant of Armageddon" result of the test). Give it time, I'm sure people will slowly find IMPORTANT REASONS to use it that erode it from a major disaster alert type thing to a noise.
kazinator 2y ago
In my neck of the woods, they bug people with this shit over people's child custody situations. A pair of kids were "abducted" ... by a well-identified woman bearing the same last name as the kids. They're in a SUV whose license plate is known, because it's her registered vehicle. Like, if I saw them, I would totally not do a thing to interfere with their lives, so fuck off with the alert, you know? That's not an emergency; that's Jerry Springer material.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
The US alert system has severity levels. I think there are amber alerts (child abduction), two "regular" severity levels, and then "presidential alerts" (meant for "the aliens have invaded" or "nukes inbound"). By law, presidential alerts cannot be disabled - but users can still turn the whole feature off. I'd assume that within the US, only the president or a high-ranking delegate is authorized to send these alerts, preserving the ability for these to actually work even if local authorities decide to flood people with bullshit on the lower levels. Canada, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that it really wants people to not turn off Amber alerts (frequently sent in the middle of the night), so of course they use the code for presidential alerts to send them... Part of the reason for the bad UX of these alerts is that they're legally regulated, and the laws are, or at least were overly specific, often preventing better solutions like letting the users configure the alarm behavior (i.e. you have to turn amber alerts off if you don't want to be woken up by them, rather than turning them into a regular notification). And since it's a regulated topic, even the improvements that would be possible would require legal review, i.e. once the feature is "good enough", few developers want to touch it and subject themselves to bureaucracy hell. This system is based on cell broadcast - cell towers can send a message that will be received by all phones, without having to send it to each phone individually. The messages have channel numbers, and a set of channels are reserved for this use and most modern phones will display messages sent with those channels as alerts. That's also why e.g. Canada can seamlessly use (and abuse) the system originally designed for the US. I think severity levels are the saving grace of any overused alerting system. Swiss severe weather alerts also have severity levels, and while the default in some of the alerting apps is excessively sensitive (notifying for rain or wind that does not pose meaningful risk unless you're out hiking), it's very clear that you can just raise the threshold rather than opt out.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  I believe the option of sending out a presidential alert on 9/11 was considered, but rejected because those are only supposed to be for really really really big emergencies. That's how you use this system responsibly.
neya 2y ago
On iPhone, there is no easy way to disable this bullshit either.
nicbou 2y ago
It took me less than 24 hours to disable alerts after arriving in Korea. They are just nonstop and barely above the weather in terms of relevance. In Germany we get a yearly test and that’s about it. I have been here 9 years and I think it’s the first year the test worked on my device. In Romania you sometimes got bear alerts per SMS, even with a foreign number. It was less intrusive and kind of cool.
red_admiral 2y ago
For android apps, messages/popups/alerts come in categories, and you can turn them off in the settings precisely be cause the OS developers anticipated that there'd be difference of opinion between users and app developers on what the user really wants to see. It feels like we need something similar for "emergency" alerts. Tornado is an emergency. Invasion is an emergency. Nuclear launch detected is an emergency. A shooting 400 miles away is a tragedy, but not a cause to immediately seek shelter. On iOS, I believe you can get banned from the app store if you use notifications irresponsibly. Maybe Apple should have a word with Texas.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  It's a great feature but the abuse continued because there's no enforcement that alerts actually get split up, so most apps just have a single channel and pile important/useful alerts in with marketing BS anyway. Basically every app I use to actually interact with a service has done this, and therefore has notification permissions removed (or I outright uninstall the app when I don't need it)
red_admiral 2y ago
From Scott Alexander: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez Chavez became a dictator, among other things, by _abusing the emergency alert system_ to broadcast his speeches on socialism.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Apparently I forgot to turn these off on my last upgrade to the personal snitch. Done, well done pigs.
tim333 2y ago
I'm British but got one of those thing when I visited Austin for a couple of weeks. Some lady 40 miles away wasn't sure where her child had gotten to. I agree the system could do with some fine tuning. I'm not aware that we have such a thing in the UK.
- psd1 2y ago
  We do; it was tested nationally a couple of years ago and, AFAIK, unused since then
GLAMCINEMA 2y ago
[flagged]
GiorgioG 2y ago
During hurricane Helene our area (Raleigh, NC) received a tornado warning that told people to “TAKE SHELTER” causing people to panic. My wife and kids were hiding in our pantry. My parents were at a medical center and they were moved to a stairwell for “safety reasons”. It’s impossible to predict exactly where a tornado will occur (or if one will occur.) I’m all for being diligent, but telling an entire regional area to take shelter over this will eventually cause people to stop taking these things seriously. I was on a work call at the time and basically just paid attention to the weather but didn’t (IMO) overreact.
MountainArras 2y ago
[dead]
naming_the_user 2y ago
In the UK I've never had an "alert" on my phone. If I got more than maybe, two or three in a year, I'd probably just disable it entirely, if my phone didn't let me, I'd get one that did. If anything really important happens I'll know about it when I hear everyone stampeding out of their house and sirens blaring and whatnot.

