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.

My phone doesn't have an emergency alert setting so I'm guessing I'm going to be spared. Given that I live in a village, on a hill and there is no nuclear bunker within a 100 mile radius I doubt any warning will be of much use here.....unless they are going to activate it when the cows break lose and rampage across the football field again.

Good to have for a real emergency but a bit annoying to have alerts for every missing child

Thst seems an odd mentality.

Not in UK but we get them, mainly localised and 2-3 per year. Generally a vulnerable person who has wandered off and they fear is lost in bush. Many people’s properties here back onto National bush so guess putting it out is sensible, I’ve never taken issue with it.

I thought this was incredibly odd too.

Imagine not wanting to get disturbed when a child has been kidnapped in your area 😳

I think they need to be saved for 'Drop everything and take action' situations or people won't take them seriously. If experience tells you most alerts are for missing people, and you get an alert when you're at home and there's nothing you could about it, your instinct might be to ignore it.

😆😆

Imagine not wanting to get disturbed when a child has been kidnapped in your area

Well I won't be getting up in the middle of the night to look for them so a text I see when I wake up would work fine.

🤦🏻‍♀️

I wonder how many are googling ”sound proof box”, to put their secret second phone in for the 23rd of April.

Reminds me to turn it off on the kids' phones actually - DD2 is very noise sensitive as part of her autism and it's liable to cause her a fair bit of distress if it's an unexpected loud noise. Already disabled it on my own phone - but I have a lot of notifications and shit muted on that because I take the view that it's my PHONE it's not every other random company's ability to bug the shit out of me device.

I'm another one living the US and alerts sent to your phone are standard here. I think I've only received three types - a flash flooding alert once, a winter squall (like a bad, super speedily incoming snow storm/white out) one once and missing children/vulnerable adults. The winter one got me off the highway just before a huge amount of accidents started happening when everyone suddenly had 0 visibility in the snow. Missing children alerts are the most common for us (maybe once or twice a year) with, as PP mentioned, descriptions of abductors and license plate #s where available. I wish they had that back in the UK - it has been so effective in locating missing kids as suddenly you have tens of thousands more eyes looking for the abductor's vehicle, for instance.

It has never once occurred to me to find missing children alerts "annoying" @kitsuneghost - in fact I'm struggling to see how anyone could reasonably find an attempt to bring a scared child home anything other than valuable. I know how grateful I would be for such a service if I was - God forbid - ever in the situation where my child was missing and needed help.

Generally OP, it's a service that works really, really well over here. I hope it does in the UK too.

I would have left it on until you said that. Good to have for a real emergency but a bit annoying to have alerts for every missing child.

Bet you wouldn't feel that way if your kid was missing.

Neither of them went off in the night. I believe here the emergency weather/event ones come through at any time but the missing persons ones only go off in the daytime.

I think you are missing the point. There are emergencies where you need to act immediately to protect yourself; and emergencies where you probably can't do very much - the missing child would fall into the latter category.

I think you are missing the point. There are emergencies where you need to act immediately to protect yourself; and emergencies where you probably can't do very much - the missing child would fall into the latter category.

Amber alerts in the U.S usually feature very specific and helpful information that does allow others to potentially help e.g in the case of an abduction, description of the child, the suspect and details of the car last seen heading for... So that others can report the suspect's vehicle if they see it. They aren't released for every missing child. There's criteria that must be met e.g the child must be considered to be at risk of harm, there must be sufficient information about the suspect and vehicle etc.

We had a situation last year where a young boy with autism went missing in my area and the police released a description of him and asked people to look out for him. We did do exactly that and he was thankfully found relatively quickly because people knew who to look for.

I'm not saying they don't serve a purpose but they'd need to be a separate warning type from 'immediate threat to life' warnings because if too many warnings go out, as I've said, people will stop taking them seriously.

I say this because, like it or not, not everyone is going to care enough to look out for a missing child, and because even if you do care, there will be many circumstances where you can do nothing - if you are at home, asleep in bed for example.

Not once have I ever thought to be annoyed when I've received an Amber Alert or a tornado warning.
We are thankful for the warning systems that are in place here.

Please believe me: when it’s your child who’s missing, and you think you’d give your life to have them back safe and sound, these alerts are so valuable.

I’m in the US. We get a missing child alert once or twice a year: age of child, licence plate, area last seen. The police send them out only when they know the child is on the move and they need ordinary citizens to be eyes and ears. When you’re in the car on the highway when the alert comes, we all pay attention.

A lot of people I know seem to be panicking that it’s in relation to current events that it’s suddenly kicking in now and are taking it as some kind of confirmation that world war three is imminent - however it’s my understanding that this has been in the works for a long time and is going to be used for all sorts of things like previousnposters have said. Providing the government is restrained with it and not using it for every single weather alert etc I think it’s good in theory.

Honestly what a load of hysteria over nothing. The way people are carrying on here you’d think that your phone is suddenly going to turn into a device which is constantly alerting you to the goings on in your area whether they concern you or not.

These systems are in place all around the world and people seem to survive without having constant anxiety attacks over them. If anything the UK are behind on this one.

I suspect that the people who want them disabled are the same people who never watch the news and who would then be shocked when a real emergency actually happens because they didn’t know it was coming.

IMO it shouldn’t be able to be disabled.

When you’re in the car on the highway when the alert comes, we all pay attention.

It's already been confirmed you're not allowed to read them while driving in the UK, so that wouldn't work here.

Agree with others. Have experienced this getting tornado warnings while on holiday in the us and it wasn’t scary at all. Or sinister. Or population control.

Where’s the hysteria? This just isn’t a feature I want my phone to have, so I’ve turned it off. Anything relevant to me I’ll see on Twitter, the news etc. If I don’t know about it through normal means it’s not relevant to me.

I can see the merit in countries with multiple danger-to-life weather events that come on all of a sudden. I don’t live in one of those.

I suspect that the people who want them disabled are the same people who never watch the news and who would then be shocked when a real emergency actually happens because they didn’t know it was coming.

I'm perfectly capable of watching the news and keeping myself up to date. I just have no need to be woken up during the night. I turned off phone alerts from the environment agency as they rang during the night and it was for a flood alert, not even anything serious. Text messages fine, sirens unnecessary.

It's already been confirmed you're not allowed to read them while driving in the UK, so that wouldn't work here.

Well many people have passengers but they're often also announced over the radio too.

Can’t believe there are such stress heads around.

It must be very debilitating to have such an anxiety over a message.