Our smartphone is an essential cable that keeps us connected to the world. While this cable supports all forms of engagement with the world, it plays a crucial role in our day-to-day activities. Among many other things, it keeps us updated about the world around us and alerts us to what's happening in our immediate vicinity. AMBER alerts, in particular, are alert notifications that keep us informed of missing children and other related incidents in our neighborhood. In case you are wondering what AMBER alerts are, they are part of the AMBER plan – a system that supports the creation and dissemination of safety information on missing children. It helps law enforcement to identify missing children and broadcasts the information to the general public. Unfortunately, many people find these alerts annoying. This comprehensive article, therefore, explores how you can silence AMBER alerts on your smartphone, with a step-by-step guide on how to do it for your iPhone as well as Android devices.
We won’t get into how to handle them just yet, but it’s worth noting that they’re more than notifications – they’re a chance for desperate families to enlist the help of a whole community in the search for their child. When an AMBER Alert goes out, it’s for a missing child who has been abducted by a stranger – and it’s making every effort to ensure that child is recovered as soon as possible. When it’s activated, it will sound very loudly and be marked as ‘extremely important’. However, while it’s great to make sure these alerts reach the right people at the right time, nobody wants them to come in at 3am.
For iPhone users, the process of managing these alerts is quite simple and user-friendly:
It even lets you turn off other types of alerts, including Emergency Alerts and Public Safety Alerts, so the only notifications you see are the ones you want to see.
The main steps are nearly identical to the ones above for Samsung, even though there are small differences in some of the menu titles.
Though AMBER alerts can strike us on our phones, they’ve also expanded to social media, greatly increasing their scope. Instagram has incorporated AMBER alerts and other social media has expanded the net of those looking for missing children. Though the main focus of this guide is your phone, you’ll also see how it feels to let AMBER alerts play on your social media. If you want to help such efforts, you’ll do a lot of good by leaving those alerts enabled.
After all, this is all about balancing individual discomfort with broader communal obligation. if you don’t want the wire to buzz, you have a lot more than the wire to worry about After all, turning off AMBER alerts might make my smartphone experience less annoying, but they are also extraordinarily helpful when it comes to recovering a missing child. As smartphones increasingly develop into critical response devices, users must become more aware of these settings and the role they can play in keeping their neighbourhoods safe.
Beneath this discourse lies the powerful tool so many of us carry around in our pockets – a smartphone with software in it designed to receive alerts about AMBER alerts, NOAA alerts, tsunami warnings and just about anything else under the sun. Navigate your way around your phone’s innards, and you can shape it exactly to your tastes, and keep it open and functioning as the portal to the outer world that it is designed to be. You could programme your phone to play everything it can play, or only certain things. But either way, it is the soft interface within yourself – the human touch – that makes it a truly human machine, part of a vibrant human enterprise to keep our collective neighbours safe.
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