Crowd Safety

Safetipin is the latest of a spate of new mobile applications intended to enhance women’s safety.

Safetipin is the latest of a spate of new mobile applications intended to enhance women’s safety. While most such apps are designed around the concept of an automatic alarm informing family and friends in times of distress, this app, developed by a social researcher and entrepreneur in collaboration with NIIT, looks at crowd-sourcing information to mark locations as safe or unsafe for women. It runs on users uploading through their smartphones information about and photos of incidents of harassment, hazards and places of help—hospitals, police stations or emergency homes—at or near a location. They can then collectively view all information relating to a neighbourhood. Each time something new is uploaded, a pop-up screen will alert the user to it.

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Aanchal Bansal