Facebook shared its latest safety initiative today with a new feature focused on rescuing missing children. Through a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Facebook will now include AMBER Alerts in the timeline of its users boosting exposure of the critical information needed in such cases.
“When local or state police determine that a case qualifies for an AMBER Alert, the alert is issued by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and distributed through the Facebook system with any available information, including a photograph of the missing child, a license plate number, the name and description of the child and suspected abductor.”
Unlike the iPhone’s native government alerts feature including AMBER Alerts, Facebook users will not receive a push notification for the information, but the information will be viewable in detail when browsing the Facebook timeline when an AMBER Alert is active in a nearby community.
Facebook’s integration with the AMBER Alert system will be available on both its mobile apps and the web. Facebook says users have used the social network for years to share critical AMBER Alert information leading to the recovery of missing children in some instances, and its new integration increases that exposure and makes sharing alerts easier.
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I hope there will be a way to turn this off. I do not want the timeline cluttered up with even more useless information that I already receive on my phone. This is just duplication of the existing systems and extraneous.
Ditto. Most of them are for children hundreds of miles away, anyways.
You two are sick.
So we’ve got one guy complaining that he doesn’t wants Amber Alerts because it might clog up his precious timeline with useless information about someone who is missing, and we have another one who frankly doesn’t care because the alerts are normally for “children hundreds of miles away”.
Wow.
“….but the information will be viewable in detail when browsing the Facebook timeline when an AMBER Alert is active in a nearby community.” Reading comprehension is a wonderful thing to master.
next is instagram and Twitter… i wonder if they fail to realize that they are an app on a phone and the phone itself already gives us an amber alert…
Could you imagine if a potentially life-saving feature was added to TWO MORE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS? The Horror!
hmm lets try this again… i own an iphone… apple sends me amber alerts directly to my phone. i do not need extra alerts from facebook, instagram and twitter saying the same exact thing. when i have to CLOSE the apple alert just to get to those apps.
ah! hmmm
Brian wants our phone to blow up with “potentially life saving” features all day long. Like maybe 50 apps will track our GPS and alert us when we are about to cross the street with 50 reminders to look both ways first. Or maybe 50 alerts to remind us to get up and wash our hands every half hour during flu season! HEY ITS POTENTIALLY LIFE SAVING INFORMATION! Once isn’t nearly enough!
If seeing the same Amber Alert on multiple platforms or devices is your biggest problem today, then congratulations. The bigger the audience, the better the chances of saving the child.
Saving a child? Not necessarily. I’d say 90% of the alerts involves the non-custodial parent involved in a custody dispute. These cases do not involve a safety issue.
Wow. Three comments and they are all complaints.
Hope no one you know is ever kidnapped, where exposure to the largest audience and literally save a life.
If your child/loved one went missing or pretend you had a child, wouldn’t you want for people nearby to know about it and be on the look out? The stock Amber alert notification does not show a pic like how this could. Or is it too much of an inconvenience for people to have to scroll through that? My how people have become so self-centered to not be concerned about the well-being of others. This will only help.
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i’m just here for the comments.
Meh. Wait till facebook brings you a separate amber alert app….
90 to 95 percent of Amber Alerts involves domestic child abductions i.e., one spouse absconding with a child without the permission of the complaining spouse. Before the electronic capability of Amber Alerts these cases were resolved in the courts. In the beginning, Amber Alerts were design for the stranger abductions. Now, daily alerts are commonplace which reduces the effectiveness of the whole system.
It doesn’t matter if the system is reduced or not – ANY notification is better than non surely.
People complaining about their Facebook timeline being cluttered with Amber alerts? Are you serious? How much useless crap appears in all of our Facebook timelines every friggin’ day? And NONE that can actually rescue a child from danger, or God forbid, save their life!
Exactly right.
Look I set what I want to see and from who I want to see it from on facebook. No one is going to FORCE anything on me. So keep your almighty opinions to yourself. I bet you will be first in line for the chip implant U idiot. I am disabled and homebound and have already put up with damn amber alerts waking me up at 6 am in the morning 5 times on my phone which is used for emergencies for me.. I have had it.
I am deleting facebook purely for the reason that I did NOT ask for Amber Alert notifications on MY TIMELINE.I am disabled and homebound. I have NO NEED for it. I feel this is an INTRUSION on my privacy on Facebook. How dare they FORCE this on people? Next up: the chip implants. This is getting out of hand. And facebook is notorious for forcing stuff on people with NO WAY TO OPT OUT. I hope someone finds a way to get rid of it.