284 points by NavinF 2y ago

>I don’t know who Seth Altman is, nor do I care. Why? Because Seth Altman’s offense took place in Lubbock, Texas. I live in Austin, Texas. Four hundred miles away. What I do care about however is the misuse of emergency alert systems and public trust. >Sending out a screeching alert to 30million+ people over 250 million square miles in the middle of the night should only be used in the absolute DIREST OF CIRCUMSTANCES… circumstances like “Texas is under threat from hurricane/chemical leak/nuclear weapons, seek shelter now!” It should never be used for something that’s utterly irrelevant to 99.99% of people.

ungreased0675 2y ago

I couldn’t agree more. Add amber alerts into this bucket too. Emergency, emergency little Deborah Smith was kidnapped by her mom Sue Smith! I’m sure there’s usually more to the story, but half of them sound like custody disputes. I’m not sure public officials understand how fragile public trust and support is. Stop chipping away at it please.

aidenn0 2y ago
I've seen numbers as low as 80% and as high as "over 90%" of kidnappings as being by a parent. It's not easy to get good numbers since we have to estimate what fraction of "missing" children are actually "abducted" children. For children reported missing: Over 1/4 of are abducted by a family member, about 8% are kidnapped by a non-family member. You'll note that this leaves nearly 2/3 of missing children as not being classified as abducted. > I’m sure there’s usually more to the story, but half of them sound like custody disputes. I mean if you classify forcing a minor to live as a fugitive while telling them that their other parent doesn't want them and will hurt them as a "custody dispute" then yeah.
- atq2119 2y ago
  > I mean if you classify forcing a minor to live as a fugitive while telling them that their other parent doesn't want them and will hurt them as a "custody dispute" then yeah. Regardless of how you want to label it, that doesn't sound like a case that merits use of a public emergency broadcast system.

Triphibian 2y ago

It is standard operating procedure to abuse a contact once you acquire it. They're just doing what every other business and institution does on the Internet.

unsnap_biceps 2y ago

I've never heard of a "blue alert" before. Turns out it's a department of justice thing. https://cops.usdoj.gov/bluealert https://cops.usdoj.gov/bluealert While my heart goes out to anyone hurt in the line of duty, I'm in total agreement that this is a extreme over-reaction to the public.

tdeck 2y ago
The purpose of blue alerts is to broadcast copaganda, period. It's not a solution to any problem.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - burner_in_ma 2y ago
    I promise you there are and your country is better for it.
- ryaneager 2y ago
  100%, this alert went out because an officer was injured and for some reason that means that they get to see blood and just kill anything in sight legally.

didgetmaster 2y ago

[flagged]

TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
[flagged]

RecycledEle 2y ago

Texas Cops do not care about causing a few heart attacks and a few traffic accidents when they are mad about someone hurting a cop. Source: I live in Texas.

saywhanow 2y ago
They’re not that mad; they’re only offering $10k for information leading to his arrest. That’s less than Texas brings in via civil forfeiture on an average day.
20after4 2y ago
This attitude is not unique to Texas. Pretty sure it's nation-wide. Actually, without evidence I would still presume that it's pretty much world wide.

throwaway81523 2y ago

I gotta wonder if some of this is liability CYA. Like if the guy in the alert runs amuck and kills someone, the agencies will get asked "why didn't you do X to stop him", such as wake up everyone in Texas at 5 in the morning. I had a buddy who worked as a lifeguard at a local swimming hole. If there was a major accident (person needs immediate medical attention), they'd call an ambulance "code three", i.e. lights and sirens and run over any pedestrians in the way, or something like that. If the situation was less dire, they'd call it as code two, getting a less risky intervention. So of course at some point, someone in a minor accident got taken in on a code two call and developed some complications that might have been avoided with slightly less delay. IDK if there was a lawsuit or what, but from then on, even minor incidents had to be called as code 3. This is why we can't have nice things.

