Truecaller, the popular call screening app, recently released ‘Guardians’ – a personal safety app to help users share location with friends and family. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at how you can use the app to quickly contact your family members in case of an emergency. We’ve also covered the privacy aspects of the app, so make sure you read till the end before trying it out.
- Setup Guardians App
- Invite Guardians
- Share Location with Guardian
- What about Privacy?
1. Setup Guardians App
Guardians app is available on both Android and iOS. During the account creation process, the app asks for your phone number, name, gender, and birth year. You can also optionally set a profile picture for your account.
Tap on the ‘Invite Guardians’ button on the home page to invite your trusted contacts. From the contacts list that appears now, choose the contact and tap on Invite.
There are two ways to share location with your guardian. You can either use the ‘Watch over me’ button or the ‘I need help!’ button. You should use the latter in case of an emergency. Your guardian will then get a notification to check your current location.
4. What about Privacy?
Coming to the crucial part, privacy. Truecaller’s Guardians app didn’t have a positive start on the privacy front. Merely a day after the app went live, security researcher Anand Prakash found a security vulnerability that made it possible to track anyone’s live location through Guardian. However, Truecaller has since fixed the bug.
There’s a solid chance that someone could misuse the forever sharing feature if they manage to gain physical access to your phone. Disabling notifications followed by hiding the app can trap unsuspecting users into sharing their location with others since the app can get the location in the background. Although this is not in the hands of the app makers, it is a possibility and something you should keep in mind. To avoid this, make sure you often check your list of trusted guardians within the app. There’s no straightforward option to delete your Guardians account in the app either.
So, that’s all you need to know about Truecaller’s new Guardians app. The company has plans to bring community guardians and support from law enforcement agencies in the future, and we’ll have to wait to see how that works out.
