Sharing your location with people you trust

 Do you want your family and loved ones to know where you are at all times? Are you interested in knowing whether or not your child made it back to school safely? Do you want to find out the location of your husband (boyfriend) or wife (girlfriend) at this very moment? Are you interested in […]

 Do you want your family and loved ones to know where you are at all times? Are you interested in knowing whether or not your child made it back to school safely? Do you want to find out the location of your husband (boyfriend) or wife (girlfriend) at this very moment? Are you interested in knowing if your friend made it through the fracas that occurred in a certain city in the country? Your buddy flew on Arik Air to Accra and you haven’t heard from him; do you want to confirm that he made it to Accra safely? For that matter, and for any reasons, do you want a particular person to know your whereabouts at any time or are you interested in knowing the whereabouts of a particular person in your life?

If your answer to each of the foregoing questions is “yes” and you have an Android smartphone, then you could download Google’s Trusted Contacts app and get to work. It’s that easy! The app was released less than two weeks ago. However, you want to make sure you are sharing your location only with people you truly trust, because, as you can imagine, the potential for abuse is significant. Trusted Contacts is intended by Google to be a personal safety app, but the app is also rife with potential misuse. Possessive or jealous boyfriends or girlfriends, abusive husbands or wives, or folks who are just plainly nosey, could try to keep track of your whereabouts at all time, if you leave the app running innocently in the background. 

To use the app after downloading it from Google Play, you’ll first need to select the contacts with whom you want to share your location from your Contact list. Adding them to your Trusted Contacts list evokes an email that is sent to them to let them know you trust them dearly to the point that you want to share your whereabouts with them. (You’ll also hope that they’ll replicate by including you in their Trusted Contacts list.) Whomever you add to the list has to approve your request to receive your location, and vice-versa. As of this moment, Trusted Contacts is only available on Android devices, but you can still add someone that uses iOS (iPhone) into the list, since they can receive notifications by e-mail. 

The Trusted Contacts app works using a Google Account and you’ll need to have Google Location History turned on. If your phone is offline, this feature lets people see your last known location, provided, of course, that you send your location data to Google all the time.

You can send your location in two ways: normal or emergency. In the normal mode, you are able to select particular people in your Trusted Contacts list and send your location to them individually. In the emergency mode, you can send an “emergency blast” to every single person in your Trusted Contacts list; they will all be notified (of your location) on their phones, as well as by email.

Some control is built into the app, so you can gather yourself in the very likely event that you forget to stop sharing. That is, the app automatically stops sharing 24 hours from the time you ask it to start sharing. Thus, you have to manually start sharing again – for another round of 24 hours. Pretty useful, I’ll say. 

What happens if you request for someone’s location and they don’t respond to your request? If they don’t respond to your request in 5 minutes, the app will just automatically give you their location anyway, and do so for the next 24 hours! You may wonder why the app does this. Well, because these are people you trust. Case closed. If you don’t trust them anymore, remove them from your Trusted Contacts list. 

As you can imagine, the technology used in this app is not new at all, though the application is. Phone manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola have had these kinds of tools baked into their devices before – Samsung’s SOS service or Motorola Alert. Since Samsung phones are based on the Android OS, which didn’t support this capability, it’s no surprise that the SOS service hasn’t caught on. As for Alert, no one uses Motorola anyway. iOS has “Find My Friend!” Even for Google, it’s kind of déjà vu, in the sense that a lot of the functionality in Trusted Contacts already exist in Google Latitude, a contact location app that has been built into Google Maps for several years. Latitude was ditched in favor of a location solution embedded in the social network called Google+ Location Sharing.

If most of your trusted contacts are on Android, you may not have any reasons to not have Trusted Contacts installed and set up in your phone, since it’s free and potentially very useful. It may be too late to wait until you need the app!