Amber Alert: Californians confused, angry and startled

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-amber-alert-california-angry-20130806,0,2233972.story

by shill • 13 years ago

38 60 13 years ago

latimes.com

BgSpnnrs• 13 years ago

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

dmix• 13 years ago

But think of the children.

numo163• 13 years ago

It also exists for severe weather situations. Got a tornado warning alert on my phone in June in my area advising to take shelter (had 5 tornadoes touch down in the area that night). I thought it was pretty cool, since I don't watch TV and didn't think to check the weather.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

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

nickmain2• 13 years ago

It wasn't a normal "ding!" text message - it was sirens and all-hell-breaking-loose.

hitsurume• 13 years ago

Yea, me and my roommate were completely confused to why our phones went off. Not only that once you close the alert you can't find ANY history of it or the message that was displayed. Needs to be a better system for this.

nexox• 13 years ago

Yep, these kept going off on the (crowded) train this morning, and I thought they were some sort of fire alarm. It didn't help that everyone assumed the noise was not coming from their phone (because they'd never heard it before or found a configuration page for it,) so they mostly just let it go off while looking around for the source. The whole ride was more than a bit surreal.

jdcarter• 13 years ago

I have my iPhone set to do-not-disturb, yet a couple months ago in Colorado I received an Amber Alert, and it made plenty of noise regardless of my settings.

The frustrating part is the lack of contextual info in the alert message. Mine said something about a car and its color, but nothing about the abducted child, area where he/she went missing from, etc.. It simply wasn't enough info to be useful to anyone.

rco87862• 13 years ago

Angry is pretty strong. But I am one of the ones this happened to and let me tell you, it was not pleasant. The alert was more like "oh shit take cover in a bomb shelter" than "hey, be on the lookout for this". Not to mention that after the initial alarm that gave practically no information the whole thing disappeared.

If you're gonna send out an alert as disturbing as that one, at least include some relevant information.

j_baker• 13 years ago

I want emergency notifications to wake me up. When the message came out, my phone made the exact same noise you hear for emergency broadcasts. I expected my phone to give me a message regarding a storm or a coming earthquake, but I instead got a pointless amber alert.

This is a great way to destroy the credibility of our emergency alert system.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

> "but I instead got a pointless amber alert"

That sounds like the real issue here then. I'm sure there are others like you who found it useless but quite a lot of people who think it's a great idea. They need to offer a few on/of switches in the settings for types of alert (weather, terrorism, amber alert etc.).

jjindev• 13 years ago

This was full on alarm and blinking lights on my old Android Droid X. About 30x the sound volume of a text message.

It only woke me up, but I wondered how smart they were. I mean, someone driving might have been shocked into an accident. The cost-benefit of a really loud system might be more cost.

rtkwe2• 13 years ago

These _emergency_ notifications like alarm clocks don't respect silent or do not disturb. It's also that most people haven't experienced it before which adds to the annoyance of being woken up in the middle of the night by the jarring noise. It's really not surprising that people aren't thrilled about it.

nickmain2• 13 years ago

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.

cbabraham• 13 years ago

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

GauntletWizard• 13 years ago

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.

saurik3• 13 years ago

Which system are you talking about? The AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, named after a specific child abduction case that I remember watching the news reports of with my parents while in high school) Alert system is specificaly designed for child abduction.

I actually am not certain if there is a similar large-scale system for "natural disasters [or] nuclear wars". In Santa Barbara (a specific county) we have a way to sign up for that kind of alert run by the "County Office of Emergency Management", but AMBER operates over a much larger arena. Sure, war might sound important, but think of the children!

The AMBER Alert™ Program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases. The goal of an AMBER Alert is to instantly galvanize the entire community to assist in the search for and the safe recovery of the child.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

I think he means the regional emergency message system thing on cellphones. That system(s ?) is currently meant to be used by several things (most commonly dangerous weather I think. I recall getting "flash flood" warnings with it before in Philly.), and was presumably not initially created for AMBER Alerts.

