> Child alert systems find about 50 or 60 kids a year (US). Turning them off is a pretty shit move for the ~dozen per year that come through.

As far as I know, the only options on my phone for these alerts are "deafeningly loud alarm" and "entirely disabled." After my phone woke me up at 3 AM for some kid being abducted in some other town, it's now off permanently. I did the same for weather alerts after it destroyed my ears to tell me about some flash flooding alert on some street across town that I will never use.

There is literally no situation in which my phone making a deafeningly loud alarm is acceptable, so I turn all those alerts off to make sure it doesn't happen again. If the implementation were better, I might leave them on. But it isn't, so I don't.

One challenge with AMBER alerts is that they don't provide enough information for the receiver to determine if the alert reflects a credible danger to a child, or if it's a nuisance alert where the system is being abused during a custody battle. Further, the very nature of a highly disruptive, high volume alert like this is to encourage the public to take extreme action -- e.g. following a vehicle -- that increases danger for both the involved child and everyone else in the area. While there are attempts to fix this very broken system (e.g. [1]), for now I very much consider the cure to be potentially worse than the disease.

[1] https://kutv.com/news/local/law-introduced-for-new-criteria-...