Step one: Own a smartphone.
You’re done.
You actually have to opt-OUT of these alerts on almost any modern smartphone made in the past 5-6 years.
You actually have to opt-OUT of these alerts on almost any modern smartphone made in the past 5-6 years.
I had to “hack” my phone to disable them (using the term loosely; you need to connect it to the computer and use a terminal).
Disabled them because in my country, they abuse the system and send all alerts at the “Presidential” level (aka. top priority and everyone might die unless you do something soon). My phone manufacturer helpfully decides not to have Presidential alerts respect my volume settings (like Do-Not-Disturb).
I also live in a particularly large region.
All this combined means that I have to live without alerts that say “Tornado incoming” because I don’t want monthly alarms blaring in the middle of the night to tell me that a child is involved in a custody dispute somewhere about a 7 hour drive away from me. Guess they wanted me to keep my eyes open and call the police when I see a “white vehicle” because it may contain the “missing” child, whose entire description is “7, last seen wearing a red shirt and jeans”.
So yeah, I opted out. Against all alerts, against my will.
Also, in my country, when there was an active mass/spree shooter who was masquerading as a cop and pulling people over before shooting them, they DIDN’T use the emergency alert system. They used Twitter. Remember to like and subscribe!
Yeah it’s really stupid when all the alerts use the highest priority mode. It is literally the same thing as a kid calling wolf. Like, I don’t need to be woken up in panic mode because my phone decided to play the emergency alarm at 4AM because of an AMBER alert. Especially when that alert is 10 hours late. This happened last week btw. Luckily this time I didn’t get waken up because I learned my lesson from the last time and set my phone to the proper do not disturb mode.
I’ve got a Pixel. I don’t think it’s possible for me to set a DND that blocks presidential alerts.
EDIT: In response to the deleted comment (in case anyone else was wondering), I’m on the stock OS and I disabled the entire alert system through ADB.
deleted by creator
In my country the one and only time they’ve ever used the system at its highest priority level, it didn’t work for half the phones. And a good 20% of the people got the alert over an hour late.
Last night they sent out an alert at low priority because there was a “risk to life” weather event. But I guess they didn’t want to worry me too much, you know because it would be terrible if I took action of some kind. In order to get these alerts you have to have the weather widget on your home screen, presumably iOS users just don’t get told.
How do you opt out of them? I mean, I probably don’t want to, but I feel I should know how, if only to feel I own my device, rather than the government.
I use a Motorola Android phone for reference.
In some countries, you can’t unless you connect your phone to a PC and disable the system on your phone entirely.
But googling “[phone make and model] disable amber alerts” should direct you to the settings where you can adjust things (assuming your country does it properly and respects these settings).
Depends on the system
The “Yo dog, a tidal wave is hitting right now. That is why it looks like it is super duper low tide.” alert? Yeah, you’ll get that. Whether that is time to meaningfully act or not depends.
But most regions have additional services you can and should sign up for that will give the early warnings. So “Seismic activity detected a mile or three off shore or however tidal waves work. We are monitoring the situation” is a good indicator of “maybe today is not the day I go to the beach”. And “We are no longer monitoring the situation. Please proceed as normal” is a sign that maybe you do want to go for swimmies after all.
Same with other disasters. I live in a region that has a lot of wildfires. We tend to get the early warnings and even the “We might say to evacuate in a few days” through a different service. We get the “Get the fuck out of town immediately” alerts through the normal emergency alert system.
In my country, you have to opt-in to get alerts by installing corresponding app.
Since iOS 18, I have recognised, that state level weather alerts are now distributed through the apple weather app as well (before it was only through state weather app AND state warning app… Now I get it 3 times 🤣😅)
I appreciate this article for telling me how to disable amber alerts and silence the others.
Be sure to wear ear-pods on your iPhone, so you get the alert message at 100% full volume into your ears… This will help you to gain an additional super-power called: Tinnitus.
Yes but at least you’re now aware of the incredibly mild issue.
I’ve had, “warning a tree has fallen over and is blocking a minor road”, and “there is some fog”.
Or in my country, you are now aware that the alert system is still working every first day of the month. That’s it.
They test that shit every month? Damn, here its only every half year or something, doesnt happen very often.
Yes, every month…
I remember one year I heard that weather radios save lives, so I bought them for the whole family one Christmas. They might save more lives if they weren’t loud pains in the ass that eventually get turned off.
Maybe it’s because I live in one of the more remote areas of my country, but I never get alerts of any kind. Not much going on here I guess.
In my country they don’t exist yet…
Actually handy. My city doesn’t have disaster sirens, but they do have emergency text alerts I didn’t know about.
Is this US only?
The software is on all phones but your local government has to make use of it. For the longest time the UK government didn’t use it and now they’ve adopted it and are obsessed with it.
They’ve now fortunately realized that irritating everyone with it means that they just turn it off eventually, so they’ve calmed down with it somewhat.
But I believe they are on by default so if you’ve never had an alert it’s probably because your local government don’t use it.
Government issued alerts are something I went out of my way to remove. I’ll happily live precariously like humans managed to do for the entire rest of our history before cell phones.
I ain’t a fan of the corporate tracking device but how people acted before a technology existed says little to how best to act now. Even if it did the past is littered with the corpses of those unaware of incoming danger from natural disasters.
It’s not a big enough difference maker for most of us to ever truly need it. An amber alert for a kid thousands of miles away? No thanks, because that is what I got the vast majority of the time.
Life is too short for such invasive stress.
I was thinking strong wind, flooding, fire, rockslides, etc
In Canada it is all or nothing. :(
I turned amber alerts off. The only time alerts have come through is tornado or flash flood warnings.
Life is too short for such invasive stress.
Those amber alerts aren’t about you.
Exactly the problem.
Hell, I disabled that shit. A year into Covid, I got an emergency blaring away on my phone at 2AM to let me know that there was a pandemic going on. Thanks, Sherlock. Now I laugh as people get warnings about things that happen 500km away and can’t possibly affect them.
Government using it like their own private Twitter ensured I’ll disable it on every new phone I get going forward.
