Comment: Use for AMBER alerts improper and dangerous. (Score 3, Insightful) 197
I was furious when they started using weather radios to announce AMBER alerts and I'm equally annoyed they are extending that to this system as well. These systems were designed for major public emergencies. Use for AMBER alerts and other emergencies impacting only small groups of people will only encourage people to ignore or deactivate their alert enabled devices.
Here where I live, weather radios routinely go off for AMBER alerts. The average radio also goes off for a variety of minor weather issues, rather than only triggering for weather warnings. Many people simply unplug their radios after being woken up one too many times by a screaming alert radio letting them know there is a thunderstorm WATCH or AMBER alert. I imagine people will similarly disable all the available phone alerts, because the system will simply trigger far to often and annoy them. I know the very first thing I did when I read this article was find and disable the AMBER alert option.
The settings were omitting from the article. You can find them in Settings >> Notifications, located at the bottom. There are two options, one to disable/enable AMBER alerts and another to disabled/enable "Emergency Alerts."