I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we had an even more (in my opinion) egregious case about two months ago that I'm still fuming about.
Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones:
"WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]"
What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start walking around my town to see if she's somehow walked all this way? I felt bad for the lady, but this isn't a "wake everybody up in the middle of the night" scenario, just get the cops involved and look around the area where she went missing.
Fiiiiinally just about get back to sleep (took a while because I was fucking furious), must have been about 4:30 and it starts going off again.
"FOUND: MISSING WOMAN IN [town] HAS BEEN LOCATED AND IS SAFE"
Found. They woke me up to let me know there was no emergency. Do not even get me started on the absurdity of it, I'm genuinely still absolutely pissed. Best part is? We can't shut off our emergency alerts. The CRTC mandates that there must not be a way to opt out of them.
Sorry for the rant, your story reminded me of this bullshit and got me all fired up.
Also in Canada. Ontario would blast the province for technically “abducted” children that were typically joint custody disputes.
There was one exception case where children were actively harmed, but already murdered by the time the alert went out. I suspect police couldn’t kick down the door where they were murdered because they didn’t have a warrant/sufficient cause yet: right to peace and privacy in your home but not on your phones!
The alerts are 4G/5G only, so for a while I had a shortcut that would downgrade me to 3G at night.
Despite everyone questioning the system being labelled as “with the child abductors”, there are far fewer of these alerts. Either abductions are way down, or they’ve tightened up the criteria to blast the province.
That's really egregious to do in Nova Scotia out of all places. Where there was a mass murderer on a 13-hour rampage, they just tweeted about it. This is what they use the emergency alert system for?
I think that's why they abuse the alert system now. People were outraged that he was running loose (very close to where I lived at the time) and nobody was notified, so now they notify us about every tiny little thing.
Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones:
"WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]"
What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start walking around my town to see if she's somehow walked all this way? I felt bad for the lady, but this isn't a "wake everybody up in the middle of the night" scenario, just get the cops involved and look around the area where she went missing.
Fiiiiinally just about get back to sleep (took a while because I was fucking furious), must have been about 4:30 and it starts going off again.
"FOUND: MISSING WOMAN IN [town] HAS BEEN LOCATED AND IS SAFE"
Found. They woke me up to let me know there was no emergency. Do not even get me started on the absurdity of it, I'm genuinely still absolutely pissed. Best part is? We can't shut off our emergency alerts. The CRTC mandates that there must not be a way to opt out of them.
Sorry for the rant, your story reminded me of this bullshit and got me all fired up.