Truecaller launched a new personal safety app called Guardians on Wednesday. The new app from the caller ID platform 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 claimed that the Guardians app — built in-house over the past 15 months with team members from Sweden and India — would never share any personal information with any third-party apps for commercial use, including the Truecaller app. Guardians debuts just ahead of International Women’s Day 2021 on March 8.
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 also noted that the app requires only three permissions: your location, contacts, and phone permission.
The Guardians app is a free-to-use experience, without any ads or premium tiers, Truecaller says. 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.
Guardians was born out of a simple question – how can we crowdsource personal safety, just like the way we crowdsource protection against spam, scams and frauds with Truecaller?” said Alan Mamedi, CEO and Co-founder of Truecaller parent True Software Scandinavia AB, in a prepared statement. “We also believe that we have the right tools and the conviction to make Guardians happen.”
How will Truecaller’s Guardians work?
The Guardians app allows users to select personal guardians from their contact list, choose when to stop or start sharing location, and can even set up permanent sharing with selected contacts. Users can also share their location during a particular trip, and the app will keep working in the background. It also comes with the ability to notify selected guardians to let them precisely follow the user’s location in case of an emergency.
In a normal scenario the Guardians app shares location intermittently to preserve battery life. It, however, shares precise location once switched to the emergency mode. 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.
