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Phones should have FM radio again (as an emergency safety feature)
(www.spacebar.news)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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It's granular. It CAN be used for that. It's used for Amber alerts already. Easy enough to make additional categories.
Here in Canada it isn't granular, every alert is sent at the "presidential" level
When COVID-19 started, the county health department where I was decided to repeatedly use it to blast non-updates. And in the US, unlike the Amber Alert stuff, the general alerting stuff cannot be disabled; that means that you're trusting the party who can send alerts to not abuse it. When you consider that they were causing everyone in the metro area to stop whatever they were doing -- meetings or whatever -- and look at their phones for a message that said "stores are still closed, continue to social-distance", it was incredibly obnoxious.
Honestly, I want the ability to at least disable county warnings. At least temporarily. So far, the federal government hasn't use it other than for very infrequent tests, but county officials haven't shown that restraint.
That being said, I suppose it could be worse. One major point of contention in Germany after the 2021 European floods that killed a bunch of people was that, even though they knew that they were going to have to flood the towns along the rivers, they didn't have the emergency alerting thing set up, so they couldn't notify people that they were about to be flooded and to get to high ground immediately.
It sounds like some emergency-handling people in Germany caught flak for that and that they went out and banged their alerting system into shape after that.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/germany-to-warn-of-future-floods-with-mobile-phone-alerts-2495503
https://www.thelocal.de/20221206/all-cell-phone-users-in-germany-to-be-part-of-disaster-warning-day
That being said, we also had that bogus Hawaii ballistic missile alert, which wasn't great.