Truecaller unveils new personal safety app ‘Guardians’

Sweden-based leading caller ID and spam blocking app, Truecaller has launched a new personal safety app named Guardians, which allows the users to share their location and alert their guardians in case of an emergency.

According to the company, the Guardians app, built in-house over the past 15 months with team members from Sweden and India, will never share any personal information with any third-party apps for commercial use, including its Truecaller app.

The user can sign up on the Guardians app using their existing Truecaller account or by entering the phone number. A missed call or one-time password (OTP) will be generated to verify the user’s phone number before signing up if they aren’t a Truecaller user. Further, the company has noted that the new app requires only three permissions and they are the user’s location, contacts, and phone permission.

In a normal scenario, the Guardians app shares location intermittently to preserve battery life. It, however, shares a precise location once switched to the emergency mode. Along with location sharing, the app can also share the users’ phone status, including its battery life and network strength.

“Guardians was born out of a simple question – how can we crowdsource personal safety, just like the way we crowdsource protection against spam, scams, and frauds with Truecaller? We also believe that we have the right tools and the conviction to make Guardians happen. We believe that this [Guardians] deserves something bigger, and it deserves to be an independent product that you have on your phone that is lightweight, that only has one purpose. And that also means that we have a dedicated team that thinks about this every single day, how do we improve the service? How do we make it better? How do we make it faster and so forth.”

Truecaller claims that the Guardians app is completely free to use, with no advertising or premium tiers. A shortcut to download the Guardians app will be made available via the daily Truecaller app to attract users in the coming days, the company added.

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