First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess 380
Mark Gibbs writes "AT&T's implementation of the FCC's Emergency Alerts System provides minimally useful information in an untimely fashion with little geolocational relevance. ... Yesterday California got its first AMBER alert and my notification arrived at 10:54pm. It came up as panel over my lock screen and here's what it looked like on my notifications screen: 'Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door.' The problem with this it that's all there is! You can stab away at the message as much as you like but that's all you get, there's no link to any detail and considering the event it related to occurred over 240 miles away from me near to the Mexican border, the WEA service seems to be poorly implemented. Indeed, many Californians were annoyed and confused by the alert and according to the LA Times 'Some cellphones received only a text message, others buzzed and beeped. Some people got more than one alert.' I got a second copy of the alert at 2:22am and other subscribers reported not receiving any alert until late this morning."
It seems to have gone down about as well as New York's.
Sprint sent out the same message (Score:5, Informative)
I received the message via Sprint, despite being 400 miles from the affected area. I guess this is one way to make sure people start ignoring these messages.
Don't blame AT&T for terse message (Score:5, Informative)
Don't blame (only) AT&T for the terse message. The WEA system limits messages to 90 characters:
http://www.fema.gov/wireless-emergency-alerts [fema.gov]
WEA will look like a text message. The WEA message will show the type and time of the alert, any action you should take, and the agency issuing the alert. The message will be no more than 90 characters.
I can't believe the government asked for such an arbitrary and small limit on message size, so I'm assuming that the carriers said that's all they could provide, probably because a 90 character message fit into some control message they were already sending to phones.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Now go look up "Boulevard, CA" on a map and explain why 20+ million people in CA who have never heard of it or live within 300 miles of it should be woken up in the middle of the night about it.
I don't see much of a problem (Score:5, Informative)
The radius needs to be quite wide, because a person can travel a great distance in a car in a short period of time. 800 miles would not be unreasonable depending on when the missing child was reported.
Abducted children are often taken quite far away.
The fact it was an Amber alert tells you a child is involved, and the alert had all other information needed to report something, basically the plates and make/model of the car.
I guess the different times of reception are an issue but something is better than nothing, and it takes time to work through a list of many cell phone numbers to send out an alert... obviously they do need to improve on the speed of that, and try to remove duplicates.
Re:You really can't figure that out? (Score:3, Informative)
Rewind and first of all explain to me why some random child being kidnapped justifies an alert on a national emergency system.
It wasn't a national alert, it was a regional alert in California. An alert that the system was specifically designed for, that's why your phone will let your block Amber alerts separately from the other alerts if you want to.
If you don't want child abduction alerts, then turn off amber alerts in your phone.
Worse than useless - here's how to disable them. (Score:4, Informative)
On iOS: settings -> notifications -> Government Alerts down at the bottom. You can turn off just Amber alerts.
On Android: open the Android messaging /application/, then menu -> settings -> emergency alerts -> disable Amber alerts.
Re:Be vigilant citizen! (Score:4, Informative)
"Police Alert. Wanted: Hacker in city. Has committed cyberterrorism and crimes against the State. Name:
"... watch for a man running
(welcome to Fahrenheit 451)
Re:Seriously? Yes! (Score:2, Informative)
The custodial parent isn't always the more fit, they might just have better lawyers, 'specially abusive, wealthy fathers/husbands.
Rely on Slashdot to vote this up to +5.
Meh. Amber Alerts are largely useless anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Amber Alert seems like a really good idea, until you look at it closely. The root problem is false positives. Not false reports of sightings of abducted children, those can be weeded through pretty effectively. False Amber Alerts.
The basic concept behind the system is that since many abducted children are killed in the first three hours, it's necessary to get the alert out there fast. But, it's also really important that there not be a flood of Amber alerts issued about kids who just wandered off to a friend's house or something, so the process of verifying that a particular case meets all of the criteria for issuing an alert pretty much guarantees that by the time the alert is issued it's too late for kids who were victims of the most frightening form of child abduction, the sort for which the alert system was created.
Research backs this logic up. Multiple studies have been done, and none have demonstrated that Amber alerts do much at all that's useful. They're most effective at finding family abduction cases, but those almost never harm the kids and almost always get resolved anyway, without the alert.
All of the actual research papers I can find are paywalled, but here's a Boston Globe article [boston.com] that discusses the results of one of the earliest studies. Several more have reaffirmed and even strengthened the findings of the first.
So, it really doesn't matter much if the alert delivery system is broken. The alert issuance system is fundamentally and likely irreparably flawed.