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

Some context

[Guspaz]

Thunder Bay is 870 miles away from Toronto by road. This is equivalent to setting off an amber alert in Pittsburgh or Washington because of a missing kid in Florida.

Re:Some context

[Jbcarpen]

I live in Colorado. Before disabling Amber Alerts on my phone I regularly received them from Tampa Florida. That's an 1800-2000 mile trip (depending on where in CO you start), so the Amber alert system in the US is no better.

Why is it so hard to get the location for the alerts down to something narrow enough to be useful? I like the idea of the system, but the implementation is so bad that it's useless.

Re:Some context

[93 Escort Wagon]

I live in Washington state. A couple of years ago we got an Amber Alert related to an abduction in California - somebody thought the guy might choose to head north, so they apparently set them off along the entire I-5 corridor.

I disabled them on my phone long before that, but you still see them on freeway signs and whatnot.

The idea behind Amber Alerts isn’t a bad one, but the implementation is rubbish - probably because it’s driven by emotion rather than a rational look at what might actually help.

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:No opt-out is evil

[thegarbz]

Why are you not thinking of the Children? Are you some kind of sociopath?

Think of the Children, Reductio Ad Absurdum

[mentil]

Coming soon: child-in-a-hot-car alerts, child-accidentally-saw-someone-naked alerts, child-missed-school alerts, child-using-drugs alerts, child-feeling-depressed alerts, child-feeling-repressed alerts, child-defying-authority alerts, child-attempting-suicide alerts, public-child-funeral alerts, government-overreach alerts, government-collapse alerts, and finally no alerts once children are starving in a lawless land.

Re:No opt-out is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

There are not enough pedophiles to present any meaningful risk to me or my family.

My children are more likely to be abused by members of my own family.

My children are more likely to be run over walking home from school.

My children are more likely to be shot by my own gun in the family home.

For fuck sake everyone, gain some perspective!

"imminent safety threats"

[Megane]

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.

One of these things is not like the other... one of these things is not the same...

I'm not sure what kind of flawed logic you need to consider an "Amber Alert" (which basically affects a single child) to be a safety threat anywhere near on the same level as natural disasters. Many "terrorist threats" may be false or localized, but even those affect many more people than a single child.

Re:No opt-out is evil

[Anne Thwacks]

Yes.

You are beginning to understand American culture.