Google today launched a new Android app focused on safety.
Trusted Contacts asks you to name your closest friends and family, and then those people will be able to see when you’re online and have moved around recently. If you feel unsafe or are in an emergency, you can quickly and easily share your location with them.
Those people can also request your location at any time. When they do, you’ll get a full-screen notification that’ll let you approve or deny the location request. If you don’t respond to this alert within five minutes, your location will automatically be shared with the person that requested it.
If you do share your location with someone, you can continue sharing it with them as you move around. This way, someone call follow your path as you walk home in the dark, while you’re running a race, or for some other reason.
Trusted Contacts even works when you’re offline. If someone requests your location when you’re offline, like if your phone died, they’ll be notified of your last known location.
Google’s new app looks like a good one. With it, you can quickly and easily let your loved ones know that you’re safe, and if you’re not, you can tell them exactly where you are or the app will tell them if you’re not able to. There’s no word on an iOS version of the app, but it’d be nice to see something similar for iPhones, too.
