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.
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.
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 🤣😅)
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.
