Some Amber Alert ideas
Re: Amber Alert pushback panned, May 15
Between the extremes of calling 911 to complain about Amber Alerts (which is clearly inappropriate and it is incredible that people actually do this) and being happy to receive these alerts at any time of day under any circumstances, there is a large grey area where reasonable people can have a balanced discussion as to the precise implementation of the alerts.
To start, people should be able to disable these alerts if they choose to. This option is already available in the U. S. People with a predisposition to migraines, heart disease, cerebral aneurysms, panic attacks, and other health issues should not have to worry about their phones going off at surprising moments with the most brutal cacophony of sound imaginable. Real harm may actually be caused by these alerts. Nobody has studied this and therefore nobody knows if there is measurable population- based harm caused by these alerts. Do car accidents go up due to startled drivers? Does the sleep disruption caused by the alerts cause an increase in car accidents the next day (similar to daylight-saving time changes)? At the very least, one should be able to configure the alert’s tone and volume.
Next, our phones already know when we are sleeping, where we are, and whether we are driving. Leverage this data to target the alerts to those people in the appropriate geographical region (which may still be quite wide but perhaps not the entire province) who are accepting of the alert and who are not sleeping. When the phone senses we are awake or that we have entered the affected geographical region, send the alert then (i.e., when we can plausibly help!).
Simply lambasting those who want to have a more fulsome discussion about these alerts is closed-minded and inappropriate. Amber Alerts (and other emergency alerts from the government) have an important place in our society. Let’s now have a more nuanced discussion about how best to implement them. Philip Jones, London, Ont.