Don't squander public trust on bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Don't squander public trust on bullshit

livboeree.substack.com

284 pointsNavinF150 comments

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.

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.

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.

if they can send you mail about parking tickets, the tech is there to text just the parked car owners, after driving up and down to get the number plates surely? Id be happy to develop it for them…

Tell me you live in Cambridge, MA without telling me

“STREET CLEANING. NO PAHKING ON THE ODD NUMBAHED SIDE. YOU WILL BE TAGGED AND TOWED.”

It’s loud enough you hear earlier repetitions as a vague buzz in the distance, then crescendoing to a blare on your block, then receding with agonizing slowness like some hellish echo. And the whole time you thinking, awake now and very annoyed, “I don’t even own a car.”

And if you manage to get back to sleep, it soon jolts you awake again, and again.

> Speaking of street cleaning, if only I could get the city to stop [waking people up for something you could do silently with a sign]

Assuming you are in fact talking about Cambridge, MA, good luck with that. I've written to the city repeatedly over the past 10 or 12 years with no result except getting nonconsensually added to a mailing list about noise from airplanes, which I don't care about.

Heh. As somebody who had his car towed a couple of times because of street sweeping, I might have appreciated such a warning. What a racket.

I know that presidential alarms can’t be blocked, but I have yet to find if local “real” alerts can be blocked? The entire state of Texas was awoken recently because of something that happened in a locality that didn’t really affect anyone outside of it.

https://x.com/averytomascowx/status/1842146095612198944

I don’t need to know a cop is hurt 8 hours from me and the chances the perp would come into my life are bordering on infinitely small. What it can do is lead to lots of deaths because people turn off all emergency alarms because now they don’t trust the government to be decisive in sending out an alert that should have been local. Texas government definitely has a lot of joke elements to it. Evidently you can’t turn off these “Blue Alerts” unless you turn off all alerts. There has been nothing from the government about why this is allowed, only just radio silence, and they wonder why people have an axe to grind.

My (least) favorite version of this: there's a state wide alert in Tennessee that happens when a cop is shot.

You can't disable it without disabling all alerts.

Why somebody in Memphis might care that a cop is shot in Knoxville is beyond me.

I think a lot of people would care. But I don't see how it's an immediately actionable emergency alert, like emergency alerts are for.

Sounds like its main purpose is propaganda. I have seen similar acts of government bullshit like local tourism ads which just so happen to be structured like campaign ads for incumbents saying how awesome of a job they are doing.

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)

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?

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.

These are Texas public alerts. I don't think they are CYA. I think they are due to lack of investment in government.

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.

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.

It’s not necessarily about education, it’s just hard to cope with psychologically. Lives aren’t valued with unlimited resources. When it’s someone you care about you wish more was done.

[flagged]

I'm genuinely curious. How can you be sure natural immunity cured Covid and not the vaccination? The vaccinations were correlated with steep declines in deaths and severe illness, isn't that good enough to motivate the vaccinations?

Or is your point that the vaccine just gave a temporary respite that ultimately saved few lives relative to the cost?

countries around the world, rich and poor, pursued different public health responses, some because of choices, some had no choices. But people around the world are not getting serious covid any more, it's just not something anybody even thinks about more than say the flu. That's the attenuation of the virus and natural immunity (and you might as well lump attenutation of the virus with natural immunity because they occur on the same timescale in the same interactions), which was predictable and was predicted. The UK initially followed that idea as a strategy, and Sweden followed it, it was accepted science.

The people who died with covid didn't necessarily die of covid, but public health officials followed policies of lumping them together, and govts incented them to do it: "more money for covid". Old and infirm people, the morbidly obese, respiratory illnesses, etc. suffered the worst, as they do from the flu. Young people were hardly affected, though young people seem to have suffered more from the vaccine side effects and the socialization developmental deficit.

The conferred immunity from catching covid protects you from reinfection far longer than the so-called vaccines, because these mRNA vaccines don't work as traditional vaccines do, that's why (along with the profit motive) we were all told to start getting boosters essentially right away.

When an event like this causes excess deaths, it is followed by a period with a death deficit, simply because many of people "who were going to die soon anyway" died early, and they aren't around to die later, it's accepted science. That has to have happened with covid because they told us those people were dying, but try to get your hands on the statistics. I'm not saying people didn't get sick from covid or that it wasn't serious, But the coverups and stonewalling stop us from getting to the truth about what happened.

but it is not because of vaccinations that we don't worry about covid today, and the vaccinations we got had more side effects (in no small part because they were not tested).

