„Es muss einen besseren Weg geben“: Einige Einwohner von British Columbia möchten, dass sich das AMBER-Warnsystem ändert
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/there-has-to-be-a-better-way-some-bc-residents-want-the-amber-alert-system-to-change/
„Es muss einen besseren Weg geben“: Einige Einwohner von British Columbia möchten, dass sich das AMBER-Warnsystem ändert
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/there-has-to-be-a-better-way-some-bc-residents-want-the-amber-alert-system-to-change/
41 Kommentare
Better way #1: respect the GSM spec and properly use the Cell Broadcast categories for WPAs as intended as is already the case in America, the EU, the UK, and coming as soon this year, Australia. Concurrent emergencies can occur at the same time, but they may not be of equal importance, such as the [additional](https://alertable.ca/#/details/2022/284346) [manhunts](https://alertable.ca/#/details/2022/284395) that were initiated in Saskatchewan at the same time the big James Smith Cree Nation mass stabbing manhunt was ongoing in 2022.
Better way #2: if it must be put out late at night, push it out as an Advisory first and/or set the Broadcast Immediate flag Yes but *not* the Wireless Immediate flag for those who are awake and actively watching TV or listening to AM/FM radio, then at daybreak or when the morning shows start at 6 AM, re-send/update as Critical with WI set to Yes.
Better way #3: unless there’s specific reason to believe otherwise, drop remote fly-in communities/Vancouver Island.
There’s three right there. Need I say anything about #4 of the distribution means not even being owned by the federal government?
I believe locating the kid is imperative, but the kid was lost in Terrace BC. All our phones rang in Lower Mainland at 1 am. We are 15 hours drive away from Terrace and the kid has been gone for 3 hours. They cannot possibly be near us when the alert was issued.
Shouldn’t the alert system have a radius or something? Let’s assume the kid was gone for 3 hours. I will give the maximum travel speed of 150km/h, that’s 450km possible radius. Put extra 2 hours distance there, so 750km radius from the last seen location should be the area that receive the alert? If another hour goes by, add another 150km radius and people in that expanded area will get the alert too and so on.
That shouldn’t be too hard to program?
How do I turn it off?
I’m glad I disabled it on my phone.
I don’t want to have my house woken up in the wee hours because of some stranger’s domestic dispute, and I’m not getting out of bed to help like I’m Batman.
I was awakened by it on three separate phones this morning. While it was annoying, I was impressed that it came to a phone with a Toronto area code that just happened to be in BC.
Like complaining about sirens: your minor inconvenience is someone else’s dire emergency.
All of Canada is the same. I’ve lived in Ontario and Quebec and the damn alerts are province wide. This same argument and critique of a very poorly designed system has been going on for YEARS. Anyone trained in UX or maybe just common sense understands that we’re creating a bot who cries wolf scenario. When immediate threats emerge some people will ignore the alarms due to repeated annoyance of previous ones.
The earliest ferry to the Island is 6am. So waking everyone on Vancouver Island up at 1am is not an intelligent decision.
Whats the point of amber alert? No photo or nothing to locate the kid lol
because of this one, it’s now forever disabled on my phone
they abused the alert system by not actually using the amber alert category. they pushed this through as a top tier emergency. you know, like for overturned chemical railcars near you. or a tornado. or a forest fire, or a flash flood, or nukes incoming, or a tsunami warning.
the alert immediately disappeared as literally millions of people fumbled with their phones, desperate to silence the full volume alert at 1am. nobody could find the alert on their phone as it was dismissed by everyone startled out of their sleep.
a quick google does not find the reason for the alert, now millions of people are awake and trying to figure out how to bring up their alert history, further searching online to find out why their phone went off.
this is absolute clownshoes.
the alert could have gone out as a text and everyone would have read it when they woke up.
as it was, the alert was called off a few hours later.
because of so many people being woken up by startling, and sleep was interrupted for so many people in aggregate, those clownshoes have likely killed and injured people today by not being more selective with that top priority alert.
they also have blood on their hands for alarm fatigue, or crying wolf. i’m one of the likely tens of thousands who have absolutely silenced all alerts now. of any sort. forever.
this will lead to deaths in the future due to people turning off alerts from fatigue, and missing an actual warning.
great jorb, RCMP.
I’m pleasantly surprised in the comments that people FINALLY seem to be getting it. This has been an issue since the system was implemented and I’ve seen posts about it from time to time since – until now the majority of comments were always along the lines of „if it helps to save a child, who cares, if it bothers you you’re heartless“. Now I only see 2 comments along those lines. I have always argued back „If you didn’t get out of bed and start searching, you’re a hypocrite“.
It’s turned a safety system into a domestic dispute alert system which is almost pointless. Only people that are already awake need to be made aware of a missing child, the alert priority should respect your phone’s alert settings and save the presidential alert level for life-threatening warnings.
I echo everyone else’s sentiment, the kids needed to be found, but what the fuck am I going to do at 1am? Get out of bed and get dressed and head out with a flashlight?
Almost had a fucking heart attack when that mother fucker went off.
> Online critics argue that treating Amber Alerts with the same level of severity as a large-scale natural disaster could lead to alert fatigue, a phenomenon that happens when the public becomes less likely to take an emergency alert seriously due to the increased frequency of seemingly low-risk, high-panic alerts.
I’m pleasantly surprised that the article’s author didn’t just copy a responses from idiots in order to weaken any arguments against the current system.
> Despite those minor frustrations
Though they then seemingly dismiss those claims at the end of the article.
