People Hate Canada's New 'Amber Alert' System (www.cbc.ca)

The CBC reports: When the siren-like sounds from an Amber Alert rang out on cellular phones across Ontario on Monday, it sparked a bit of a backlash against Canada's new mobile emergency alert system. The Ontario Provincial Police had issued the alert for a missing eight-year-old boy in the Thunder Bay region. (The boy has since been found safe)... On social media, people startled by the alerts complained about the number of alerts they received and that they had received separate alerts in English and French... Meanwhile, others who were located far from the incident felt that receiving the alert was pointless. "I've received two Amber Alerts today for Thunder Bay, which is 15 hours away from Toronto by car," tweeted Molly Sauter. "Congrats, you have trained me to ignore Emergency Alerts...."

The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats. Telecom companies had favoured an opt-out option or the ability to disable the alarm for some types of alerts. But this was rejected by the broadcasting and telecommunications regulator. Individuals concerned about receiving these alerts are left with a couple of options: they can turn off their phone -- it will not be forced on by the alert -- or mute their phone so they won't hear it.
Long-time Slashdot reader knorthern knight complains that the first two alerts-- one in English, followed by one in French -- were then followed by a third (bi-lingual) alert advising recipients to ignore the previous two alerts, since the missing child had been found.

Comments

Re:Some context

[SuricouRaven]

Imagine you are a very concerned public official in charge of this system, and you get a police alert for a missing child. You know that the child has probably just gotten lost, but may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody. The child has been missing now for 24 hours - the time taken for the parent to notice they didn't come home from school, call the school, let the school search and check their records, call the police, have the police send an officer over to collect full details, organise a local search, and finally conclude that the child should be declared potentially abducted and an amber alert issued.

I ran that through the trip planner on Google: An abductor on the run, unable to use air travel but also willing to forgo sleep in their deperation to escape a search area, can do that in 27 hours drive time. Achievable if they take a bus part of the journey, or try for a desperation-fueled thirty-hours-without-sleep day. So that is actually a perfectly reasonable search radius.

There is an obvious problem with this: When the 'reasonable search radius' includes more than half the country, alerts are so frequent that people quickly learn to ignore them. Child abductions are very good at terrifying parents, but actual cases of children harmed are very rare - that's why they make headlines when it does happen, further fuelling the fear.

Re:Some context

[sjames]

The last alert I got was for an abduction that had taken place two hours prior, in a city that was an 8 hour drive away. A little after 9 P.M.

The odds that I might happen to see the described vehicle were zero. Since then, I have seen news reports of abductions where people in my general area might have potentially seen the vehicle, but I didn't receive an alert.

Re:Some context

[Kjella]

You know that the child has probably just gotten lost, but may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody.

Haven't suspected custody battles been explicitly exempted from the Amber Alerts? Also I think you've missed out on the recent paranoia, it's notice the child is missing - or even potentially missing - and go straight to panic, better safe than sorry. Even in my day I'd say the longest period out of touch between dinner and supper would be 3-4 hours at the most, if I didn't show up for school or didn't get home from school the panic would start much sooner. I mean I could hang out with a friend, but then they'd call from their house to my house and tell where I was.

Maybe my parents could be out and about a whole day without being in touch with an adult, but not me. These days any child that's mature enough to be left unsupervised for any longer period of time usually has a cell phone too, so if you're too young to have one or isn't answering they're both reasons to start a search sooner. Of course there could always be an outlier somewhere but I imagine the vast majority start <2 hours after they got lost.

For the Amber Alert to be useful the child must be visible which only happens if the kid is still going along with it, if it's drugged or tied up in the trunk/back of a van it hardly matters how wide the alert goes. And it'll only take so long before the kid realize you're not giving him/her a lift home, so practically I doubt it's useful for more than say a one hour radius. You also have to consider that you will be blasting it on TV, radio and online news. How many people do you really need to nag by text message? I'd probably go with like a 50 mile radius at most. Potentially even less.