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Comment by msingh_5 | Hacker News Reader

These are emergency broadcast alerts. Different countries have different laws on these - and in some countries you might not even be able to disable them.

Just because its listed under "Apps & notifications"/"Wireless emergency alerts", it doesn't mean they are "user settings". Its not necessarily the local "carrier" that turned the settings on, its more that connecting to a cell tower in a particular jurisdiction can enforce receiving emergency alerts.

More on the EU alerts systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU-Alert

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If it's not a user setting, then it shouldn't be listed with all the other user settings, and labeled as something the user has control over. At the very least, any setting that can be overridden by the carrier should have a note or warning next to it, stating that.

The fact that it's so unclear leads me to wonder what other settings -- perhaps some related to my security or privacy -- the carrier can modify without my knowledge.

Hide number setting is something telcos can change remotely, at least its common.

It doesn't really matter what the laws say. When I tell my computer to do something, I expect it to be done, no questions asked. If I tell it to violate a law, I expect that law to be violated. I have free will and the computer must obey that will, not impose somebody else's will on me.

You’re using a utility and you must accept the terms to use that utility. There’s probably some verbiage in your carrier agreement about it.

You can’t disable 911/112 just because you don’t like it either.

9-1-1 doesn’t usually call me at odd hours though.

Is that a thing? At least in this part of the EU, they never ever sound unless it’s a genuine emergency or the monthly test. I’m pretty sure the only reason they would go off is for a tsunami because they don’t even go off for tornados.

Apparently government alerts come though to americans at all times at full volume whenever a parent doesn't return a kid to the other one on time.

I think in the US you can set it to a lower-than-highest level, but in Canada, they send the kid-in-a-custody-dispute ones at the nuclear incident level (which was also sent out by mistake once).

Nothing sadder/funnier than seeing politicians defend their broken system as it increasingly did broken things.

I don't care what the carrier agreement says. If they want to send me the warnings, fine. My phone is perfectly equipped to receive them and will happily display them should I choose to allow it. What's unacceptable to me is forcing my phone to do anything. It doesn't matter to me if there's some piece of paper saying I can't turn them off, I will turn them off and I will resist them if they try to force it on.

I mean, you can try. At some point they may just kick you off the network. No shoes, no shirt, no service. IOW, providers have a right to tell you how and in which fashion you use the service. Just like you can’t walk into a 7/11 butt naked, you apparently can’t go into Germany without enrolling in emergency alerts that probably go off once every decade (not including tests).

Can’t easily disable them in Canada. And all alerts are sent at “presidential” level, while the issuers fail to geo-target them, so you get alerts for “abducted” (usually child custody dispute) several hundred km away.

Buuuuut, these alerts are LTE/5G only, so I’ve set up an iPhone automation to switch my phone to 3G in the evening and back to whatever in the morning to avoid alerts at night. I’ll cry when 3G gets shutdown.

Just because another country has a law does not mean my phone should disregard what I told it to do.

This absolutely is a user setting.

How far we've fallen from sharing the DeCSS flag, to arguing that users shouldn't have control over their devices, and governments and carriers should.

The local (EU) law about emergency broadcast is clear in that it applies to both residents and visitors, and alerts are to be delivered without the need for “opt-in”. In other words, if you’re in range of local services, you must receive the alerts (which, you know, is handy in case of an actual emergency).

Gotcha. I'll just draft a law saying all devices must automatically unencrypt themselves when they enter my country's borders.

Hey, it's the law! You must comply, and for your convenience, your phone will do that automatically for you!

Good grief.

If you do not like the regulation, fight to change it. Do not expect your devices to do the fighting for you.

My devices should absolutely work on my behalf, and only my behalf, i.e. "do the fighting for me".

A better response to these laws would be that the device should just stop working if the settings I have selected conflict with local law. The cell towers are free to refuse to allow my phone to connect. They should send some sort of message to me to tell me what I'd need to do in order to comply with local law and be allowed on the network.

But of course, that wouldn't be convenient, and a lot of people would be confused, and that would generate costly support calls, so they'd rather just violate the sanctity of the things we apparently don't really own and put intrusive hooks into "our" hardware and software.

In the case of this particular requirement -- that wireless alerts be enabled -- I would almost certainly just enable them and go about my day. But reaching into my device and changing things without my consent crosses a line.

You can do that now with nearly all of the big carriers around the world.

You just need to sign a service level agreement along with paying for them to develop that feature and deploy it on your phone.

Given that the fight is between megacorps, megastates and ~mega~individuals, it feels like a slightly uneven fight.

The people who have the power to make the phones vs the people who have the power to make laws and prevent the makers from selling, vs a few individuals who actually care and a large majority who do not have the time to care.

I’d love to vote with my wallet, but I live in a country that 90%+ votes against me, so my vote is meaningless.

If you are in fact the monarch of a sovereign nation, you can indeed give companies a choice: "either design your products to automatically decrypt themselves when they enter my territory, or don't do business in my country."

Companies will then be forced to make a decision based on the market size of your country. Or they will break the law, and you will have to deal with enforcement.