Eisenstein 2y ago
These are Texas public alerts. I don't think they are CYA. I think they are due to lack of investment in government.
AlbertCory 2y ago
The only solution to CYA is a written policy: this is the criteria for when we Code Three, and only then. "Why didn't this incident get Code Three?" "Because it didn't meet the criteria." You'll still get complaints, but at least it's in writing.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  The problem is, written policy doesn't count for anything if you can still be sued for obeying the policy. And if you can't be sued for following the policy, that's guaranteed release from liability, and the public haaaaates that. Vaccine companies have release from liability, for example, because otherwise nobody would make a product which is more-or-less mandatory and guarantees at least some complications over a large enough sample size, and this has spawned an entire culture of angry conspiracy theories. There's no mechanistic way around this problem other than user education.

123yawaworht456 2y ago

I had a similar thought when they were testing alarm sirens (like these https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/f9/Motorsirene_-_Feuerwehralarm.ogg/Motorsirene_-_Feuerwehralarm.ogg.mp3 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/...) in my city recently. they do it every few years, and I doubt anyone pays attention at this point. it's the proverbial wolf-crying boy kind of thing. how did it not occur to the people in charge of that alarm system is beyond me.

night862 2y ago
Cya and everything looks like a nail syndrome from my position. There’s no downside for cops to do this, they get free publicity and these are federal programs to lean on. Apparently there’s little oversight accountability or basic constraints as well. Oh well!
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
That's kinda funny, they test ours monthly around here and I still trust them cause every few years they go off for real tornado conditions
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  I concur, not sure how annual testing would dilute the significance unless the fact it was a test wasn’t disclosed at all.
tbrownaw 2y ago
> every few years The tornado sirens here get tested at noon on Saturdays.
- NavinF 2y ago
  Why? I doubt they break often and it's easy to buy two of them. Testing them more than once a year seems kinda pointless
  - 2y ago

fijiaarone 2y ago

Willing to bet this wasn’t a shooting as claimed, but a personal squabble. He probably got pulled over by the police, talked back, and then drove away, bumping the officer with his side mirror. Officer got mad because he didn’t get the last word, and sent out the alert.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I'll take your bet, and I'll trust you to be honest in retrospect about how much money you'd have wagered. > Just after 11 p.m. Thursday, investigators say Plant and another officer were serving an arrest warrant for burglary when Altman opened fire and ran away. > Investigators report Altman ran out the back door, shot Chief Plant and fled the scene. Chief Plant was transported to a hospital here in Lubbock, where he is stable. https://www.kcbd.com/2024/10/04/texas-police-chief-brought-lubbock-hospital-manhunt-underway-shooting-suspect/ https://www.kcbd.com/2024/10/04/texas-police-chief-brought-l...

santoshalper 2y ago

But he injured a police officer, which according to the police, is the second worst crime is existence.

wakawaka28 2y ago

Why is this coming up only now? Amber Alerts and various other fringe alerts have all the same issues as a general warning about a violent criminal. What I really hate is when the weather alert system is abused to communicate other information. Weather is relevant to my life. All these other alerts are irrelevant to me because the probability of a homebody in a big city spotting a person or car based on a generic description is exceedingly low. I should be able to elect to receive only alerts I am interested in.

missingcolours 2y ago
2 unique things: - Texas, unlike other states, seems to blast all of their emergency alerts statewide (and it's a big state) - Unlike other alerts, this was sent as a public safety emergency alert (not amber alert, which most Texans turn off due to the aforementioned point) and sent at 4am, meaning it woke up almost the entire state

