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> The Canadian government has made the alerts mandatory. The option to disable alerts in not present in settings menu (at least on iPhones).

I'm Canadian too, and I'm able to toggle all the options off on my Android phone, it just does absolutely nothing and all the alerts still come through.

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so, the option to disable alerts is not present in the settings menu, despite appearances
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>> Disabling alerts is the second thing I do to a new handset

> Except you can't in Canada. The Canadian government has made the alerts mandatory.

Same for USG and Presidential alerts. I disable them anyway - which I can do after rooting. For one phone I deleted the PotUS alerts file. On another one I edited a config file. On my current handset, I disabled the wireless alert system.

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> Same for USG and Presidential alerts.

The problem is that Canada ignores all of the different categories, and just sends everything out as a presidential alert.

> I disable them anyway - which I can do after rooting

Yeah, I used to root my phone and do the same thing, but I don't any more since rooting is too easy to detect with hardware-backed Play integrity these days :(

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Apparently can’t in NZ either.

There was a scheduled test last weekend, and I disabled the single “emergency alert” option in my iPhone’s settings. But it didn’t work, I still received the alert, complete with the heart attack inducing sound.

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Shortly before COVID there was a string of amber alerts arriving in the wee hours of the morning in Ontario regarding missing children. Didn't matter where in the province (larger than many European countries) it happened the alerts would to out regardless. A mix of people complaining about it and social media about why you're a bad person if you don't welcome these alerts. But inevitably they went away by and large. Not aware of any stated policy change I just suspect that they have become more conservative about sending them out because it was frankly ridiculous. Rousing millions of people from bed with any regularity over things they absolutely do nothing about would have only snowballed into a demand that it stop, even with the social media engine shaming people
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For a while, I automated my phone to drop to 3G (no alerts there) at night to get around this.
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Parent commenter is saying that they do this _after rooting their phone_
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You can disable the right background service on Android phones through ADB.
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