What is an "amber alert"?
I've never encountered this before, and I don't see any option for it on my phone.
I'm an Android user in the UK, if that helps.
Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
21–30 of 154 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#22Your phone is supposed to have a safe max volume, so WEA doesn't need to care. But your phone might not implement max volume correctly.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.
I have amber alerts disabled but still receive weather emergency notifications. Which makes sense. Perhaps it works differently in different states? In Texas my iPhone has this alert granularity: AMBER Emergency Public Safety Test
May also differ by OS. I'm on Android and have options to disable four or five different types of alerts.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.
> Why are they useless? I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state. I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night,…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#25These are obviously complete trash. Waking people up in the middle of the night for some random child that was abducted half a Belgium away with no real call to action even if it were in the same very small town. What we need is political pressure for a pay-to-play solution. You fire an alert at my phone, that's $100 deposited within a week against my phone bill or offered via mail for the pay-as-you-go burner phone…
Your solution is, "give me $100 every time a child goes missing?" Did I get that right?
I believe its more "don't send me an amber alert every time a child goes missing".
But on the other hand it's possible to turn them off so maybe not.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#26I very much doubt that there is any technical reason for the alerts always being loud. It's a deliberate decision. Like the whole idea of amber alerts, it is a matter of authorities taking decisions that make them feel good, without considering the consequences.
Amber alerts are bad. We get them now and them in Ontario at 3am, sent to the entire (rather large) province. This is idiotic. The probability that someone would be awake and in a position to observe an abducted child at 3am is negligible. The probability that someone woken at 3am will not be able to get back to sleep, drive to work in the morning when drowsy, and consequently get into an accident that kills someone, is not negligible.
Such alerts should be confined to warnings that people really do need to pay immediate attention to. Like a train accident that has released toxic gas, requiring immediate evacuation, even if it's 3am. As it is, an alert at 3am will be ignored, since the system has been abused by the idiots running it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#27These are obviously complete trash. Waking people up in the middle of the night for some random child that was abducted half a Belgium away with no real call to action even if it were in the same very small town. What we need is political pressure for a pay-to-play solution. You fire an alert at my phone, that's $100 deposited within a week against my phone bill or offered via mail for the pay-as-you-go burner phone…
Your solution is, "give me $100 every time a child goes missing?" Did I get that right?
it's a modest proposal, but I'm worried about what this would incentivise
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#28Poor UX, poor system design, and "the competition doesn't do it so we don't need to either".
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#29malice
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
#30These are obviously complete trash. Waking people up in the middle of the night for some random child that was abducted half a Belgium away with no real call to action even if it were in the same very small town. What we need is political pressure for a pay-to-play solution. You fire an alert at my phone, that's $100 deposited within a week against my phone bill or offered via mail for the pay-as-you-go burner phone…
Your solution is, "give me $100 every time a child goes missing?" Did I get that right?
I believe GP intended the $100 to be a disincentive to spam people's phones with alerts that can't reasonably be acted upon.