Voluntary public alerting is on the rise
Voluntary services have an increasing role in the dissemination of emergency alerts
Public emergency alerting has traditionally been associated with regulated communications infrastructures. Government alerting authorities issue official emergency alerts for people in affected areas, and governments have relied on regulated broadcast and telecommunications services as primary mechanisms for delivering those alerts.
This model is evolving. Official emergency alerts worldwide are increasingly published in the machine-readable Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) format, and these are freely available through global-scale CAP Alert Hubs. These developments allow public emergency alerting to leverage newer communications services that people rely on, such as the Internet, Web browsers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistants, mobile networks, social media, and direct-to-device (D2D) satellite connectivity.
Voluntary public alerting is already performed by organizations and services including AccuWeather, Esri, Google, IFRC, KDE, meteoblue, the Weather Company, Windy.com , Apple, Microsoft, and many other private-sector and non-government actors. They can access officially published CAP alerts, determine which users are within the alerting areas, and deliver the officially published alert content under applicable public-domain or open-licensing provisions.
Such voluntary public alerting can respect location privacy because coarse location information is often sufficient to determine whether users are within or near an alerting area. The necessary security and authentication can be supported using standard cryptographic and digital-signature mechanisms.
This kind of public alerting could be adopted voluntarily by other infrastructure providers whose platforms reach users worldwide. Doing so could address important gaps in emergency alert dissemination, in part because changes in how people access information can leave them outside traditional warning channels..
Four examples are described below, focused solely on the relatively small fraction of emergency alerts associated with life-critical, "siren-worthy" emergencies.
1. Online streaming users can miss alerts designed for mass media
Traditional television and radio systems can interrupt programming with life-critical warnings. Increasingly, however, people who consume the same content through Online Streaming do not receive those broadcast interruptions.
Chromium-based web browsers could provide an analogous public alerting service by accessing authoritative CAP alerts and displaying an emergency notification when the user is within the alerting area. Because Chromium underlies a large proportion of the world's Web browsers, this could provide a broadly deployed Internet equivalent of the traditional broadcast emergency interruption.
2. AI platforms could surface authoritative emergency alerts
AI Assistants, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, aspire to be perceived as reliable, useful, and socially responsible sources of information. Any AI platform could receive and continuously update official CAP alerts from authoritative sources.
When the user of an AI assistant is located within or near the alerting area of an official warning, the AI platform could proactively identify and surface that officially issued warning or prominently present it when the user asks about current conditions. The AI platform would not determine whether an emergency warning should be issued or create its own warning; its role would be to help disseminate and present an alert already issued by the responsible authority.
Reliably identifying official warnings could make an AI Assistant substantially more useful when people need trustworthy information most urgently. The AI Assistant might also to help a person in harm’s way distinguish the most appropriate and reliable ancillary information for the current situation.
3. Social media users need access to authoritative emergency alerts
Public confusion is a very real problem during emergency situations, and social media could play a major role in reducing such confusion. It is therefore important that users of social media be able to identify and access authoritative alerts concerning an emergency.
In this vein, CEN, the European standards organization, asserted in 2023: "To ensure consistency, clarity and completeness of the messages disseminated simultaneously across different channels, the social media early warning messages and related notifications shall refer to the persistent unique URL of the CAP message."
Social media platform operators could provide a voluntary public alerting service by accessing authoritative CAP alerts and displaying an emergency notification to social media users within or near the alerting area, with a link to the authoritative CAP message.
4. Direct-to-device satellites need an equivalent to mobile phone alerting
Direct-to-device (D2D) satellite connectivity is increasingly blurring the distinction between terrestrial mobile networks and satellite networks. People should not lose access to life-critical warnings merely because their connectivity has shifted from a terrestrial network to a satellite network.
Amazon Leo could subscribe to an authoritative global CAP feed, determine whether a user is within the geographic area specified by an alert, and transmit the official alert to that user. This would provide a satellite analogue of emergency alerting on terrestrial mobile networks.
Such a public alerting service would be especially valuable for people outside terrestrial coverage, people whose terrestrial service has been disrupted, remote and maritime users, and populations where terrestrial infrastructure is limited.
Key Principles
A voluntary public alerting service for official CAP alerts is a dissemination channel that supplements regulated communications channels. Voluntary public alerting has a very limited role:
- Obtain CAP alerts from authoritative sources;
- Determine whether a user is within the alerting area; and
- Deliver the alert without substantive modification.
The public alerting service operator does not determine whether, when, or where an emergency alert should be issued, nor does it make substantive changes to alert content. A voluntary public alerting service does not exercise governmental authority to issue warnings; it voluntarily provides an additional means of disseminating warnings issued by those who possess that authority.
Especially significant is that such a voluntary public alerting service does not need an operational relationship with every national alerting authority, because the official alerts are published without copyright constraints other than attribution. It simply accesses already published CAP alerts through trusted global-scale CAP Alert Hubs and performs deterministic geospatial filtering and dissemination.
Such services may be motivated by humanitarian, commercial, or public-interest considerations, and these motivations are not mutually exclusive.
There is a growing recognition that public emergency alerts should be represented in CAP format regardless of the dissemination technology employed. Whether alerts are delivered through cell broadcast, location-based SMS, mobile applications, push notification services, internet platforms, broadcast media, content streaming, or future technologies, CAP provides a common authoritative messaging format that supports interoperability, consistency, auditability, and multi-channel dissemination.
From a humanitarian perspective, the evolution of communications infrastructure should strengthen, rather than fragment, worldwide public emergency alerting. No person should lose access to a life-critical warning merely because the technology through which they communicate has changed.
