> Child alert systems find about 50 or 60 kids a year (US). Turning them off is a pretty shit move for the ~dozen per year that come through.

As far as I know, the only options on my phone for these alerts are "deafeningly loud alarm" and "entirely disabled." After my phone woke me up at 3 AM for some kid being abducted in some other town, it's now off permanently. I did the same for weather alerts after it destroyed my ears to tell me about some flash flooding alert on some street across town that I will never use.

There is literally no situation in which my phone making a deafeningly loud alarm is acceptable, so I turn all those alerts off to make sure it doesn't happen again. If the implementation were better, I might leave them on. But it isn't, so I don't.

No situation at all? What if you were on that street?

Then it should vibrate like any other notification. There is no situation I can think of that is improved by someone at city hall having the ability to make every phone in the area scream at full volume, versus just behaving like a normal notification.

>There is no situation I can think of

The horizons of your thinking appear to be truncated to somewhere within a few dozen yards and ~10 minutes of your current time & location. Can you think of no incident where there was an otherwise avoidable death or injury that could have been prevented with a timely alert?

Not one that couldn't have been equally well handled by a normal notification, no.

I'm not quite clear on this-- are you maintaining that stance only with respect to yourself, or for all people across society in all situations?

For me, it is unacceptable for my phone to ever make a noise that I did not ask it to make. I can't think of any situation in which this is not true. A normal notification will get my attention just fine. If I have to choose between deafening noise and no notification, I will choose no notification every time.

I think there should be a third option, which is to treat them like normal notifications. This is so obvious to me that I'm utterly baffled that it isn't an option. We probably wouldn't even be having this discussion if the option existed. But it doesn't, so here we are.

I would even OK with deafening noise being the default. I would argue that it shouldn't be the default, as I think the false-alarm problem is a serious one that will cause people to just turn it off. But I understand the other side of the argument.

My opinion is anything that causes a bunch of deafening noise from every phone in the vicinity should be treated with the same level of gravity as turning on the tornado siren. We don't turn on the tornado siren for every kid who gets lost or every flooded road. We shouldn't be blowing up every phone for those events, either. Tornado coming to town? Ok, blow up the phones. Missile coming down from the sky? Ok, blow up the phones. City-destroying wildfire coming in? Ok, blow up the phones. Kid got in the wrong car? Berry St is flooded? Sorry, those doesn't qualify for the tornado alarm, so they don't qualify for blowing up phones either.

Okay, then it's just a matter of you & I drawing the line in different places, and maybe yours is further out due to less likelihood of dangerous weather conditions, or the thrill of potentially having an unscheduled white-water rafting experience through the town, or personal preference. I can see your point about the defaults. Cheers!

So you've determined that you are a exception in so far as never being in any potential danger from something covered in the contents of a emergency alert.

This does not counter argument that the GGP comment is incorrect in labelling these systems "mostly useless"

I interpreted their comment as saying the specific alerts that user receives are useless to them. I definitely agree with that. If enough people feel as we do and turn the alerts off, then yes, I think the system itself does become useless. I don't know how many people turn them off.

This could be avoided by making the implementation less terrible. I don't know how we arrived at the current situation where they're either deafening, or entirely off. It seems really stupid to me that those are the only options. I would prefer to receive them, but it's not worth waking me up at 3 AM for a flooded road 20 miles away.

>If enough people feel as we do and turn the alerts off, then yes, I think the system itself does become useless. I don't know how many people turn them off.

That's like saying x = x. Of course if people don't use the system, the system isn't being useful. Contrary to that hypothetical, I am making the observation that people do use the system and often find it useful.

Sure, that's a fair take. My comment was more responding to your comment saying that turning off alerts is a "shit move," by explaining why many of us choose to turn them off.

One challenge with AMBER alerts is that they don't provide enough information for the receiver to determine if the alert reflects a credible danger to a child, or if it's a nuisance alert where the system is being abused during a custody battle. Further, the very nature of a highly disruptive, high volume alert like this is to encourage the public to take extreme action -- e.g. following a vehicle -- that increases danger for both the involved child and everyone else in the area. While there are attempts to fix this very broken system (e.g. [1]), for now I very much consider the cure to be potentially worse than the disease.

[1] https://kutv.com/news/local/law-introduced-for-new-criteria-...

>e.g. following a vehicle... the cure to be potentially worse than the disease

I'm not aware of citizen vehicle chases being a systemic problem. What other offsetting problems exist that negate the benefits of the system? I don't consider annoyance/disturbance to be sufficient to say it's worse than the disease (which implies it should be stopped, pending overhaul) especially considering the ability to turn the alerts off.