I knew I would get downvoted for this because there is a political class that is, in HN terms, not comfortable with people "being curious" about it, they'd rather censor. But since GP engaged in gratuitous soapboxing and propagandizing I thought I'd spend some karma to speak up.

When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data? So far it looks like most (but not all) countries had an increase and then returned to the previous trendline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year. For the world's total deaths per year, it definitely looks like the area under the curve increased due to covid.

Wow I haven't seen that graph before. It's very striking. It certainly shows Covid was not "just the flu"

yeah, but that's not a significant point. covid "not having been the flu" is a different statement than covid is just the flu now. the Spanish flu (1919 or whenever that was) was not "just the flu" either, but it burned bright and then died out in a very short time.

the question is not whether covid-19 happened, it did. the question is whether our various responses did anything or much at all to help, and whether it was productive to turn it into an us/them political issue and suppress speech and criticism to maintain the facade of being right. qui bono?

>When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data?

right away. I'm not an epidemiologist, but it's simple logic. A certain number of people of every age die every year. infants, toddlers, tweens, adolescents, middle aged people, old people, in each group a certain %age of people die every year of "all cause mortality". More old people die than young people (we're talking about rates here, % chance of dying)

so, if there is a period where a whole bunch extra old people who die one year, that whole bunch extra old people are not around the very next year to die, because they're already dead.

If the numbers don't add up, somebody is hiding data. the numbers absolutely should make sense.

so, one explanation for what you are saying is that extra old people didn't die, it was the same number of old people; who died must have been young people, because those "missing deaths" will not show up in the "normal" death statistics for a long time. But that's not what we were told happened, so again, something is not right with the data.

I do want to believe what you're saying because it means fewer life-years lost but... the other explanation is that covid plus the countermeasures to it really did impact people's health (not just the fatalities) and increased net mortality. We can check back in a few years but so far this explanation seems likelier to me.

There was more covid this summer than any summer before. Millions are disabled with long covid. The severity of an infection has barely anything do with outcomes.

https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html

The severity of an infection barely has anything to do outcomes… did you ever use any iota of common sense when you wrote that?

Because it used to be called the flu, and the rise of Covid is correlated to the decline in flu related deaths. And suddenly as Covid started to decline flu related to increased. The mortality rate, however, did not change.

I can be sure the vaccination didn't cure COVID because COVID was not cured - it is still here.

But it's still "cured" in the sense that fewer people die from it today compared to 2020, right? Intensive care units are not under the same pressure as they were during the pandemic years. It's a much less severe illness today than it was before, and many people attribute that change to the vaccinations.

That's probably the evolution to less deadly variants. We are lucky that happened, because we humans sure as shit weren't going to improve things ourselves.

I still don't understand why you think we can't improve things ourselves. Do you believe every vaccine is a hoax, or only the Covid vaccine?

I said we humans aren't improving things for ourselves. What fraction of people do you see wearing a mask?

Seems to me we improved things by developing a vaccine so we don't have to wear masks

The COVID vaccines were fairly effective in reducing infection rates and severity.

The problem comes when you present an experimental vaccine that hasn't gone through ordinary trials and requires you to sign a liability waiver before you can take it, but then superciliously impose penalties and restrictions on people who choose to decline. That is how you destroy public trust and foment conspiracy theories.

we were told the covid vaccines would prevent infection, then when they didn't, the narrative changed to reduced severity, is a more accurate statement of what you said.

In somewhat of a case in point on losing public trust, mentioning politicians and corporate media outlets lying about something seemed about as redundant to me as mentioning water being wet.

It's not politicians and media being embroiled in scandal that is surprising. It's that they still have their jobs. Politicians used to resign after scandal and reporters got fired. Now they get promoted

Politicians used to resign because of the expectation that they'd be voted out, in turn because of the expectation that the media would inform the voters of their mendacity.

The media has become so partisan that each side will attack the other with equal ferocity regardless of who was right on a particular issue, so now the politicians roll the dice and most of the time they still get reelected right after their own misbehavior.

