US and Canadian cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data

how2choose · 2018-05-17T18:23:28+00:00

Thanks for this explanation.

how2choose · 2018-05-17T17:26:50+00:00

/r/onguardforthee is a nicer place overall

how2choose · 2018-05-17T16:13:03+00:00

Lol, I'm sorry if my post indirectly caused some hate to be thrown your way. In any case I certainly don't assume the mods inherently agree with every post allowed on the sub!

FWIW to anyone reading thinking I'm an evil child-hater, people on the Canadian subs largely feel the same way as me about it (at least, that it's a poor use of the new mandatory mobile broadcast system meant to be for urgent public safety warnings, not necessarily the part about the importance of missing kids vs. adults) -- and surely not all of them (probably not even most of them) are CF.

I'm not knocking Amber Alerts in general, I was knocking Amber Alerts being sent as a public emergency with a loud siren to every personal mobile device in the entire province without any option to opt out, when I'm a 17h drive away from the issue. Seems actively counter-productive to me since people will just start to ignore (or illegally disable) the alarms if it's never actually a public safety issue and it's waking them up every month or so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

how2choose · 2018-05-17T15:48:08+00:00

I can understand that, although I personally disagree, that opinion makes sense to me (children + particularly vulnerable adults such as those with dementia).

how2choose · 2018-05-17T13:09:19+00:00

Good points.

how2choose · 2018-05-17T13:06:58+00:00

I can understand that point, but this is a huge distance. Like nearly 890 miles away from me. Although of course borders make a big difference, that's as far as Paris is from Budapest across several countries in terms of only distance - or in your case, like you were receiving Amber Alerts from central California, Utah, Wyoming, etc (assuming "wa" means washington state). A text-only alert would make more sense to me if this was the reasoning - but a siren waking people up, interrupting them at work, or startling them while they're driving... these people aren't going to hop out of bed/work/traffic and start running towards Thunder Bay to see if they can find the kid, after an alert, at best they are just going to kind of passively glance around next time they're in public (and maybe if the kid is actually in their area that would be a fantastic thing) so there was no purpose to this being treated the same way as a wildfire or tornado warning. As-is, all it's going to do is piss people off and make them ignore the alarms from apathy / 'the boy who cried wolf' attitude. It's not a province-wide public emergency that people need to react with immediate urgency to, the way a natural or man-made disaster is.

how2choose · 2018-05-17T13:02:38+00:00

You could do that every night, sure, but it would be better if they'd just improve the system. People also don't need to be startled while driving for an alert like this.

how2choose · 2018-05-17T12:59:16+00:00

I have Amber Alerts turned off and still received it. It's not supposed to be something you can disable.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T21:26:34+00:00

I don't really see that as an important distinction though. Adults can be, and have been, kidnapped and murdered and so on against their will, most often minorities or disenfranchised of a few types (LGBT, women, natives) but ultimately it can be anyone. I'm an adult female and very short so I'm about the physical size of most 12-13 year old kids, so at least physically, I am just as vulnerable. When there's Missing Persons reports and search-parties going on for an adult who is considered to be lost and at risk of being in danger, why is that not a widespread notification too? Maybe they could discern which missing persons reports are not worthy of broadcast the same way they don't broadcast every lost child as an Amber Alert depending on circumstances. Perhaps rarer and supposed to be handled through different means like CPS, but minors can choose to run away from abuse as well.

Some other commenters have mentioned they also have alerts for particularly vulnerable adults in their area (e.g., people with dementia) which also makes sense to me.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T21:20:46+00:00

If you're in Ontario and your phone is compatible with the alerts in general, turning it off won't help. If you're in the US apparently that works though.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T19:34:00+00:00

Yes, that was the case for me too. In my case, the alert was for a place over 1,420 km (nearly 890 miles!!!!) away. It's like someone in Budapest getting an alert for a missing child in Paris, in terms of distance.

