I have a 1 month-old Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s a cool phone, but I got a message today I wasn’t expecting.
I got a Wireless Emergency Alert, but that’s not the message I’m talking about.
Wireless Emergency Alerts are those alerts that go to most newer phones and send messages from the National Weather Service and others about emergency situations. The program has just gotten started but will spread to most counties and cities over time, we think.
Right after the alert showed, though, was a message like the headline above helpfully explaining how I could disable the emergency alerts on my phone.
Now I understand why folks might want to disable these alerts. There have been a number of news stories lately about phone alerts at 2AM and 3AM, etc. waking people up to tell them about missing kids, flash floods and other such things.
Please folks, if you are going to disable the emergency notifications on your phone, sign up for your local emergency alert service and opt for text messaging. You can sign up at www.usnear.org.
The alerts will come as normal text messages, which means you control how they sound and when. And there’s no cost to you other than text messaging charges.
This way, you get the valuable information in these alerts but you also get to control whether your sleep is disturbed.
