Everyone and their mom has their own system, managed by different people with different standards.
It’s like USB cables — yes there are strict technical standards but when you have a million different manufacturers, they all do it differently and some cut corners and bend the rules how they want to.
Look at how two different cities handle their water supply or their police — different management, different priorities.
I agree. It's a lack of technical proficiency on the part of the world's government's problem, which is another way of saying it's a political problem.
> And the problem is that it’s not centralized.
It is, though. The implementation might not be uniform but the architecture is inherently centralized. Subscribers do not get to pick and choose sources, that is decided by the network operator (AFAIK).
Consider, if BigCo wanted the ability to push alerts to people on their campus (who consent to receive them ofc) how would they go about it? If you have family who live elsewhere in the world and wanted to be apprised of natural disasters how would you subscribe to receive those alerts?
Now you could try to enforce more onerous requirements but then people will simply just find an alternative — my own area has its own alerts on top of whatever else is already there.
Technical solutions are important but past some point, you’re dealing with a product or people problem and further technical improvements bring marginal benefit.
There would be no consent btw, they'd just fire anyone who didn't enable the alerts.
And then if it wasn’t tightly controlled and carefully managed, probably things like social events with free snacks, company all hands announcements, and single cars blocking someone into a parking spot.
I see the usefulness of more fine-grained subscription, but also see the abuse potential from giving more people access.
If the end user has full control over subscriptions then spam will simply result in silencing or unsubscribing. As opposed to right now where it's all or nothing and it isn't even authenticated. So for example either I get spammed with amber alerts from 100 miles away or I opt out of wildfire warnings. Not a great trade off.
I have no idea what they would push, the point is that certain large institutions may have a legitimate interest in reaching users on the premise from time to time. Airports, stadiums, and theme parks immediately come to mind. Anywhere there's a large gathering of people over a wide area which complicates any emergency response.
Why can't the local PD push out an alert to a particular neighborhood if they deem it useful for whatever reason? As long as they didn't spam me I'd voluntarily subscribe to that. As it currently stands I believe (at least in my state) they would have to escalate to a statewide institution and even then I don't understand the targeting to be particularly fine grained.
On top of all that alerts aren't currently authenticated.