Smartphone Turns Emergency Response System With Google's Trusted Contacts App
December 05 2016 - 4:35PM
Dow Jones News
By Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Now that smartphones allow the internet to follow us wherever we
go -- sometimes even into dangerous situations -- personal safety
has become an area of increased interest among top tech firms.
Google's new Trusted Contacts mobile app lets you connect to
friends and family in the event of an emergency.
Trusted Contacts lets you tag people from your phone's contacts.
In the event of an emergency -- whether it's a car accident, a
wildfire, an earthquake or anything else -- you can use the app to
share your location and a message. Write whatever you like, or use
canned updates including "I am OK" and "I need assistance." The app
will also display what Google calls an "activity status": when your
phone was last moving, whether it was within the few minutes, hours
or days.
Google's personal safety app made its debut on Android Monday
and the Alphabet Inc.-owned company said an iOS version will come
soon.
If it sounds familiar, that's because it works a bit like
Facebook's Safety Check , where you can broadcast a message to
friends saying you're safe, and let those same people request
information on you in the event of a crisis. It's also similar to a
feature on Apple Inc.'s iOS devices, which can automatically
transmits a person's whereabouts to family members.
In Google's version, anyone you grant "trusted" status to
receives an email, and they gain the ability to request (via web or
the app itself) your current location. If you don't respond in 5
minutes, the app will share your last known location automatically
-- determined by your phone's GPS tracking.
The app will share your location with any group of your contacts
until you tell it to stop. So you can share during a 20-minute trip
home after dinner with friends, or during a 2-month trek across a
mountain range.
For iOS users who can't wait for Google's iPhone or iPad
version, Apple's baked-in alternative relies on iCloud Family
Sharing. Family members can set it up to automatically share the
location of each other, which you can check on the Info button
inside the Messages app. (Just go to a chat with a family member,
then tap the little "i" in the top right corner.)
iPhone users can also share their location, on demand or for up
to an hour, with Messages contacts as well. And Apple has location
sharing broken out into a separate iOS app called Find My
Friends.
While Trusted Contacts is new for Google, the company has
building safety tools on the web since 2005 -- starting with
Hurricane Katrina -- which allow people to locate friends and
family in emergencies.
Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at
Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 05, 2016 16:20 ET (21:20 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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