chaps 2y ago

City of Chicago did some strange geofenced text messages to folk in westside Chicago to get people to go inside during the early COVID days. From leaked emails: Hey folks, We have a situation on Westside neighborhoods (specifically CPD 11th District) where folks between the ages of 16-25 are congregating outside in groups and not heeding the shelter in place message. Mayor would like to know if we can do a targeted texting in that geography to spread the following messages: [...] 3. CPD will do a verbal warning but if you repeatedly disregard the warning, CPD will issue citations and/or arrest. 4. By not following these directives, you are putting yourself at risk but also your family members, particularly those who live with you who are elderly or sick. Not sure who is in charge but I think I have included all relevant people here. If not, please add. Can you tell me if such a geo-coded texting is possible and when we might be able to put it out? We probably need to do it on a regular basis for the message to sink in. Let everyone on this chain know. ========== I'm sorry, but WEA is not intended for that type of usage. It is supposed to be used in dire emergencies only. People have the ability to opt out of messages at any time. If we inundate them with messages they do not find useful, they will opt out and won't be alerted the next time we have an Active Shooter Incident, Tornado Warning, Ordered Evacuation, Amber Alert, or some other extreme situation. ========== Anna and I spoke. CPD believes Saturday at 5 pm would be a good time to send out the next one. Perhaps once a week but we will monitor the dispersal orders to see if this is a continued need. Thank you for flexibility. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20652293-re_-geocoding-the-text-message-for-westside_31-03-2020_5929pdf https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20652293-re_-geocodi...

jart 2y ago
Oh my gosh these government workers. What were they thinking? "Hey guys! If minorities don't fear COVID then we'll abuse the emergency alert system to threaten them with something they do fear: cops. Just be extra sure it's geofenced to the economically disadvantaged sectors."

jampa 2y ago

In the same vein, I think the same happens with my corporate email, which "potential vendors" abuse so much that is just spam now. I receive so many emails directly to my inbox, where it seems like a legitimate reason to contact me and then I realize that they want just to sell me something. And if you don't block them they send emails every day with something dismissive like: "If you cannot make the decision, redirect to someone in your company that can", or "I guess you are too busy now but...". With AI, the emails are becoming even worse, someone mentioned the college I attended and tried to get a fun fact "I saw you attended X, did you enjoy the winter festival?". We never had that.

abound 2y ago
> With AI, the emails are becoming even worse, someone mentioned the college I attended and tried to get a fun fact "I saw you attended X, did you enjoy the winter festival?". We never had that. I just got one of these for the first time today: > Saw on LinkedIn that you attended <my university>. Did you ever experience the Sustainability Festival? This is my corp email as well, and the spam filter only catches maybe ~80% of these types of spam. Very frustrating.
red_admiral 2y ago
The one Microsoft AI which I wouldn't try to immediately disable in the registry is if they added something to outlook to auto-reply and waste these people's time.
- wombatpm 2y ago
  I still believe that spam bots vs anti spam bots is how we’ll eventually evolve true artificial AI

missingcolours 2y ago

The root of the issue seems to be the longstanding deficiency that Texas either cannot or does not localize their emergency alerts at all. I've lived in 2 other decently large states including California and left Amber Alerts enabled because they were infrequent and caused me no trouble - and they were infrequent because you only got alerts for your immediate area. As soon as I moved to Texas I had to disable them because they're all statewide, so your phone just gets blown up with them if you disable them. Alerting a 5 mile radius about a killer on the loose is reasonable. A 600+ mile radius is not.

Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
Similar to your earlier experience, I have only ever gotten alerts that were proximate to my present location, though I do live in a state smaller than Texas. I probably get about one amber alert per quarter, and severe weather alerts a few times a year. I’ve never gotten a “blue” alert in my life.
ndiddy 2y ago
Texas definitely can localize their emergency alerts. This alert got sent over the same channel as emergency weather alerts, which get localized per county. It's more that they choose not to localize the alerts.
- Loughla 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bburnett44 2y ago
    Oh boy, having worked w government/elected officials a lot, I can tell you that this is just for sure not true. Sometimes bad behavior really is just incompetence
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Even if it was ‘just incompetence’ 95% of the time it would still be irrelevant to the average HN reader, since the remaining 5% would still be too much to ever feasibly track. As there are tens of thousands of government departments, offices, committees, etc… with some amount of decision making power. And as there are an exponentially large number of subtle ways the 5% of bad apples could influence the 95%, via a few degrees of separation, that cannot be easily reasoned out.

changing1999 2y ago

This is very unfortunate. I had to disable all emergency alerts on my iPhone because of similar misuse that #1 has no effect on me personally (the way e.g. a tsunami potentially would) and #2 is completely unactionable (a missing person of some vague description in a different city).

rdschouw 2y ago

You can turn them off. I used to live in NJ and they sent these types of alerts all the time. AMBER alerts in the middle of the night, "Flash Flood" alerts after two drops of rain. It made no sense and I turned them all of off. I live in IL now and I turned them back on because tornados are actually a thing here but also I haven't received any other irrelevant alert.

