Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?
I want to contribute to community efforts at finding missing kids and be ready for local disaster situations. But as someone who wears headphones my ears are often rattled for hours by these alerts.
This can't be an isolated issue as google indicates multiple lawsuits about this. https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/17/apple-hit-with-lawsuit-over-ear-shattering-amber-alert-volume-through-airpods-pro/
The link is for apple, but as an android user I face the same issue. What I don't understand is why
emergency notifications don't respect media volume? Can someone explain the technical logistical reasons for this?
I very much doubt that there is any technical reason for the alerts always being loud. It's a deliberate decision. Like the whole idea of amber alerts, it is a matter of authorities taking decisions that make them feel good, without considering the consequences.
Amber alerts are bad. We get them now and them in Ontario at 3am, sent to the entire (rather large) province. This is idiotic. The probability that someone would be awake and in a position to observe an abducted child at 3am is negligible. The probability that someone woken at 3am will not be able to get back to sleep, drive to work in the morning when drowsy, and consequently get into an accident that kills someone, is not negligible.
Such alerts should be confined to warnings that people really do need to pay immediate attention to. Like a train accident that has released toxic gas, requiring immediate evacuation, even if it's 3am. As it is, an alert at 3am will be ignored, since the system has been abused by the idiots running it.
My guess is a conservative reading of the applicable laws, if anything.
Turn off amber alerts; they're entirely useless and you can now turn them off without turning off the tornado warnings (almost entirely useless, too).
For anyone hearing the term 'Amber Alert' for the first time:
> An Amber Alert (or child abduction emergency alert) is a message distributed by a child abduction alert system to ask the public for help in finding abducted children. The system originated in the United States. [1]
Alerts are distributed via "pagers, faxes, emails, and cell phones with the information immediately posted on the Internet for the general public to view" and have the aim of "ask(ing) the public for help in finding abducted children".
A report indicates around 200 Amber Alerts are issued per year in the US: https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/amb...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_alert
I want to be able to silence Amber Alerts but still receive them. On Android, my only options are completely off, or full-blast obnoxious tone.
I CANNOT have my phone making noise, so it has to be fully off. If there was a choice for silent notifications, I would choose that.
On a similar note to the linked article: the low battery alert of the AirPods Pro can be ear-shattering, and there's no means of reducing the volume. I suspect it tries to scale volume with environmental noise because it ranges from "startling" to "painful".
Reading this thread, I’m not sure what’s worse. The USA, where phones apparently randomly go off at any time for no good reason at a loud volume level, or Germany, where our alerting system is so broken that at the last testing round half of us didn’t get any alerts (these are supposed to be for actual emergencies, not custody disputes), and the rest received them over a time frame of several hours.
What is an "amber alert"?
I've never encountered this before, and I don't see any option for it on my phone.
I'm an Android user in the UK, if that helps.
Never had the misfortune of receiving an alert when wearing headphones. And this topic is terrifying because I have already configured the EQ on my phone to boost a bit the sound and around 80% is already really loud. I'd prefer if the alert had at least the option to bypass the jack output and instead use always the speakers.
It’s likely one of those edge cases that nobody cares to solve. It probably involves some scoping issue where one system doesn’t know the conditions of the downstream system.
Emergency volumes are supposed to be loud, and override the volume settings.
The thing making that override doesn’t know what the actual audio output channel is, or what “loud” means on that channel.
Users “reverse opt in” to amber alerts by not turning them off. Most people just these off. There’s way too many of them, and the vast majority of these are a custody dispute escalation. Don’t feel bad for shutting these off.
With this fact pattern the issue never makes it to the top of the stack to solve.
When an amber alert pops up, what happens 100% of the time is I'm like "holy shit wtf stop that loud noise!" and then after the message is dismissed and untrievable I try to read it, resulting in me having no idea what it said.
Is it possible it's only a specific combination of hardware and software that's having this issue?
We don't have amber alerts in my country (or at least I never got one). However Mi wireless earbuds + Nokia X10 for some reason reset to a painfully loud 100% volume when receiving a call. I can lower the volume in settings, but on next call it resets to 100% again. Same phone with a different Bluetooth headphones and same headphones with different phone work fine.
I don't know the whole software stack to point fingers whose fault it is, but there must be a bug either in this specific phone's Bluetooth implementation, Android 12 or the Mi earbuds.
These are obviously complete trash. Waking people up in the middle of the night for some random child that was abducted half a Belgium away with no real call to action even if it were in the same very small town.
What we need is political pressure for a pay-to-play solution. You fire an alert at my phone, that's $100 deposited within a week against my phone bill or offered via mail for the pay-as-you-go burner phone types.
Then if the phone goes off I know its something real. Right now it's just a waste of resources and annoyance, probably killing more people than it is saving via sleepy or distracted drivers or medical professionals.
Do the people who get these alerts really act on them at all? I know the second after I read the license plate number that its gone out of my head, and I usually don't know what the make and model of the vehicle would actually look like since I don't pay attention to what most cars actually look like.
If you aren't setting all alerts off, you're setting yourself up for a failure of the next day several times a year. (Way too many pointless midnight or worse alerts going on).
The low power warning noise is also painfully loud when I'm just using them without audio playing. Bose also have this issue, and there is no way to change the warning sounds.
It's really weird to me to see so many people discussing Amber Alert spam when I can count on one hand the number of alerts I've received in my lifetime
Your phone is supposed to have a safe max volume, so WEA doesn't need to care. But your phone might not implement max volume correctly.
Poor UX, poor system design, and "the competition doesn't do it so we don't need to either".
Although there are no such things where I live, I turn off all cells for the night. Why don't you?
My phone went off 3 times in one night. Two amber alerts, one silver alert. I was dead the next day.
I don’t know anyone who keeps amber alert turned on. It was the first thing I disabled.
Why do Americans need amber alerts? How
come the rest of the world apparently doesn’t?
Yeah I disabled it for those same reasons.
Pro tip: You can turn them off entirely.
Full disclosure: I pulled this information out of my arse, but perhaps it's to avoid the situation where you leave them connected without realising? If it plays at max volume through the headphones you have a better chance of hearing it even if you're not actually wearing the headphones