Launched in the wake of Virginia Tech and Dawson College shootings, cell phone alerts give an extra layer of security but have vulnerabilities of their own, as several Canadian schools have discovered. This week, U of T is preparing to roll out its mobile alert voice message system to warn students in the event of a campus emergency.

The service, available to those with a current UTORID, calls all registered cell phones with a recording warning them of an emergency. Students must opt in to the alert program and provide their phone number before they can receive any warnings. Those who do receive an alert will be charged for the phone call by their carriers.

Several other North American universities implemented such systems after the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in which student Seung-Hui Cho killed 33 people including himself, and wounded 23 on April 16, 2007.

“These systems are appearing at many universities in the US [largely in response to the shootings at Virginia Tech] and a handful of Canadian schools now offer them,” wrote Erin Lemon, a university spokesperson, in an email to The Varsity.

The voice service complements a text-message alert service U of T introduced last year. Students can register for the alerts on ROSI. Other schools, including Dalhousie, the universities of Calgary, Manitoba, and New Brunswick, and the University of Victory and Simon Fraser University have all announced or implemented warning systems of their own to send text alerts to students during a crisis situation.

Despite their popularity, the systems don’t come bug-free. UVic’s first test of its text- and voice-based system was marred by technical problems this past August. Furthermore, the alerts can be very expensive. According to SFU newspaper the Peak, launching the small university’s text system will cost $30,000. The University of Calgary’s system costs 25 cents per text message, according to U of C paper the Gauntlet.

Critics of other schools’ text-message-based warning systems have demonstrated that warning messages can be easily and perfectly faked in order to lure individual students away from public spots or otherwise disrupt their movement. The Varsity found no studies of whether voice-based warning systems were as susceptible to forgery.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that a former staff member at the University of Florida had confessed to accidentally sending the text message “The monkey got out of the cage” over the school’s emergency warning system on the day of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration.

Complications notwithstanding, U of T is encouraging all students to register for the school’s warning system.

“The more people who sign up, the more effective the service is,” said Lemon.