I just saw a post with someone questioning the usefulness of an Amber alert 400 km away from where a vehicle was spotted¹ and wondered if the alert itself would indiscriminately be sent to every phone in a target region, and if that would include the phone of the person of interest, which would seem counterproductive at best.
¹ I pointed out that the car might be known to travel to that region, even if it was last seen 400 km away.
Yes, it gets sent out to every phone in the target area, it also gets broadcast on radio and TV channels.
Sure, the person of interest will get the amber alert, but realistically, they probably know that someone is going to be looking for the kid sooner rather than later.
And while 400km (about 250 miles for other Americans like myself) is certainly a big area, that might be only like 3 or 4 hours of driving if they take major highways. I know people who regularly drive double that in a day and think nothing of it and they’re not even trying to flee from a kidnapping.
And of course, there’s probably going to be some time delay between when a kid goes missing to when the alert gets pushed out. The parents/guardian may not notice right away that the kid was missing- maybe the kid was playing out in the yard while they were inside cooking dinner when it happened, they may spend some time looking around the house/neighborhood and calling everyone they know before calling the police (I work in 911 dispatch, the amount of calls I get from some friend or relative in another state because the person having an emergency called them instead of calling us never ceases to amaze me,) and then it may take some time for the police to get out there and collect the necessary information and go through whatever process the area has for issuing the alert
So it very well may be a few hours since the abduction occured before the alert is issued.
And of course, like you said, they do try to determine an appropriate geographic area to issue the alerts in, if the abductor is known to live 400km away, or has made specific threats to take the kid to a certain location, or there’s other reasons to think that may be where they’re headed, it seems pretty reasonable to me to alert that area and much of the area in between the two locations.
In America, all telecom providers have to push these out, and the POI would also be included. In your area, I would imagine similar rules are in place for that. GrapheneOS users can disable it, though.
Can also confirm a setting to turn it off on iPhone and some dumbphones. Found out after once receiving the same alert 5 times in a row. GrapheneOS can uniquely block presidential alerts though.
GrapheneOS can uniquely block presidential alerts though.
I love open source
I had an iPhone flip out at one point and do the full screeching alarm cycle every 15 seconds or so for several minutes until I figured out how to turn it off.
Fun side story: I told my friends about it and how to turn it off, and one of them like berated me for being selfish because I didn’t want my phone screaming at me continuously for an alert I already knew about. That’s how I learned that guy was a shithead.
Wdym presidential alerts??
I would assume so; they don’t necessarily know the abductors phone number, just the vehicle, right? So, it would be difficult to single out that one phone.
The vast majority of amber alerts are parental custody disputes (at least from California data), so yes, they know the abductors phone number, name, home, workplace, social security number, relatives, etc
… wait… including the target? oh god…
It also goes to any TV or radio they’re using! The fools!
