Google Pixel’s Safety Check (yes it sort of works with your phone dead)
One of the new feature upgrades this month (June 2023,) for the Google Pixel series, which will probably be on all devices in one form or another soon enough, is the Safety Check. Google wrote up some great instructions for using this and there’s no need for me to re-create them.
The idea here is that you are entering into an uncomfortable situation and you’re wanting friends or loved ones to know something is up in case you don’t respond, but maybe you don’t want to scare them prematurely.
You can share your exact location, time you didn’t respond by, and all sorts of things with your emergency contacts. You can choose when setting this up whether to tell them it was set up and running, or not.
Once you kick on the safety app it keeps updating something in the background and if you haven’t checked in a service texts your emergency contacts with the last known info about your phone.
For my testing I set up a 15 minute window (after screenshotting one hour,) and then powered the unit off and threw it into a signal blocking bag. When I didn’t disable the countdown timer on my phone, because it was powered off and in a bag, the web service texted everyone in my contacts that something was amiss. I had the description of being eyed by a skeezebucket
It’s something useful to know is on your phone, although whether it’s actually useful in real life when people are getting random texts from an unknown service saying to click there to see where the phone is… not sure that’s going to quickly gather the attention that is probably needed.
Might be good for a “don’t worry about me I’ve got this deadman’s switch” sort of thing however. Probably great if you want to set it to trigger for a call to get you out of a bad date.
I’d expect this to be heading to other brands of phone when Google gets it hyped up enough as a pixel exclusive.
