Emergency alerts to your phone

[TheFirstOfHerName]

From April, the government will be able to send emergency alerts to our mobile phones.

www.gov.uk/alerts

A siren will go off, even if your phone is on silent. You won't be able to do anything else on your phone until you turn it off. They plan to test this on 23 April.

I understand the reasons why this can be helpful, and in areas where people need to suddenly evacuate due to wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes etc it could save lives.

However, personally I don't want it, and have disabled it on my phone.

1. Of the emergencies I might experience, I'm not sure I'd want to be alerted to any of them via this method. If a flood or storm is imminent, I'll find out through the usual channels. If a nuclear missile is heading my way, having a few minutes' warning will not help.

1. This system is being run / overseen by the UK government, and my trust in them has been somewhat eroded over the past few years.

1. I have an anxiety disorder (reasonably well managed with combination of medication and other methods) and I think the cost to my anxiety levels of having my phone suddenly sirenning at me outweighs the negligible probability of this system saving my life.

If you are the kind of calm, resilient person who could have these alarms going off and it not completely throw you, then great.

He's have had so much more fun deploying the new variant. He must be gutted he missed the opportunity.

Yep! How anyone can trust this government after the last few years is beyond me.
I’ve switched off emergency alerts and don’t care who calls me selfish

You know the alert is coming, so acknowledge it and then carry on as normal. No need to get your knickers in a twist.

If you know it’s coming what’s the point of the alert? If I know it’s coming I know the information it’s telling me.

It’s under settings and notifications on iPhone. Right at the bottom

Very sad that so many are trying to disable the alert even when that alert could save a life in the case of a missing child. If it was their child missing, you can be sure that they would eat the alert issued.

The US is enormous. The UK is not. Alerting the entire country to a missing child is pointless either way, but especially in the UK when you can't get out easily anyway.

I have Facebook. There's a child or vulnerable person missing in our area practically every other week. Seems to have really mushroomed since 2020 too. I'm not sure how a phone alert system would be better than this but note that the govt information talks only about adverse weather events and fire.

But I can have the alert without a siren. I'll then see it when it's convenient, it's not as though I'd be going out searching, I'd leave that to people who know what they are doing!

Aaaah passive aggressive faux-sadness... always the sign of a lost argument.

Siren and prompt that blocks your phone until you dismiss it - in an age where people use phones for sat navs or software for job allocation in the case of things like delivery jobs... not the safest thing in the world.

Alert disabled for me. They'll just have to rely on every other method they have of getting a message out that they have in the modern world for the hypothetical MN scenarios plucked out of thin air as I'm not aware that anyone with any credibility has even suggested the UK use is going to be for missing children.

I don’t like the idea of it at all. Let’s not normalise the government instructing us via our phones.

The government won’t tell us to save ourselves.

This thread feels a bit like when people on Mumsnet were scrabbling around for logical reasons for illogical restriction decisions.
There are some valiant arrempts here - missing children, random gunmen etc. If this was a concern it would be on the govt info page.
The person who mentioned Grenfell made an excellent case for it however.
At no point in 45 years have I felt like I needed a weather alert in my area of the country. Especially not one that sounds like a high pitched siren.

Thats exactly it, slowly boiling the frog. Little by little they take our liberties and slowly control us and people lap it up (15min cities anyone?).

'You're so selfish won't you think of the lost children' is the new 'don't kill your granny' 🙄

Mandatory where I live with no opt out. Is tested twice a year. Only had weather alerts in the past few months.
System works in other countries, why not the UK?

Because in the Uk we don't have tsunamis, bad earthquakes, volcanoes, forest fires etc etc etc.
It's just project fear. A population in fear is easier to control. It's a slippery slope and one I don't plan on being on...

I'm sure it'll be useful every few years.

However, I'm more interested in which Tory donor got the contract to provide this....

Because in the Uk we don't have tsunamis, bad earthquakes, volcanoes, forest fires etc etc etc.

but you do have abducted kids etc. to my mind it’s just an extension of what is already in place but rolling out with more modern technology. Instead of relying on electronic billboards for Amber alerts etc, it’s pushed to all phones in the area instead. Hardly crime of the century. We get them here for bushfires and floods as well as local vulnerable people missing. We don’t see it as a means of government control but rather genuinely saving lives (own and others).

The reason ive seen given for people switching off their emergency alerts on their phones is because of lack of trust in the Government because of the shit they have put us through over the last three years. I just know they will abuse this system.
You reap what you sow

Because in the Uk we don't have tsunamis, bad earthquakes, volcanoes, forest fires etc etc etc.

We had wildfires last year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62224618

At least you have the option of it not sounding. I worry for people in abusive relationships who have their own secret phone they don’t want to be discovered and people who would be confused and distressed by an alarm going off.

I think it's a great idea. In fact I assumed we already had something like this.

you mean YOU have not experienced these things in the UK, not that the UK hasn't experienced them, and other natural disasters.

Some of these smug, blind, ignorant posts put me in mind of the citizens of Pompei

We have floods and building fires, traffic gridlock for hours due to accidents, etc.

A way of alerting people in the affected areas and keeping them informed as to actions required, etc., can only be a good thing.

We have floods and building fires, traffic gridlock for hours due to accidents, etc.

It'll be going off far too often if they use if for traffic gridlock!

Gridlocks - a phone that goes off with a loud, high pitched siren, that you have to find a safe place to pull over look at to see what it's about and what the instructions are, that stops other things working until you acknowledge the warning (the podcast or music you were enjoying stopped playing? ) is one of the worst designs for traffic flow management I can imagine.
We have apps that already warn us of traffic issues and even reroute us without causing this level of disruption and yes - panic, because we don't know if we're being warned about a traffic problem or an incoming tsunami.