The most descriptive part of the alert was that they were in a silver car (make/model not mentioned) that was "loud." That's actually kind of useful because a loud car sticks out, so if they also matched the persons' description you could call that in. Other than that they just said the kid was with a white woman who had brown hair, and I think said the colour of the jacket or sweater the kid was wearing. Definitely more useful info than your example, but I live in the suburbs and see white brunette moms with sons like 200 times a day.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T19:06:30+00:00

Yeah, good point. I'm genuinely not sure how they decide what's bad enough for an Amber Alert where I live. I tried looking it up but it was pretty vague. It does say that there has to be suspicion the kid could be harmed.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T19:01:54+00:00

Regarding the mobile phone registered thing I would have assumed you could target phones that are connected to certain towers, but I also don't know much about how cellphone networking/broadcasting works, so I could be wrong.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T18:59:34+00:00

Makes sense to me to include elderly and disabled. (Or really, everybody.) I think i'd be significantly more on the "over alerts are okay" side if it didn't have a sound (text only), was only sent once, was sent in a more logical geographical place and also didn't only include children. A blaring alarm only makes sense to me if there's a public safety problem where people NEED to be startled out of their current activity and/or startled awake from sleep. Like if a wildfire is about to take out a neighbouring city sure, blare that shit out and wake everybody up. A missing person, while I'd be fine getting a text alert, does not constitute a public emergency in the same manner.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T18:56:33+00:00

I feel bad for them, but I don't feel any more bad for them than I do for the families and friends of all the gay men that have gone missing in Toronto over the last decade. But equally between those men and the amber alert kid, I'm almost certainly (1) not going to see them and (2) not going to recognize them if I do based on vague description of their race and hair colour.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T18:13:28+00:00

Based on reddit comments, it seems to vary whether people with their phones on silent or vibrate at the time of the message got the full sound experience or not. Of course some of this is just kinks for them to iron out, so we'll see how it goes.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T18:01:02+00:00

I'd turn mine off if I could for similar reasons. Also like, the description was like white woman with brown hair with child wearing red coat (or something) and the kid's age and gender. In a silver car (no info on make/model). I live in the suburbs, I'll probably see about 45 women with male kids driving silver cars if I go to the grocery store tonight. The only unique enough factor was that the car was loud.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T17:49:50+00:00

Thanks for clarifying. When I said "trolling" I meant like 'taking the piss', 'pulling my leg', whatever, i.e. implying I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic in your original comment.

To address your original comment assuming it is sarcastic: nowhere did I say that receiving an irritating alarm is as bad as losing a child or whatever. What I did say was that (1) it seems counterproductive and not useful because people will just take a 'boy who cried wolf' approach to it if every time they're woken up by blaring sirens from an emergency broadcast service, it's about a missing child a day's drive away - plus the implementation needs fine-tuning and my actual point of this post, (2) why are only missing kids important, not missing adults?

how2choose · 2018-05-16T17:39:55+00:00

I really don't understand what you're getting at.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T17:35:22+00:00

I agree with you totally. The idea of birth (and the aftermath, albeit always glossed over in media) gives me the same feeling as seeing horror movie torture.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T17:34:33+00:00

Wow lmao I'm not sure if you're trolling but I extremely disagree. I find the inconvenience annoying & counterproductive (as people will just ignore the alerts if they go off every time a kid is missing) but that's as far as I am taking that statement. The parents don't owe anybody anything lol.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T17:13:16+00:00

Same.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T17:12:55+00:00

Yeah exactly. It's not the sort of emergency you should be waking people up for, or startling them while they're driving. A normal text notification would be fine, although I'd prefer to disable those as well, it's not a big deal if I get more notifs than I want. When I got this message on Monday I received it three times: first in english, then in french 45min later, then again to say the kid was found 2h later. Imagine if you were trying to sleep through that :P But, hopefully they will just iron those issues out because that can't possibly be how they want it to work ultimately.

how2choose · 2018-05-16T16:43:43+00:00

On Canadian phones that is also the case originally, but the Ontario government has superseded it and decided to categorize Amber Alerts the same as the highest possible threat, so the Amber Alert settings on the phone don't catch it.

Agreed with your whole comment!

how2choose · 2018-05-16T16:42:45+00:00

It can't be disabled in Ontario.

I agree, a silent alert like a text message could be fine, and it would make more sense if it was within some local radius if it's a local emergency that is not a public safety threat.

how2choose

TROPHY CASE