Stuff this sort of system would really be useful for is things like Tsunami warnings. I assume it is use for that where applicable.

rtkwe2• 13 years ago

There's the Emergency Alert System [1] which has been around much longer, in various forms back to the 60s. It's mostly used for sever weather alerts from NOAA, it's the crawl you see on the bottom of broadcast TV some times. It can be activated nationally though.

aclimatt• 13 years ago

While I'm not sure of your phone's implementation, all I received was indeed a buzz and notification, not some "full warning and reading of text" or an absurd "complement of a 10-second spurt of high-pitched noise and buzzing."

Does iOS have some ridiculous implementation? Because for Android and SMS users to get horribly inconvenienced by the sound of a text message at 10PM with information about a child abduction sounds quite insensitive. At best.

avolcano• 13 years ago

The idea of getting more eyes on Amber Alerts is a fundamentally good one, I think we can all agree on that.

I think a far superior option to these kinds of active, "HEY LOOK AT ME" alerts would be something that could fit in passively but draw just as much viewership, and not just on phones.

Imagine if, when an Amber Alert was out in your area, the alert showed up in your Twitter and Facebook feeds, your phone'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's preferable to everyone getting annoyed by the alerts and turning them off entirely.

betterunix3• 13 years ago

"The idea of getting more eyes on Amber Alerts is a fundamentally good one, I think we can all agree on that."

Can we? It is not clear that the Amber Alert system is an effective way to find kidnapped children, and it may actually cause more harm than good.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/...

http://www.psmag.com/culture/amber-alerts-largely-ineffectiv...

Like most attempts to protect our children from strangers, the Amber Alert system was a knee-jerk reaction to a shocking but exceedingly rare crime.

baddox3• 13 years ago

FYI, for years there have been electronic billboard displays on highways that will display AMBER alerts.

malandrew• 13 years ago

Yesterday, thousands of people probably disabled the alerts on their phone. Classic boy who cried wolf problem. Now these people may not get alerts for legitimate warnings like floods, Tsunamis, war, etc.

This system should also be far more targeted. Sending a blanket message to the whole state is absurd. They should selectively send it to people based on GPS location. Who knows where that kid was abducted, but I'm certain that people on the other side of the state didn't need to know about it.

smacktoward2• 13 years ago

Not necessarily. Any alert system has to walk a very fine line: too few alerts can mean people don't understand what they are or why they're important, but too many alerts leads to people just ignoring them all. Treating them essentially as background noise.

I would imagine that this particular alert system has to deal with this pressure more than most. It's a system that can send an alert to every pocket and purse in the country, complete with audible and visual notification of its arrival. Anyone who has something they want to alert the public about would love to have their alerts go out to that network. But if they all could, it would just train people to ignore the buzzing and flashing -- which could lead to them missing an alert that is genuinely important, such as a dangerous weather event or potential mass-casualty threat in their area.

pgrote• 13 years ago

This is what it sounds like. I had no idea my phone make that sound. lol

http://youtu.be/y2tj4vz8qX0?t=55s

mchusma• 13 years ago

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.

sk5t2• 13 years ago

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't raining and to my knowledge no flash floods actually came to visit destruction upon the Philadelphia region that day.

It seems absurd that there'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?

numo163• 13 years ago

It seems absurd that there's no setting in iOS to disable this nonsense without calling up the phone company

There is: Settings > Notifications > Government Alerts (at the bottom)

sk5t2• 13 years ago

Cool, thanks for the pointer. I'd never scrolled past the start of the enormous list of notification center apps.

volker48• 13 years ago

Yeah it woke me up at 2 AM despite my do not disturb being set during that time.

mitchty• 13 years ago

Don't you want this to alert you for things like floods/earthquakes/etc even with do not disturb? I don't think do not disturb means ignore alerts about weather or other life threatening (to you at least) alerts.

dubfan2• 13 years ago

I disabled the alerts on iPhone by going into Notifications settings, scrolling to the bottom and toggling the Amber Alerts and Emergency Alerts off. This is on an AT&T phone, not sure if it's carrier-specific.

