Smartphone Turns Emergency Response System With Google's Trusted Contacts App

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 [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 05, 2016 16:20 ET (21:20 GMT)

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