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I feel old... It never occurred to me that not everyone in America knows what an Amber Alert is and where the name comes from.
It never dawned on me that it wasn't a thing elsewhere until I moved and stopped having my phone screech like a banshee on occasion.
You can turn them off...I'm a monster
The way they go State-wide makes them especially annoying in places like Texas where there's a ton of people, and the event is 400+ miles away.
The regulation needs to be fixed so that they can make them more targeted. Currently it cries wolf often enough that nobody pays any attention.
If, when appropriate, they could limit it to a county or two, that'd be a hell of a lot more useful.
It also gets used way too often in cases where it's a 17yo running off with their boyfriend or a custodial dispute where the child isn't in any danger but is a day late coming back from the weekend with the other parent.
You can’t turn off Canadian ones. I went to a music fest just over the border of Canada last year, and my phone would randomly go off every few hours because my phone would pick an American tower then swap back to a Canadian tower and sense me as “new to the area” or whatever. I can turn off American amber alerts.
This is on iPhone btw.
Plus not everyone here is American. I'm so thankful that here in Germany these notifications only get used for catastrophic events (which is never) or the yeary test that got postponed 3 times in a row, lol.
What's the origin story?
It was named after a child that went missing and was later found murdered in 1996.