Eisenstein 2y ago
The whole point of the text was that you should not misuse public trust or else people will do that. It was only like two paragraphs...

EdwardDiego 2y ago

This happened when I was in LA for work, everyone's phone went off with the emergency notice noise, I thought there was a big quake happening. Nope, it was an elderly person who had wandered off from a rest home, in some far part of LA. Scared the shit out of me.

csharpminor 2y ago

I find it fascinating how communication channels are subject to some form of Goodhart’s law. Channels that are recognized as valuable by subscribers become more desirable by publishers, receive more noise, and then cease to be useful.

thwarted 2y ago
Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
gavmor 2y ago
A crowd at the gym makes the gym less useful, so fewer people attend the gym, and it oscillates. A negative feedback loop. A crowded channel grows noisier, but there's no feedback. Can a gamed metric become valuable again, or does it likewise expire? "Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback."
- josephg 2y ago
  The reaction is that people disable notifications. Only, it’s really hard to get data on this as a publisher. You just, silently, get decreasing click-through rates on subsequent messages. “This app would like to send you push notifications!” -> Deny. “It’s just for (legitimate reason)!” Fine. “And marketing!” -> Uninstall app. “Are you sure?” - I’ve never been more sure in my life. There’s a setting in chrome & Firefox to block websites from even being able to ask for the ability to send notifications. It’s one of the first things I set when I setup a new computer.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    I literally subscribed a professional software for accounting ($400pm). In it, there is a chatbot. It’s horrible enough. The chatbot popped out an ad. What do people think, we’re on Netflix?
- oehpr 2y ago
  It's funny because in a group crowded channel there is feedback so long as you are part of the channel. But I think even in those circumstances, the feedback you get from the noise of everybody else, you don't interpret that as the same thing as you sending just "your one message". Humans are really bad at understanding distributed harms.

lmaoguy 2y ago

After the mess the USG has made out of Helene recovery, I do believe public trust is dead and buried.

Mistletoe 2y ago
I remember after Hurricane Katrina, the silly notion I had in my head that the government can protect us in emergencies evaporated and never came back. I anticipate that any large nationwide emergency such as a nuclear attack would be total chaos for a very very long time.
- immibis 2y ago
  For me it was when the (German) government kicked my door down and said hey you, you're homeless now.
burner_in_ma 2y ago
You misspelled "when Bush Jr. and Cheney stole an election in broad daylight."

Rocka24 2y ago

I wonder if they could send the messages to certain counties that are actually relevant to the "breaking" news. Geography based sorting of phone numbers to what I assume must be addresses could be a security issue though so not entirely sure. A better solution could be alert settings that would alert for violent crimes/amber alerts/natural disasters(which should never have the option to be disabled) and maybe a downtime period during the night similar to do not disturb mode on iOS devices that only have exceptions for natural disasters. A system that robust would need integration with individual phone manufacturers like airplane mode which has proven to be efficient.

bigiain 2y ago
They can do that here in Australia. I've had 6 SMS messages from the Police in the last 12 months, all for missing persons, every singe one of which is in my suburb or an adjacent one. But cops are gonna cop. I'd bet if they were chasing someone who'd shot a cop they'd SMS blast the entire country, because fuck you civilians! ACAB
mook 2y ago
They can limit messages based on which cell towers you're connected to. Of course, over here they do Amber Alerts on the main emergency channel for things the next state over instead…
- Rocka24 2y ago
  I wonder if folks get amber alerts if they only use satellite based connectivity. I'm willing to be that Apple will have it automatically enabled in iOS 18.

neilv 2y ago

I think it's three times so far that I've removed myself from a gov't emergency alert service, due to poor use of it. Once I was awaked by an ungodly alarm noise that I didn't know my smartphone could make, and which should only be used for something apocalyptic like a tsunami warning (e.g., you have 3 minutes to get to the top of the hill, or you will probably die). Some kind of Amber Alert, to the greater metro area of millions of people. So I disabled it. And, on a local emergency alert thing, someone used it to announce a city street cleaning or routine snow removal. I then went some trouble to opt-out of the alerts, more than it took to opt-in, like they wanted me to waive liability. (Speaking of street cleaning, if only I could get the city to stop routinely driving a truck up and down the street in early morning, blaring numerous times over loudspeakers that there's a street cleaning sometime in the next couple hours, and any cars should be moved before they are towed. Rolling through the streets, making stern announcements on loudspeakers, to be heard inside homes, is what you do to announce that you have invaded the city with tanks, and anyone caught outside will be shot. Not to repeatedly wake up a neighborhood of sleep-deprived students and researchers and hospital workers, who mostly don't even own cars.) I'd think we're incapable of handling any real emergency, except I spent awhile listening in on local emergency services radio (police, fire, ambulance), and it's really impressive how on the ball in an emergency some can be. I wish some others -- who don't seem to have that training, experience, and discipline -- wouldn't grab the emergency alerts ball, and drop it.

