Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.
I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state.
I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off.
The system may have started with good intentions, but it was mismanaged and abused so much that it became useless.
Sure, that might not work well when I'm on travel, but when I'm on travel I'm typically in places with a ton of built-in mass notifications systems (airports, metro & train stations, roadside state DOT banners) so I don't feel I'm missing out.
Maybe go with the UX best practice of allowing the user to choose how they want to be alerted? Is that so hard? Government can't get basic shit like this right, I wonder how they're handling the rest of it...
Isn't part of the issue that when a child is taken, the assumption is that the kidnapper will immediately flee the area? I think hundreds, plural, might be excessive, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to notify people within a certain distance based on high speed and how much time has passed; maybe 50-100 miles?
I can see getting annoyed at multiple messages, but it's also important to remember that working with time sensitive emergency services is a extraordinarily difficult thing. It's like, everything is important all at once, and your mind can only process it all so fast. It's extremely time sensitive, and if you mess up any of the details, you are directly delaying the proceedings.
I haven't had to issue anything like an Amber Alert, thank God, but I did have to relay some information from a victims family to a supporting organization, and basically screwed it up the first time around. I ended up having to end the call with the family, call the organization to see what they needed, call the family back, then call them again with the relevant details. It was an incredibly brutal thing. You can feel the rawness of the emotion through the phone for the people. In my own experience, like, I could hear people crying and screaming in the background. It's this insanely personal moment for them, but you kind of have to force your way in the middle of it to make something happen. The person who I started off with had to hand the phone over because they thought they were about to pass out. It's really a very difficult to communicate in the midst of a crisis.
Anyway, I'm not sure which area you're in, but from my own experience, the very few times I've gotten one, it was always very succinct and clear. Child's name, description of their clothes, make/model/license plate of car, which direction they were headed, and when it happened.
I certainly don't blame you for turning off the alerts, or for being annoyed at the emergency services. The point wasn't to finger wag or whatever, it was just to say that it's extremely difficult to do, let alone do well.
States vary as to how effectively they run their alerting systems, and how well they follow best practices, but that is ultimately an issue for the voters.
In my own assessment, I classify that person to be dangerous. A stranger takes a child for an unknown reason. A parent takes a child, willingly harming the child physically or mentally in hopes of doing harm to a person they hate. I would assume they are willing to do far more than mere mental harm to the child, if it means "winning" the fight. I don't have any data to back that up, and it's entirely possible I'm wrong. I just don't see an Amber Alert being raised because a parent took the child to be any less serious than if a stranger took the child.
I would imagine that some number of Amber Alerts are a kind of "false positive", something like failing to drop a child off on time (out of gas, severe traffic, etc.) and their phone dying, turning into a big ordeal, but I just wouldn't discount the situation just because the suspect is a parent. Maybe that shouldn't meet the threshold, but I just personally don't see it as being a big enough nuisance to be bothered by it. Again, it is easy for me to say that though, since I don't get those sorts of alerts very often, maybe 2 to 3 times per year, if that.
I do also completely agree though, that as it relates to headphone usage it should be changed. I think that if you are listening on your headphones, it shouldn't come through your headphones at all. Just play the noise on the phone speaker - it'll probably still draw the users attention. I might be asking too much though, as there was that 911 bug [1][2] a while back.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29492884
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/r4xz1f/pixel_p...
To be honest I wonder if the people in charge were starting to get a kick at waking up so many people, or if they were engaging in some sort of malicious compliance, e.g., maybe the people responsible for sending the alerts out are also pretty pissed off at being woken up to send them out. The stated reason for them existing leaves no room for there to be any reason to be sending these out at 3am, if neither the abductee nor the putative abductor were known to be nocturnal.
I doubt it. The messages were just incremental additions of information as it was added: First message had something about the area. Second message had the color of the vehicle. Third one added another detail or a correction or something, I can’t remember.
I just remember that everyone in my local office was visibly tired the next day and we all shared the information to turn the alerts off.
And then they don't even send another alert saying she was found safe and sound sleeping at her dad's house.
A missing child in a custody dispute alone is rarely enough to trigger an alert.
One of the leading types of child abductions leading to alerts is vehicle theft with a child in the vehicle. Not a custody dispute.
"The vast majority of child abductions are carried out by a relative or close acquaintance of the victim, often a divorced parent who was not granted custody... about 20 percent involved a kidnapping by a stranger or slight acquaintance of the child. In the other 80 percent of cases, the youngsters were taken by a relative (most often a parent) or an acquaintance (frequently a babysitter)."
source: https://psmag.com/social-justice/amber-alerts-largely-ineffe...
"Presumably because of that need "to make an intuitive, rapid decision," as Griffin puts it, AMBER Alerts often turn out to be false alarms. Of the alerts the UNR team tracked, about 20 percent involved a kidnapping by a stranger or slight acquaintance of the child.
In the other 80 percent of cases, the youngsters were taken by a relative (most often a parent) or an acquaintance (frequently a babysitter). While such incidents can be traumatic to both the child and the custodial parent, they are routinely resolved peacefully."
There may be a way to turn off the "Watch" alerts and still keep the "we are gonna die" alerts. The one time we got the green sky of doom the phone did explode in a way not normally seen, so I assume they know something about crying wolf.
As for amber alerts being useless - something like 90% (?) of the time it's a custody dispute where one parent hasn't returned the kid at the appointed time.
Once you know about them, they're relatively easy to spot (look in areas near power plants, downstream of dams, etc).
You can find some here and use them as ringtones!
https://www.whelenmassnotification.com/recorded-message-libr...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-phone-4...
Even older parents called their kids to find out how to make sure it does not happen again.
Many abductions are vehicle thefts where the thief takes off without noticing or caring that there is a child in the car.
In one recent case, the thief threw the baby out the window into a ditch. Citizens who received the Amber alert found the child.
The government mandated stuff just needs to be turned off because it's broken.
It IS fun to get the weather warning and then run outside and hear the air-raid siren begin to warm up.
In Texas my iPhone has this alert granularity: AMBER Emergency Public Safety Test
If the local government is sane, they send WARNING and (unnamed) only - (unnamed) being the YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD MAKE YOUR TIME notices.
Then if you want WATCH you set your weather app to notify you on those.