Ahead of International Woman’s Day, Truecaller, an ID and telephone search engine launched Guardian. Guardians app is primarily focussed on location sharing among trusted contacts. The app has an emergency mode that will assist users to reach their trusted contacts when users feel uncomfortable in a situation or location and need help. The app is focused on personal safety.
In case of an emergency, The guardians (assigned/trusted contacts) will receive a notification which they will have to accept to receive the senders’ live location.
The description on Google Play Store reads, “Exploring new places, walking home alone, meeting someone you don’t know, taking a late-night cab ride – these are some things that can make us feel unsafe, especially for women. In 2021, we all have phones, and now that can be our line of defence.”
It s a free app available on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The company notes that all its features are free to use and there are no ads or premium tiers.
CEO and Co-founder of True Software Scandinavia AB, Alan Mamedi, in a statement said, “There are probably hundreds of apps on the app stores for personal safety and location sharing. But none of them works in a way where you can involve your family, friends, the community at large, and the authorities. Mamedi said that Guardians were created to crowdsource personal safety like the company crowdsources protection against spam, scams, and frauds with Truecaller.
“We also believe that we have the right tools and the conviction to make Guardians happen. Our engineering team has a proven track record of building great user experiences and we have also crossed the milestone of 270 Million active users (200 Million in India alone). With this kind of reach, our past four years of research on women’s safety and campaigns like #ItsNotOk, we now understand this problem well. It’s now time to do something about making our cities safer for everyone,” he added.
Guardian users can select personal Guardians or people who 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.
Besides Emergency mode and Normal mode, there are other different kinds of modes available such as Watch Over Me mode, Forever Share mode.
