Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs)
It's 4 A.M. and your phone starts loudly blaring a scary tone. You check your phone, and it's an emergency alert for a child abduction. This exact scenario happened in New York (July 2013), and similar scenarios continue to happen around the nation. Such scenarios have prompted people to disable the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) on their mobile devices. Since other alerts (including tornado warnings and national emergencies) are disseminated as a WEA, these middle-of-the-night annoyances are encouraging many people to disable a feature that may save their life one day.
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that amber alerts are unimportant. In fact, they're extremely important. In theory, alerting people about a vehicle carrying an abducted child whose life is in danger increases the likelihood that the child can be safely recovered. The issue is, no one in their right mind will get out of bed, throw some clothes on, then get in their car to drive around looking for the vehicle mentioned in the alert message. Instead, it just comes across as highly inconvenient, because their sleep has been disrupted by an alert that doesn't prompt any sort of productive action. In fact, the end result is destructive action, because the first thing they'll look up the next day will be "how to disable WEAs".
I believe the solution to this problem is to break WEAs into two tiers, e.g. "standard emergencies" and "enhanced emergencies". A "standard emergency" would only concern those who are already active and awake, and this could work in concert with the "do not disturb mode" setting on a mobile device. This way, if the "do not disturb" setting is engaged and a "standard emergency" is issued, the device's user won't be awakened by the alert. On the other hand, the "enhanced emergency" would still sound the alert tone.
Amber alerts and silver alerts would generally fall under the category of "standard emergencies"; they only concern those who are already out and about. Alerts like tornado warnings would qualify as "enhanced emergencies", because the proper protective action would be to get out of bed and go seek a safer shelter, especially if you live in a mobile home. In other words, it is necessary for people to be woken up if they're to keep themselves safe from a tornado.
"Blue alerts" probably would also qualify as an "enhanced emergency", since these alerts are issued when someone violently attacks a police officer and escapes, which means there is potentially an imminent risk to the general public. Although, people with home security systems may not wish to receive these alerts if they're already asleep. So, maybe the solution is to have two tiers for each alert type. This is what the National Weather Service does with tornado, severe thunderstorm, and flash flood warnings; there are 3 tiers for each of those warnings and the higher-tier warnings contain stronger wording while also listing out additional necessary protective actions.
For instance, a "standard amber alert" would cover child abductions, and an "enhanced amber alert" might be issued for the rare instances when a child abduction occurs and the abductor also poses an imminent direct threat to the general public (which would make it necessary to alert everyone who could be affected).
For silver alerts, something similar could be done. The "standard silver alert" is issued for a missing senior citizen whose life is believed to be at risk, and an "enhanced silver alert" would be issued if a missing senior citizen also poses an imminent risk to others.
As it stands now, it is nearly impossible to get good value out of something that treats every situation the same. This needs to be fixed, or WEAs will continue to be disabled due to obnoxiousness, and that takes away one potential source for life-saving information (which also happens to be one of the most effective since almost everyone owns a mobile phone nowadays).