Yesterday, Truecaller launched a new stand-alone app focused on personal safety based on location sharing. The app known as Guardians was launched just before the Women’s Day. The Guardians app can be used by everyone who feels unsafe while travelling. In other words, the new app is designed to crowdsource personal safety of its users by letting them share their location and alert their guardians in case of an emergency.
Truecaller already has a strong user base of 270 million globally and over 200 million in India alone. Truecaller claimed that the Guardians app is built in-house over the past 15 months with team members from Sweden and India.
Privacy Policy
On data sharing, Truecaller claimed that it would never share any personal information with any third-party apps and can’t even access the location data for any commercial use, including the Truecaller app. The live location data is shared with encryption between the person sharing the location data and the person receiving the location data. Truecaller also claims that since your location data isn’t shared on any servers anywhere, there is no option to revisit a previous journey at a later date.
Truecaller said that the Guardians app is a free-to-use experience, without any ads or premium tiers.
Pre-Installation
You will be able to sign up on the Guardians app using your existing Truecaller account or by entering your phone number. A missed call or One-Time Password (OTP) will be generated to verify your phone number before signing up if you aren’t a Truecaller user.
Truecaller noted that the app needs three permissions: your location, contacts or “guardians” in this case with whom you would want to share your locations and phone permission to show your phone status to your Guardians.
Guardian users can select personal Guardians or people who they want to share their location from their contact list, choose when to stop or start sharing locations and set up permanent sharing with selected Guardians.
Safety Features & Working Mechanism
The Guardians app uses the Google Maps technology for location tracking. The app works quietly in the background when users are sharing their location for a particular trip in the Watch Over Me mode.
In normal mode or Forever Share mode, the app is designed to quietly run in the background and share location intermittently while preserving battery life.
The Guardians app, however, shares precise location once switched to the emergency mode. Users can press the emergency or ‘I need help’ button in case they do not feel safe about their location and situation and feel that there is an emergency.
Aside from location sharing, the app shares the users’ phone status, along with its battery life and network strength. It supports interoperability and is claimed to be device agnostic. This means that the app will provide location tracking even if the user has an Android phone and their selected contacts have the iPhone, or vice versa.
Once the details are shared, Guardians allows the contacts to call or message users with one tap. The selected contacts can also look at the particular location of the users once it’s shared through the app.
In emergency mode, the guardian contacts will be notified and will be able to precisely follow and reach users’ location or be able to send help. Truecaller notes that emergency mode will also share your location with “community guardians” who may be in the vicinity. However, it will entirely be up to the users if they want to accept help from the community. Further, Truecaller revealed that users will be able to get help from local law enforcement through the app so that they can get help in the shortest span of time. Truecaller firm assures that it will not share any information with third-party apps for commercial use, including the Truecaller app.
There is also a volunteer guardian option in case you call for help and your guardian contacts aren’t nearby or are some distance away. The developers say that the app will then search for those who have signed up as volunteers on the Guardian app and ping them requesting for help. However, questions remain about the volunteer backgrounds and how these checks may be done for all volunteers who sign up on the app, though the developers insist there are multiple checks already in place and more can be put in place if there is a need for it.
Concluding Note
The Guardians app is currently available for free through Google Play. It will also soon be available through the App Store. In the coming days, a shortcut to download the Guardians app will be provided through the regular Truecaller app to bring new users on board.