AMBER Alert Coming Soon to iPhone

CNET reports on the upcoming release of AMBER Alert, a free iPhone application providing notifications of AMBER Alerts, which are issued throughout the United States by law enforcement agencies in response to confirmed reports of child abductions. According to the application's author, Jonathan Zdziarski, AMBER Alert will provide real-time notification of alerts, complete with photos and descriptions of the victim, suspect, and vehicle involved, as well as the ability to report sightings.

Notably, sighting reports will also be tagged using the iPhone's built-in GPS, allowing law enforcement agencies to easily track sightings.

The iPhone's GPS is used to include your current GPS position with your sighting report, allowing AMBERAlerts.com to create a geographical search radius based on the number and pattern of reports in a specific location. This provides for smarter policing and can help filter false positives. The information is forwarded to the appropriate state patrol barracks where it can be responded to in a much faster fashion than traditional phone call screening.

Zdziarski is also making his code available to other developers who wish to make their applications "AMBER Aware", which allows the applications to utilize background tasks to check for new AMBER Alerts.