c22 2y ago
I had to disable these alerts on my devices after some similar spurious experiences. It's too bad there was no way to simply change the alert sound or volume because I might have done that.
- boneitis 2y ago
  I just can't comprehend why there isn't more general backlash on this (rhetorically speaking). If the ability to disable all alerts outright wasn't a thing, I would very seriously entertain the idea of going back to a dumbphone. If given the means to change it to my normal notification sound, or heck, even my regular alarm... then sure, why not keep the alerts enabled.

csours 2y ago

These phone alerts (including Amber Alerts) have the WORST UX. To make the noise stop, you have to hit the "ok" button, but as soon as you hit the "ok" button, they disappear. So if you want to actually read it, you have to endure the loudest and most distracting noise your phone makes. It is technically possible to find the messages after dismissing them, but you have to dig through a bunch of menus, they don't show up in any default messaging app (at least on stock Pixel Android)

wombatpm 2y ago
Amber Alerts in general seem broken. It was sold on the promise of mobilizing the general population to look for missing children as soon as possible. But there is no feedback. I never get a notification that an alert has been canceled. No statistics about effectiveness. Did the alert generate tips, help solve the case? Was it something other than a custody dispute?

mdale 2y ago

I was in a co-working space where it said "earthquake take cover"; on everyone's phone at once and then the earthquake hit very soon after. I guess it was enough time to get under a desk but everyone was just confused and then maybe even more stressed by the time the earthquake hit.

woleium 2y ago

Good old alert fatigue, the killer of many people.

landedgentry 2y ago

These alert systems could definitely be abused. In January 2024, the Taiwan government issued an erroneous "presidential alert" to the entire country of 23 million people, warning of a "missile" from China. Occurring just days before a presidential election, some allege that sending the alert was politically motivated. Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/world/asia/taiwan-alert-chinese-flyover.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/world/asia/taiwan-alert-c...

rjmill 2y ago

I turned off the alerts, and felt like an idiot after the storms here in NC. Until I realized that the "severe flooding" warning would have been indistinguishable from the one that goes off whenever there's a nontrivial amount of rain (which is quite often during hurricane season.) Luckily, it ended up not mattering for me. At best, it would have just explained why my trash cans had wandered into the neighbor's yard.

mrandish 2y ago

I very quickly disabled all the different levels of alerts that I could. There was one I couldn't disable but I've also never gotten one of those.

greenavocado 2y ago
That would be the presidential alert

vages 2y ago

Visiting Seoul, I would get alerts several times a day, written in Hangul. Seoul being close to the border with North-Korea, I first suspected that they were about missile tests. When I got an app to translate the messages, they were all about lost elders. Seoul is a city of 10 million people.

crimsoneer 2y ago

This seems to be a specifically American problem? Here in the UK, emergency alerts were tested once and not really seen any use since

fredoralive 2y ago
The UK has only just gained an emergency alert system though (suspired they didn't test it twice because of the "except for users on Three, who will be blissfully ignorant of Armageddon" result of the test). Give it time, I'm sure people will slowly find IMPORTANT REASONS to use it that erode it from a major disaster alert type thing to a noise.

kazinator 2y ago

In my neck of the woods, they bug people with this shit over people's child custody situations. A pair of kids were "abducted" ... by a well-identified woman bearing the same last name as the kids. They're in a SUV whose license plate is known, because it's her registered vehicle. Like, if I saw them, I would totally not do a thing to interfere with their lives, so fuck off with the alert, you know? That's not an emergency; that's Jerry Springer material.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

