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First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess

Posted by Soulskill on from the learn-to-hyperlink dept.

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.

1 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not just AT&T by hawguy · · Score: -1, Troll

    I can say for sure that it's not just AT&T. A couple of weeks ago, I was receiving alerts every 15 minutes for floods that were happening 400 miles away on the east coast. Add to the this the fact that I couldn't stop the annoying screeching my phone was making without unlocking my phone and confirming the message and you had one hell of a case of distracted driving and nearly two accidents. I'd much rather text while driving 100% of the time. It isn't 1/10th as distracting, and less than 1/100th as infuriating. Perhaps those who thought these messages were a good idea need to rethink their sanity.

    If you find a noisy phone to be too distracting to drive and you don't want the messages anyway, why not just disable them?

    Do you nearly get into accidents when a blaring fire truck goes by or is it only a loud cell phone that distracts you to the point where you nearly crash?