Truecaller Unveils Guardians, Know How The Personal Safety App Will Benefit Users

Truecaller Guardians AppTruecaller, Guardian, Personal Safety App: The app allows users to select their own personal guardians from their contact list, choose when to stop/start sharing location and setup permanent sharing with selected Guardians.

Representational Picture (Truecaller Twitter account)

Unveling a new feature in personal safety space, caller identification app Truecaller on Wednesday launched a new personal safety app called ''Guardians''.

What are the benefits of Guradian?

The app allows users to select their own personal guardians from their contact list, choose when to stop/start sharing location and setup permanent sharing with selected Guardians. Once downloaded, the app asks for three permissions: location, contacts (for sending invites to personal Guardians) and phone permission (to show your phone status to your Guardians). Also Read:

You can download the app from Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The app will have no ads or premium tiers.

"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 family, friends, the community at large and the authorities," True Software Scandinavia AB CEO and co-founder Alan Mamedi said, as per PTI report.

The app was developed in a quest to crowdsource personal safety like the way Truecaller crowdsources protection against spam, scams and frauds.

It has been designed after extensive research on women’s safety. "We believe we have the right tools and the conviction to make Guardians happen...Our past four years of research on women''s safety and campaigns like #ItsNokOk, we now understand the problem well and it''s now time to do something about making our cities safer for everyone," Mamedi said.

What users can do?

In case of distress, users can tap the emergency button to notify all their Guardians about their location. With the community feature, you can seek assistance from Guardians in the vicinity, who can choose to help.

However, Guardians app cannot see the live data (like location) as it is live-streamed between the two different devices.

"We are using an encrypted line between the two different clients...So that actually means that you can''t revisit a previous journey because we don''t store that data...The data that is shared with the ''forever sharing'' option is the state of battery and signal, along with the location to help the trusted guardians follow the user," he added.

There are 270 million active users globally, of which 200 million are in India.

"When you are in a situation, the volunteers around you get a notification. At that point in time, they can''t see who you are and all they see is someone around needs help. And when they opt in to help, you get a notification to accept their help. So there''s a two-way consent," Nakul Kabra, Product Manager at Truecaller, said.

He added that when users accept help from the volunteer, their location is shared with other person and they can directly call the user as they can see the phone number as well, he added.