Government Alerts

May 1st, 2013

I woke up to my phone beeping at me, and for the second time in a week it wasn't my alarm, or my child (which should technically count as an alarm!). Nope, it was a Weather channel Freeze warning. Having lived in Montana for a longtime I'm used to such warnings. Except that instead of having to get up and watch he morning news, these alerts are conveniently delivered to my phone. I did mention that this was not the first alert of the week.

The first alert was an Amber Alert on Monday morning. A little boy had been kidnapped by his parents in Kalispell. The fact that the Amber Alert when out to everyone with a smart phone at 7:00 am as soon as it was reported by the police department. I was surprised that it took the media 30 min's to report the Amber Alert, by then all of my friends on Twitter and Fb had posted and "re-tweeded" or "shared" the car and suspects information. When the suspects changed cars once again Twitter and Facebook were the first to report it. Thankfully it only took a couple of hours to track down the suspects and quickly get the little boy to safety.

Thanks to technology the Amber Alert received enough attention to make a difference in a little boy's life. Shortly after, everyone wanted to know how they had received such information since they had not signed up for any alerts. Turns out that most people are not aware of this feature in your phone. They're under Government Alerts and you should have two options Amber and Emergency. These are set to on by default and can be manually turned off at anytime.

Personally, I wouldn't turn these settings off for many reasons.
1. I am a mom, and I just couldn't imagine not being able to help bring a child back to safety.
2. It's simple. Can you imagine how much faster it would've probably been to issue an Emergency alert for the Boston bombing suspects in Watertown when the mad search started?

I am glad that these safety features are incorporated into our phones. I know that in the future they'll probably be more useful than they currently are. It's good to see first hand the difference that these alerts can make in someone's life. I just hope that everyone checks their phone and doesn't turn these alerts off.

What do you think about these alerts? Would you change anything about them?