HACKER Q&A
📣 fwungy

Emergency Notifications Explosion


Just curious here, I'm getting an explosion of Emergency Notifications from my local government, mostly police and my children's school.

We are told to avoid certain areas sometimes, or just about relatively minor events on campus, like paramedic visits. These happen a couple times a month at least. Now my employer is offering to send me emergency notifications, even though I'm entirely remote.

I'm not sure what to think of this. Are there more emergencies now, or is it that they're able to send them more easily, so they do?

Rather than feel reassured by them I must admit I find them unsettling. I'm routinely being reminded things are going wrong somewhere for someone near me. I never learn what happened or who it happened to.

I honestly don't know how I feel about them yet. Yes, they can do some good, but I know from my work that too many notifications can generate Alert Fatigue and be counter-productive.

I'm curious about the HN community's view on this.

  👤 version_five Accepted Answer ✓
Any power that exists will be abused, and a hyper risk-averse bureaucracy for whom there is no downside or resistance to using a system like that will only keep escalating. It's absurd that it can't be turned off.
👤 JohnFen
> or is it that they're able to send them more easily, so they do?

In my area, it's clearly this. I've disabled them on my phone, because they're too frequent and never actually useful.

👤 PaulHoule
I’ve been trying to make up my mind if I should try to talk the local government into having a presence on Mastodon or not,.
👤 fwungy
My latest alert, which triggered this post, turned out to be because there was a Mom's for Liberty protest at our local school.

I don't agree with their positions, but come on, an emergency alert to the whole city for some women with signs?

👤 mtmail
I get very few warnings. My local government (Germany) has a phone app ("Nina"), entirely optional, and you can subscribe to areas. There's no tracking where my phone is, they only push notification to what areas I subscribed to. There's a map of the whole country where I can view current emergencies. The nearby emergencies have been evacuations due to World War 2 bombs, "please close windows" due to fires and water contermination. Weather warnings, e.g. high risk of severe storms, are done by another app. I don't have the feeling it has been misused or alerted too often.

Right now the app shows two warnings only for whole Germany. They're multi-week, one about drinking water contermination in one city, another about unstable ground due to flooding in a old mining town.