Google shuts down Trusted Contacts, its emergency location sharing app

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  • If someone is sharing their location with you, you’ll see a map on the main page of the app.
  • Setup is easy: just pick which contacts to add as “trusted.”
  • Share your location with other people on demand.
  • You’ll get a sweet notification with a map in it when someone shares their location with you.
  • Location sharing requests come with a dead man’s switch—you have five minutes to turn them down or location sharing will happen automatically.

Google has killed yet another product. RIP to Google Trusted Contacts, 2016-2020.

Trusted Contacts was a personal safety app for Android. It let you flag certain contacts as “trusted,” and those people could then request your location in an emergency situation. The base functionality was not all that different from Google Maps location sharing, but when Trusted Contacts launched in 2016—the Google+ dark ages—Google Maps did not have location sharing built in. (Google Latitude, the original Google Maps location sharing functionality, debuted in 2009, but that was killed in 2013 in favor of Google+ location sharing. Google+ was on the way out by 2016, and location sharing returned to Google Maps in 2017.) The one addition besides a proactive location sharing was for a trusted contact to declare an emergency location request, which the other user would have to deny or it would automatically share.

The app has a 3.8 rating on the Play Store and over a million downloads, which is not good enough to save it from the Google grim reaper. Google sent out emails to users saying that since location sharing was now built into Google Maps, the Trusted Contacts app was no longer need. The app will shut down in just 43 days, on December 1, 2020.

Calling Google Maps location sharing a replacement for Trusted Contacts isn’t quite right. Trusted Contacts was more privacy-focused than today’s Google Maps sharing. While both let you share your location, Trusted Contacts did not have an “always-on” location sharing mode. It would let you give people permission to request your location via the emergency request, but they wouldn’t be able to see where you are all the time. In Google Maps, there is no request system, so if you want other people to be able to see your location in an emergency, you need to proactively share your location for a set time or turn on always-on sharing.

Google’s new take on a safety app is the Pixel-exclusive “Personal Safety” app, which doesn’t let people request your location on an emergency-only basis. You can proactively schedule a “safety check,” which will let you set a timer for a dead man’s switch that will alert your emergency contacts if you don’t answer. Google envisions people using this for things like going on a walk alone or going to a party.

If you have a ton of trusted contacts, Google will let you download them from the trusted contacts page until December 1.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1715661