If you live in Andalusia, Asturias or Cantabria and suddenly, You have received a message from Civil Protection on your mobileyou should not worry about it, since it is a test previously announcedwith which the General Directorate of Civil Protection and Emergencies, an entity attached to the Ministry of the Interior, wants to evaluate the operation of #ES-Alert, the alert service with which, if necessary, the authorities can quickly report emergencies to people who may be affected.
For these tests, which will be carried out on different days in the different autonomous communities and cities, Civil Protection has established this calendar:
- October 24th: Andalusia, Asturias and Cantabria.
- October 27th: Valencian Community, Extremadura and Galicia.
- November 2: Aragon, Balearic Islands, Catalonia, Madrid, Murcia and Navarra.
- November 10: Canary Islands, Castilla y León, Ceuta and the Basque Country.
- Nov. 16: Castilla la Mancha, La Rioja and Melilla.
Therefore, on the date that corresponds to your location, your mobile phone may emit a beep, associated with a message. In such a case, and as we have already indicated, you should not worry, since no emergency is taking place, it is just a test of the system that will be used if, hopefully not necessary, it is necessary to warn the population of a certain area, in the face of an emergency that requires a rapid response in this regard.
The Civil Protection #ES-Alert system is based on a type of service specific to cellular networks, that is, does not use the Internet or SMS messages, in the first case because it would lose effectiveness in the case of terminals not connected to the Internet, and in the second because it is based on the geographical location, not on the user’s address when the line was registered. Thus, the messages are distributed to certain network antennas, those located in the area affected by the potential emergency.
Calendar of tests of the mobile phone alert system #IT IS-Alert of @civil protection
Monday October 24:
👉 #Cantabria
👉 #Andalusia
👉 #Asturias☎️1️⃣1️⃣2️⃣📲 pic.twitter.com/LPYZcmxRvA
— DG Civil Protection and Emergencies. Spain (@proteccioncivil) October 23, 2022
Haven’t you received the Civil Protection notice?
There are two, mainly, the reasons why you may not have received the notice Civil Protection test (if you are in Andalusia, Asturias or Cantabria), or that you do not do it on the dates that we have indicated above, if you are in those regions.
The first, and fundamental, is that the notice is not being sent to the entire region, only to certain antennas. This is explained because the notification system must be precise enough to inform only the affected areas, and not an entire autonomous community, when the risk is confined to a much smaller geographical area.
The other possibility is that either by default or by your own decision, you have disabled notifications of this type, and it is that both Android and iOS can be configured not to receive this type of message. Today some messages have already been seen, on social networks, from users who consider that these notifications are, in fact, a threat to privacy and that, therefore, they recommend deactivating them.
Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea.. Cell broadcast, which is the system used to send these messages it is not, in fact, a technology especially faced with privacy, because unlike messages addressed to a specific user, in this case the only thing that influences whether or not to receive them is the antenna to which we are connected… information that operators already have without any need to broadcast this type of messages. Remember that the phone is automatically registered each time it is connected to an antenna, either when it is turned on or when switching from one to another.
In other words, if we deactivate Civil Protection notices (or if we do not activate them and the default setting on our phone is not to receive them), we will lose a very fast and effective information channel in case of emergencies, without this implying any improvement in our privacy.
Be that as it may, if you want to check its status and, eventually, change its settings, to receive (or not receive) Civil Protection messages, it’s pretty straightforward on both operating systemsalthough in Android it will depend on the customization of the operating system carried out by the manufacturer of your device (or the developer with which you have wanted to update your mobile).
- Android: access the configuration and look, in settings, for a section dedicated to wireless alerts, broadcast settings, cell broadcast or similar. When accessing it, you will see the types of alerts that you can activate and deactivate. Adjust them at will.
- iOS: in the Apple system you will have to access Settings, then Notifications and, already in that section, scroll to the end (you will have to go through all the apps you have installed) until you find the ES-ALERT section, in which will display the entry «Civil Protection Pre-Alerts», which you can activate and deactivate, according to your preference.
