In Summary
- Truecaller Guardians is a personal safety assistant that aims to solve the problem of personal safety in the real world.
- Guardians requires you to choose your guardians (from your contacts) who you can reach out to when you need help.
- The app intermittently shares your location with your guardians so they can see where you are.
- You can tap the emergency button in case of an emergency to notify your guardians about your location and seek their help.
Truecaller, the company behind one of the most trusted caller ID and spam blocking apps, today announced the launch of a new app. Called Guardians, the app builds on the same idea as Truecaller — to safeguard your life — but in the real world. It is essentially a personal safety assistant that requires you to choose trusted contacts as your guardians who you can reach out to when you feel unsafe or need help.
Guardians is said to be developed by a team from Stockholm and India. And it aims to solve the problem of personal safety in the real world, for which it is crowdsourcing safety by bringing family, friends, community, and authorities as potential guardians.
How does Guardians work?
Guardians requires your location and your contacts to function. It requires you to set your own personal guardians from your contacts. One, who you are comfortable sharing your location with. Once selected, the app starts sharing your live GPS location with your guardian in the background intermittently. By default, this happens intermittently. However, if you want, you can choose to stop/start sharing your location and even set up permanent location sharing with select guardians.
Now, while you are out and you are in need of help, you can tap the emergency button in the app. As soon as you do that, your guardian gets notified of the same. And they can then follow your location and reach out to your or send help. Similarly, when you hit the emergency button, Guardians can even share your location with community guardians in your vicinity to get you instant help. Community help is optional, says the company, and you may or may not choose to accept help from nearby guardians. What’s more, Guardians is also, soon, introducing help from local law enforcement. So you can get help even faster.
How to use Guardians?
To start using Guardians, if you are an existing Truecaller user, all you got to do is sign in with one tap. On the other hand, if you are not a Truecaller user, you need to verify your phone number to start using Guardians.
Talking about app permissions, according to Truecaller, the Guardians app requires three permissions to function. These include –
i. Location
ii. Contacts: to allow you to select and invite your personal guardians
iii. Phone: to show your phone status to your guardians
What’s more, you can choose to stop/start sharing location and setup permanent sharing with selected guardians. And like we already mentioned, you also get to decide if you need community help.
Guardians is available as a free app on both Android and iOS. It is completely free to use as of now and does not have any premium-tier upgrades either. Nor does it have any ads on the app. Moreover, the company appears to have a strong take on user data, wherein it promises to never share any personal information with any third-party apps for commercial use, including its very own Truecaller service.