The App For Your Personal Safety
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עברית (Hebrew)
You are walking home after a night out on a dark autumn evening. Suddenly, you get the feeling that someone is following you. You look over your shoulder, and see a shadow between the trees in the park. You quicken your steps. When you glance behind you again, you see the shadow disappear in between two houses. This is when you could press the “help” button on the app that you have downloaded. It sends a message to everyone in the area who also has the app, with information about your phone number and where you are. This way they are able to call you, alert emergency services, or get to your location if need be.
This important app is called Flare and was developed by a group of four students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). “We want to start a network of users who can help each other, and by doing so, help make the world a little safer,” says Svein Grimholt, the brain behind this app.
Grimholt got the idea during the UKA student festival held in Trondheim two years ago. Every year tens of thousands of young people come together during festivals to go to concerts and other large events. In one such event, which Grimholt attended, there was a rape case, and an attempted rape, he explains, which got him thinking that there must be a way to let people around you know that you’re in need of help.
“There are apps that resemble ours, but ours is unique in that it is crowdsourced. This means that you reach out to other users that are nearby, so help can potentially arrive much quicker. The average response time for the police is between 15 and 23 minutes, meaning that the damage may already have been done by the time they get there,” Grimholt explains.
There are some problems arising from the use of this app, however. First, there is the danger of people taking the law into their own hands instead of waiting for law enforcement services, but according to the developers, the app is meant to complement them, not replace them. There is also the possbility of people sending out prank calls and calling out for help needlessly, as often happens in emergency call centers today. The young entrepreneurs have already had this matter taken care of and explained that the app requires verification with the caller’s phone number, so the user is connected to their identity. The information about both the person who sends out an alarm call and everyone who receives it is stored for a certain period of time, so it is possible to retrieve the info if there is a problem.