The question is why the media continues to do this, given that they are clearly not benefiting from it -- their viewership/readership numbers are in the toilet, a lot of them have already gone out of business and the others are on the same trajectory.

I suspect it's something like, they've cultivated a partisan audience and if they now try to be neutral, they short-term lose partisans faster than they gain moderates and then some MBA who can't think past next quarter insists that they stop.

But returning to the original intercept course with the ground is hardly a genius plan.

In a free economy, there should never be something mandatory.

Tax, recording of births and deaths, court appearances, product information, delivery of goods and services in the event of payment for said goods and services, driver education...

... enforcement of property rights ...

At some point somebody's going to argue alert fatigue in court and probably win, if they haven't already. CYA works until people stop believing that you were doing your due diligence. After that it becomes a contributing factor.

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.

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.

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.

Sounds like Ontario. They sent our amber alerts at the nuclear war level and refused to change.

Hm, that's not my experience with California. I disabled amber alerts pretty quickly because I got them for LA despite being in the north end of the state. I wasn't the only one in my social circle complaining about it, either. This was pretty early into amber alerts showing up on the iPhone. Maybe they've improved since then?

Illinois is awful with this too. I disabled Amber Alerts after too many alerts for someone in the St. Louis area when I'm in northern Illinois.

You, too? Fortunately, disabling those doesn't disable the severe weather alerts, and those have worked well for me, most recently in that July tornado.

Yeah I share the same experience in IL, I turned my Amber Alerts off after being woken up by one at around 2am for some incident at the far end of the state 350 miles away. Like you say though, the weather alerts have worked pretty well for me, too.

I don't think the issue is really just localization, though, but also timing. The alert went out at 4:50 AM. I think even if it were highly localized, for what is basically a missing persons alert, most people would be pissed and just go back to bed.

California had a state-wide Amber Alert once, well over a decade ago. Some department on the fringes of LA sent it, and woke up the whole state, including Northern California, 400 miles away. Millions of people annoyed. Much negative publicity. Didn't happen again. There are still Amber Alerts, but with much shorter ranges.

That's auxiliary. Distance for most of these alerts should be 0 (read: not at all)

I've never heard of a "blue alert" before. Turns out it's a department of justice thing. 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.

The purpose of blue alerts is to broadcast copaganda, period. It's not a solution to any problem.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

I still believe that spam bots vs anti spam bots is how we’ll eventually evolve true artificial AI

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.

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

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."

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.

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?

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.

I worked for an academic support program at a college once. They used texting to communicate with their small population of target students. It worked so well that the institution started texting. For everything. Everything.

After about three weeks, students blocked all texts from the institution's numbers.

We can't have nice things because there are so many of us to ruin them. Ever read the Consul's Tale in Hyperion?

No, it’s just that we have stupid people managing them

Honestly the idea of a valuable communication channel getting abused for selfish purposes feels like it needs its own law. I'd happily call it csharps law. Maybe it's already got a name. We have the idea of spam, but it's vauge, nebulous, and doesn't concretly identify the systems and forces in place that lead to this innevitable outcome. It casts this outcome as not even a problem of individuals, but something like "the problem is someone sent me a message I didn't want." As if that person had not done that, then this wouldn't be a problem.

I think this is important because it feels like an endless surprise to everyone that this keeps happens. It feels like we have to cover the same ground again and again in discussions about it, and it feels like if we could tackle this problem more generally, the benefits to society at large would be massive.

Product reviews are valuable, producers capture reviewers, spam fake reviews.

Email is valuable. Spam nearly destroyed it until we migrated the entire decentralized system to Google.

Public discussions like these are valuable, and God knows how much work Hacker News does to moderate all this.

None of this feels like it's designed to resist this problem.

It’s like urban deer overpopulation. We need a hunting season to reduce the numbers of marketingdroids and MBA’s.

Bill Hicks had the right idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Mn2NbjlqU

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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_-geocodi...

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."

I had a similar thought when they were testing alarm sirens (like these 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.

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!

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

I concur, not sure how annual testing would dilute the significance unless the fact it was a test wasn’t disclosed at all.

> every few years

The tornado sirens here get tested at noon on Saturdays.

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

So that people in the area recognize what they sound like, regardless of how long ago they moved in.

Everyone knows what a siren sounds like.

"So that people in the area quickly learn to ignore sirens, regardless of how long ago they moved in."