Most companies would like to do business in the EU.

> Companies will then, of course, be forced to make a decision based on the market size of your country.

And as we've seen time and time again, China can get away with a lot of bullshit with demands anywhere from tech to culture (e.g. MCU films that ended up censored). At least now, Apple has woken up and begun moving off production to Vietnam, and Marvel has decided to ignore Chinese demands after all.

My device should serve me, not the EU. If I choose to violate EU emergency alert laws, that's on me.

For other use cases, I'd probably agree with you. But you being startled and confused during an emergency because you didn't see the instructions on time can be very dangerous for everyone around you. It's not just on you.

The marginal upside to everyone else is not even close to worth the marginal downside to me. It's my choice to make. If a government wants to force messages on me so badly, they can set up something like an air raid siren (and they typically do, for actual emergencies).

For people suffering from certain mental health issues, the alert itself can cause significant problems for them and others.

If you suffer from panic attacks, for example, and these alerts trigger them, they do not help you, no matter how well intended.

If you suffer from (C)PTSD, and these alerts trigger flooding, they actually make everything worse.

If this were to happen while you are driving, you might even cause an accident.

The world is sadly too complex for simple solutions that assume something to be always good or helpful.

Which is why I believe it's important for the user to eventually control his device.

If there is emergency, I'm sure you'll find out very soon that something is happening. We are usually not living in lone solitudies.

the same applies when the device is off, or i left it at home. unless there is a law that requires me to carry a functioning, powered device to receive emergency alerts at all times, there is no reason why a device should be required to receive alerts just because it is capable of receiving them. if i turn of alerts on my device, then it's no different from a device that doesn't have the capability to receive alerts.

Then you probably don't have one of those fancy new things called smartphones, as they are all very locked down and don't allow you to access or modify a lot of system settings, limit access to files apps create, don't allow to move some apps to the SD card, some of them even disallow you from installing apps from anywhere but their own app store. Certainly you don't have one of those devices that treat the user in a completely patronizong way.

Of course, you can liberate yourself quite a bit from the draconian rule of the manufacturer by rooting the device, but then you're also able to disable cell broadcasts permanently...

Notice that I used the word "should", not "does". And, in fact, I am deeply concerned about the war on general purpose computing.

I guess if we're at a point where the law says the phone must have a function and the user doesn't want that function to operate, the only real option is that the phone just not function in that region?

People keep failing to understand that if you can't make your device do something that is illegal, it's not /your/ device. It's that simple. Politically crafted laws are not physical laws of the universe, they not only can be violated, they often /should/ be violated. Laws are not a moral imperative. This particular law (emergency alerts) might not be an issue, but the fact that your device will follow the government's mandate over the user's choice is all we really need to know about that device.

It's not the default of the device though.

We need to get rid of those in power who decide on things they have no fucking clue about it. The easiest way to do that is to not just go vote, but educate everyone else about who is running and why they are/are not a good choice. The harder way is also (at least for the US folks) showing up and engaging at primary votes and holding the primary candidates accountable, which takes a lot more effort but has the advantage that your vote is amplified in its effects.

Just root the device, then you can disable it. And don't give me any of this "it should be possible to do this without rooting the phone"

Smartphones are already locked down in a million other ways compared to eg a desktop Linux install. Why is this different?

> Smartphones are already locked down in a million other ways compared to eg a desktop Linux install. Why is this different?

It's not, but it's bad that smartphones are locked down like that, so we should be pushing back on it at every opportunity.

I'm with you there and in general, it just feels like a rather minor point even just compared to the excessive tracking Apple and Google do. I'm just thinking of the recent news where it was discovered iphones still send tracking data home even if disabled in the settings. That's way more concerning to me at least.

> all we really need to know about that device.

Namely, that it's created by a party / parties also subject to (and abiding by) these laws?

I'm not sure what you plan to do with this information; certainly a law-abiding supplier is more likely to remain in business, so perhaps it's indicative of a better chance of receiving long-term support for the device...

You enter a new country, in case Germany, you're automatically opted in to the emergency broadcast notifications, as any other local laws.

The EU legislation allows "opt out" from level 2/level 3 notifications, but is based on the notion that messages are received "without the need for the public to have to opt-in".

So for compliance sake, you're opted in. Maybe this should only happen the first time you enter EU or a member state, and then either your phone or cell service provider should remember your preference (which is probably not worth the resources to implement for the cell service provider, but maybe your phone already does?).

I'd be interested to see if this already exists, i.e. do you only need to opt out in Germany once? Does that opt-out at EU level?

When your wife disabled notifications, she merely opted out of notifications in whatever jurisdiction she was in (presumably US?), but opting out of something in US doesn't mean you opted out of every other similar law from every other nation state.

She actually opted out already being in Germany, and once she noticed the reverted settings, she turned them off again. Only to find they get turned back on by the carrier, enforcing a specific set of settings against her will. Which is when she told me about it. In this case it's more about the principle. At least for now.

my brother in Christ, where do you think you are?

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