We know that time changes result in people being harmed or killed, due to less sleep. We also know that alert fatigue is very real, and will get people killed. None of these things are „minor frustrations“.
The alert system has multiple alert levels built into it. They just only ever use the top tier one. I do not understand why. Combined with poor geographic targeting and this is really not how the system was designed to be used.
This is the same system that they refused to use during the flooding of the fraser valley when we were literally just hours away from a massive systemic failure that would of put a lot of people at risk because ‚it would upset people not in the area‘.
I have been a software engineer for 15 years in big tech and have been doing 24/7 on-call rotations for a long time. I am used to waking up to alerts like this. We design our system monitors so that getting paged at night usually means something is seriously wrong.
When I got the alert last night, my first thought was, are we being attacked? We live so close to the border that it felt like the only possible explanation. Then I read that it was an Amber Alert happening more than 1000 km away, and I was like, what am I supposed to do about this?
Am I the only one who has these silenced? If I silence my phone, which I always do for sleep, the alert makes no sound. It’s the same on my work cell phone. I am so confused why no one else seems to be able to do this.
It feels like abuse of the level of alert.
While I understand that Amber alerts are important perhaps we can save the air raid siren feature for impending missile strikes or emergencies of that tier?
If it keeps playing at the MAX volume with the most annoying sound in the world, i’m ignoring all of it. Especially when 99% of the time it isn’t anywhere near me.
The ability to target alert to any shape with 1 meter precision has need there for years. You can draw, type in name of the city, etc, etc, but people issuing alerts choose to make them province wide.
If everything is an alarm. That ceases to work like an alarm.
You know what I and most people did to that loud amber? We swiped it out because of how loud and immediate and barely awake I was.
It was until the morning that I read a screenshot of the amber alert because I didn’t get a chance to sit there and let it be loud any longer.
My mom was in the hospital last night. Don’t get me started on how it was for the patients‘ phones as well as the nurses and doctor’s phones
I think everyone should get it. If they drove all night and someone saw it when they got up and helped locate the kid while going out for breakfast or coffee in a place outside of whatever zone you are thinking up then It would be worth it wouldn’t it?
Let me opt out. I don’t want the disturbance at night.
There is a measurable increase in car accidents the day after daylight savings time begins, when many people get less sleep. I would not be surprised if amber alerts that wake people up also cause more fatigue-related accidents the following day.
Most of us would be totally fine if it were either opt-in or opt-out AND DIDN’T use the nuclear alarm noise!
As an Ontario resident, I’ve completely disabled all the alerts. If there’s an ICBM/nuke or whatever incoming, I am not safe anyway.
I don’t understand why they use the alert that sounds like we’re under nuclear attack. Like there’s better options and don’t do it to everyone in the province
It’s dangerous for ALL of the public if they use the emergency alert system frequently like this.
It induces ‚The Boy who called Wolf effect‘, we’ll take the alerts less seriously each time it’s used in such disruptive manner for issues that has zero impact on the recipient… Also, what’s to say that nobody has been seriously injured or made a serious mistake as a result of that 1am alert?
If a real emergencies such as a major Earthquake/Tsunami happening, a nuke flying our way, or any serious event that requires our attention comes our way, we need to be willing to take the alerts seriously.
I am quite sensitive to noise and even reading the news makes my heart pound so fast not to mention actually experiencing it. I live in Ontario though.
As aparent, i hate how we have implemented this system. By using the highest level alert and not focusing it on a reasonable geography, you’ve bayakt trained people to ignore all alerts. The idiots who scream think of the children are really the ones dooming children in need.
I learned how to go to Amber Alert history in my phone from these posts and it looks like there were only 4 (non-test) alerts since 2023 (last nights included). That’s really not very many. The way some people are posting about it you’d like it went off every 4 months at 1 am.
This is also a good time to remind people to check EmergencyInfoBC’s website or social media to read whatever alert got sent out. Its up there almost immediately. I wish they’d just text it to us as well. That seems like it could be doable no?
Inconvenient timing aside, the kids were found around in Burns Lake which is about 4 hours away from Terrace. I get why they went province-wide. The kidnappers had around a 2.5 hour head start before the police issued the alert. By around 7 or 8 am they could have reached the border with Alberta based on the timing in an article.
Not waiting until the morning was definitely the right call because what areas do you even alert then? If these kids went missing and didnt turn up immediately they would have criticized the police for not issuing the alert. There’s no winning in the court of public opinion but one choice clearly has the potential for better outcomes than the other.
Glad the kids were found safe and the Amber Alert worked in helping to find them.
We were woken up by this as well. At 2 AM, in Victoria, B.C.
If it saves a kid’s life, I don’t care at all. Stop complaining! The fact that this upsets people just shows how far our society has slipped.
Mine is always on vibrate…so it won’t make noises and my alarm in the morning will still make sound. My question is how many people here are walking around with their phone off silent? Like it’s been a nonissue for me forever…if I’m awake I’ll see/hear it vibrate
Small town NBer here. We are nosy and it gives us something to talk about. We aren’t bothered by it even when we get ones from Quebec.
I just turned off all emergency alerts on my phone, including severe and extreme ones.
Funny thing is that I already had amber alerts disabled.
No more. It’s never been something relevant to me. I’m done.
Not my kid, not my problem.
It sounded SO CLOSE to what my Dexcom low blood sugar alert sounds like that my cat woke up and began crying for me to go downstairs to get sugar in me.
I’ve never read a single alert. I’m annoyed by the fact I’m being bothered by it. I make it go away and move on.
If its a really big deal, my social media blows up with it for several days ANYWAYS.