They don't necessarily know "That's the tornado warning siren" (as opposed to some other siren), though. More important when there's multiple possible alerts, of course.

Many of them are old. They do break fairly often, as is the general way of electromechanical things that live outdoors in every kind of weather.

And if having twice as many for redundancy were a viable option financially, they'd already be installed. Doubling the density would be a good thing, but this shit is expensive.

One county near me in Ohio does weekly tests, and conducts hands-on PM checks every spring and every fall for every siren.

(Background: I have been personally involved with these PM checks, the sale and commissioning of new sirens, and implementing the back-end controls for these sirens.

I think I've personally done everything with them but plant the poles in the ground.)

Testing sirens every few years is crying wolf for you?

Switzerland does annual testing. The media mention the date a few days in advance (it's also something semi-static like "the first Wednesday of month X"), everyone knows when the test is coming, and I'm pretty sure people would pay attention if the sirens went off on any other day.

Other places test much more frequently, which feels like harmfull overkill, but an annual test seems very sensible.

Germany reintroduced annual testing after doing no testing for a long time and found out what you would expect (the system didn't work). It went so badly that they cancelled next year's test to be able to fix their system. A flood decided to test the system for real, the main difference in outcome being that this time the failure came with a high body count.

After that, they overhauled their doomed-to-fail custom app bullshit and started using cell broadcast (like e.g. the US) and a few annual tests later, they seem to be in a somewhat better shape now.

I think some places in Germany have weekly tests, but their sirens are (or used to be before mobile phones) a way to call up the local volunteer fire brigade in smaller communities.

The audid linked two posts above is titled "Feuerwehralarm" = fire brigade alarm.

I doubt there's no way to test these systems without actually blaring the sirens

You can simulate everything to some extent but you can't have an end-to-end test without actually testing.

You also want to make sure that people know what the sirens sound like (no, they don't sound the same everywhere), and a national test day is a great opportunity to remind people how they should act if the sirens go off for real. Having them go off once a year at a pre-announced time also isn't particularly disruptive.

The proper way to test this would be to also make sure that e.g. the radio stations are informed of a test scenario and broadcast it (sirens means "turn on the radio and check for what is happening", which means the sirens alone are useless without that part of the alerting working). This would also help if someone lives under a rock and knows how to act but forgot that testing is happening.

Since this part is not being tested, I think there's a high risk that the announcement in the radio won't work in an actual emergency, and an announcement on the Internet is extremely likely to be unreachable due to overload.

I think it would be ideal to actually run large scale emergency response tests (pick a small town, pick a disaster, and actually run the whole scenario, either asking people to volunteer, compensating them, or making it mandatory under a draft-like law). Yes, this would be extremely disruptive (hence a small town), but from having run emergency responses (to IT incidents, not life-or-death incidents), my experience is that any procedure that isn't regularly practiced won't work when needed, and running exercises and fixing what you find will improve this a lot.

Those tests run monthly in many tornado-prone areas of the Midwest. Still welcome when the tornados roll in.

Which is sort of the issue - if you don't have disasters often to keep everyone glad of the emergency alerting system, they become annoyed by it instead. Maybe a climate-change-induced uptick in natural disasters will remind everyone why they exist...

Illinois test sirens and emergency alerts on the first Tuesday of the month at 10:00. Easy to ignore, and everyone knows what the sound like

They test them monthly here. They send a test alert message to phones twice a year, usually on the same time they test the sirens. I still take them very seriously because they basically never go off outside of the test. If and when they do it's because they need me to take action.

The uses I can recall is a couple times for a big industrial fire where chemicals were getting in the air (so close your windows) and once because it was getting WAY too busy in Amsterdam (so for the love of god turn your car around you're not getting in to the party).

Testing these systems isn't what causes crying-wolf syndrome. It's testing them in a way that's hard to check if it's a test. It's sending alerts for unactionable nonsense. I'd be disabling my alerts too if they decided sending missing child notifications was a good use of the system.

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.

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.

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)

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-c...

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.

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.

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.

Good old alert fatigue, the killer of many people.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

That would be the presidential alert

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.

From Scott Alexander: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For me it was when the (German) government kicked my door down and said hey you, you're homeless now.

You misspelled "when Bush Jr. and Cheney stole an election in broad daylight."

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.

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-l...

>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.

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