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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

I live in Texas. I get Amber alerts for missing children that are 8 hours of interstate driving away from me. That's completely useless.

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Every single person I know in the NYC area turned off amber alerts in 2013 after being woken up by this one in the middle of the night:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-phone-4...

Even older parents called their kids to find out how to make sure it does not happen again.

It didn't help at all that phones suddenly had this feature and defaulted to ON (for awhile you couldn't turn off Amber alerts without turning off "They just launched the nukes, kiss your ass goodbye" alerts).

If we're discussing uselessness, I'm pretty sure warnings of impending war are the peak of this. They've actually killed someone in Hawaii. Let me live my final moments in bliss without worrying about that kind of stuff.

Same in California, and the ones I've received were custody battles between parents...

A child was abducted, and in some cases - as happened just a few days ago - the noncustodial parent threatens to kill the child. And does. The fact that the abduction involves a custody dispute is only one of the factors that goes into the decision to send an alert.

Many abductions are vehicle thefts where the thief takes off without noticing or caring that there is a child in the car.

In one recent case, the thief threw the baby out the window into a ditch. Citizens who received the Amber alert found the child.

Almost everyone owns a phone. Amber alerts go to all phones by default. It is therefore statistically unremarkable that "Citizens who received the Amber alert found the child". It's akin to the observation that they were all born after the Civil War. It has no relevance.

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