A friend of mine experienced a similar thing before my phone had the capability. His phone went crazy with a "blizzard warning", even though there were no storms around, and I don't believe the NWS has ever issued a blizzard warning for this area.

numo163• 13 years ago

I disabled the alerts on iPhone by going into Notifications settings, scrolling to the bottom and toggling the Amber Alerts and Emergency Alerts off. This is on an AT&T phone, not sure if it's carrier-specific.

Also on Verizon iPhone. Received Tornado warning alert via iPhone Emergency Alert night we had 5 tornadoes...it was awesome!

dkuntz2• 13 years ago

There is a setting in iOS to disable it...

Settings > Notifications > down at the bottom there's a Government Alerts section, with AMBER Alerts and Emergency Alerts toggles.

At least, there is with AT&T, because I recall getting a notification saying my phone's software was updated to be complient with phone company requirements, which added the two toggles.

speeder• 13 years ago

If a alert sounded like that in Brazil, people would instantly panic and think we are under attack by US.

Using a alert like that for something trivial is VERY, VERY, VERY stupid.

It should be just a normal SMS...

rco87862• 13 years ago

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't know what the actual alert was for.

LoganCale2• 13 years ago

While I understand why they made this system on by default and opt-out, I feel like that's unethical and should have been opt-in. Adding such things to people's phones without their permission is a bad action done with good intentions.

Making it impossible to disable Presidential alerts is even worse.

gpvos2• 13 years ago

As long as they tell you about it when you buy the phone, and there's an easy way to opt out, I don't see the problem. And after some time, people will just know that it is turned on by default on new phones.

LoganCale2• 13 years ago

They activated it suddenly in the past couple months on most existing phones without asking, under Congressional orders. And there is no way to opt out of Presidential alerts.

saurik3• 13 years ago

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.

FWIW, on the iPhone, AMBER is a switch under notifications; you don't have to contact anyone to turn it off. (The alerts also come with a "Settings" button to help users turn them off if the notification was unwelcome.)

smacktoward2• 13 years ago

This is true in Android as well, at least on my Galaxy S III running Android 4.1.2. The preference setting on my device is in Messaging > Settings > Emergency Alerts.

com2kid• 13 years ago

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.

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't we heard about people in other cities complaining? (Or were they just ignored?)

donretag• 13 years ago

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

United857• 13 years ago

If the goal of the iPhone Amber Alert feature was to wake people up, induce panic, then get them to turn alerts off...it's working.

A good example of the law of unintended consequences.

antiterra2• 13 years ago

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 'mundane' or 'trivial?'

betterunix3• 13 years ago

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/...

antiterra2• 13 years ago

I already admitted the possibility that Amber Alerts themselves may be overkill and ineffective, so that doesn't really respond to my comment about 'trivial' and 'mundane' descriptors being applied to the actual abduction.

dromidas• 13 years ago

Um... I received that this morning but my phone was on silent so I didn'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 'You just received an emergency alert. Do you want to continue receiving these? Yes/No'.

jongraehl• 13 years ago

Discussion last night ("Just got an Amber Alert ..."): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165026 had predominantly "think of the children, how can you complain about your minor inconvenience" prevailing tone.

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's not just a random difference in the initial seeding of comments, I'd have to guess that it's the authority of latimes.com talking about how (many!) Californians are startled etc. Now this is a safe, approved line of thought.

This calls into suspicion the independence of the typical HN comment. If you're just posting to be seen on the prevailing side, why comment at all? The less deeply you think before talking, the more you're swayed by subtle priming and attention-focusing trivia.

Also interesting, a years-ago attempt to shame Apple into enabling Amber alerts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509741

It sounds like a less intrusive amber-alert UI (a regular text, for example) would be accepted by most, although I'm sure if you tally up the attention spent vs. the increased odds of catching a criminal vs. increased harassment of near-matches, it's not a clear win.

Amber Alert: Californians confused, angry and startled

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