The US alert system has severity levels. I think there are amber alerts (child abduction), two "regular" severity levels, and then "presidential alerts" (meant for "the aliens have invaded" or "nukes inbound"). By law, presidential alerts cannot be disabled - but users can still turn the whole feature off. I'd assume that within the US, only the president or a high-ranking delegate is authorized to send these alerts, preserving the ability for these to actually work even if local authorities decide to flood people with bullshit on the lower levels. Canada, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that it really wants people to not turn off Amber alerts (frequently sent in the middle of the night), so of course they use the code for presidential alerts to send them... Part of the reason for the bad UX of these alerts is that they're legally regulated, and the laws are, or at least were overly specific, often preventing better solutions like letting the users configure the alarm behavior (i.e. you have to turn amber alerts off if you don't want to be woken up by them, rather than turning them into a regular notification). And since it's a regulated topic, even the improvements that would be possible would require legal review, i.e. once the feature is "good enough", few developers want to touch it and subject themselves to bureaucracy hell. This system is based on cell broadcast - cell towers can send a message that will be received by all phones, without having to send it to each phone individually. The messages have channel numbers, and a set of channels are reserved for this use and most modern phones will display messages sent with those channels as alerts. That's also why e.g. Canada can seamlessly use (and abuse) the system originally designed for the US. I think severity levels are the saving grace of any overused alerting system. Swiss severe weather alerts also have severity levels, and while the default in some of the alerting apps is excessively sensitive (notifying for rain or wind that does not pose meaningful risk unless you're out hiking), it's very clear that you can just raise the threshold rather than opt out.

red_admiral 2y ago
I believe the option of sending out a presidential alert on 9/11 was considered, but rejected because those are only supposed to be for really really really big emergencies. That's how you use this system responsibly.

neya 2y ago

On iPhone, there is no easy way to disable this bullshit either.

nicbou 2y ago

It took me less than 24 hours to disable alerts after arriving in Korea. They are just nonstop and barely above the weather in terms of relevance. In Germany we get a yearly test and that’s about it. I have been here 9 years and I think it’s the first year the test worked on my device. In Romania you sometimes got bear alerts per SMS, even with a foreign number. It was less intrusive and kind of cool.

red_admiral 2y ago

For android apps, messages/popups/alerts come in categories, and you can turn them off in the settings precisely be cause the OS developers anticipated that there'd be difference of opinion between users and app developers on what the user really wants to see. It feels like we need something similar for "emergency" alerts. Tornado is an emergency. Invasion is an emergency. Nuclear launch detected is an emergency. A shooting 400 miles away is a tragedy, but not a cause to immediately seek shelter. On iOS, I believe you can get banned from the app store if you use notifications irresponsibly. Maybe Apple should have a word with Texas.

rcxdude 2y ago
It's a great feature but the abuse continued because there's no enforcement that alerts actually get split up, so most apps just have a single channel and pile important/useful alerts in with marketing BS anyway. Basically every app I use to actually interact with a service has done this, and therefore has notification permissions removed (or I outright uninstall the app when I don't need it)

red_admiral 2y ago

From Scott Alexander: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez Chavez became a dictator, among other things, by _abusing the emergency alert system_ to broadcast his speeches on socialism.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Apparently I forgot to turn these off on my last upgrade to the personal snitch. Done, well done pigs.

tim333 2y ago

I'm British but got one of those thing when I visited Austin for a couple of weeks. Some lady 40 miles away wasn't sure where her child had gotten to. I agree the system could do with some fine tuning. I'm not aware that we have such a thing in the UK.

psd1 2y ago
We do; it was tested nationally a couple of years ago and, AFAIK, unused since then

GLAMCINEMA 2y ago

[flagged]

GiorgioG 2y ago

During hurricane Helene our area (Raleigh, NC) received a tornado warning that told people to “TAKE SHELTER” causing people to panic. My wife and kids were hiding in our pantry. My parents were at a medical center and they were moved to a stairwell for “safety reasons”. It’s impossible to predict exactly where a tornado will occur (or if one will occur.) I’m all for being diligent, but telling an entire regional area to take shelter over this will eventually cause people to stop taking these things seriously. I was on a work call at the time and basically just paid attention to the weather but didn’t (IMO) overreact.

MountainArras 2y ago

[dead]

naming_the_user 2y ago

In the UK I've never had an "alert" on my phone. If I got more than maybe, two or three in a year, I'd probably just disable it entirely, if my phone didn't let me, I'd get one that did. If anything really important happens I'll know about it when I hear everyone stampeding out of their house and sirens blaring and whatnot.