Your Cell Phone Can Save Your Life too!

The world is a dangerous place. At any moment, you could become the victim of a natural disaster, an international threat or the malicious intentions of the guy next to you on the subway. You could get lost while hiking or find yourself stranded because you forgot to put a spare tire in the trunk of your car. Living in modern society poses certain risks; however, modern society also regularly finds ways to reduce those risks. These days, there’s a good chance that you’re going to have your mobile phone with you during any trouble that you might encounter. Use that fact to your advantage by learning about the ways that your mobile phone can keep you safe from harm.

Emergency calling

The most basic thing that you’ll use your cell phone for in terms of safety is, of course, calling someone for help. This can apply to any situation at all. On the one hand, you might have gone out hiking, lost the trail and now find yourself stranded without food or water. As long as you can get cell phone coverage, you can call for help. Alternatively, you might find yourself in a situation that requires you to get immediate police assistance. If you have your cell phone with you, you can call for that emergency help.

In any situation where you may need the assistance of others in order to be safe, a fully charged cell phone with good coverage can be a lifesaver.

Texting for safety

There are two different ways that your cell phone’s SMS message features can keep you safe. The primary method would be through texts that you send out to alert others that you are in danger so that you can solicit some help. However, it’s increasingly possible that you may get cell phone emergency alerts from others that will keep you out of harm’s away.

In terms of sending text messages out, the basic safety features are the same as those that would apply to emergency phone calling. You can let others know that you’re in danger and get the help that you need (whether that’s in the form of police assistance or getting a friend to come out to your stranded car with a new tire) through text messaging. However, with SMS, you also have the added benefit of subtlety. This can be useful when you are in a public place and want to alert someone to the fact that you’re in danger without causing a ruckus in the location. For example, if you found yourself on a creepy date and wanted to make sure that you had a group of friends to escort you away from it without actually drawing attention to the person you were there with, you could text for safety.

Although messaging out is important to your safety, it may be just as important to be able to receive messages. In the United States, the FCC has just approved a new nationwide alert system which sends text messages to your phone in case of certain emergency situations. National disasters and threats will be reported by a nationwide message alert group which will forward the message to phone carriers to be sent via text to your phone. This can help you to make sure that you’re aware of dangers in your area in order to avoid them.

Finding you through GPS

Of course, in most cases you would be all right if you didn’t have your mobile phone. If you were at the restaurant with the creepy date, you could get help from someone there or use the restaurant’s phone to place your call. However, there are times when you may be nowhere near a phone other than your cell phone. And there may be times when you are in such a position that you can’t actually place a call. Perhaps you’ve gotten injured while driving on a lone road and aren’t able to speak because of your injuries.

In most cases, it would be possible for an emergency team to locate you through the navigational GPS tools on your phone. The exact extent to which this can help depends greatly on the area where you are as there have been significant debates about privacy concerns related to cell phone GPS tracking. However, as a general rule, someone would be able to find you through your cell phone even if you couldn’t speak into the phone. In North America, an e911 system is in place which allows emergency responders to pinpoint the location of a cell phone using a reverse cell search.

Camera and blog updates

One of the best things about the mobile phone world today is that it allows you to stay connected to everyone you know – and you don’t even have to call them to stay in touch. More and more people are starting to make use of mobile blogging and mobile social networking tools which let them post short blogs and photo images to their online profile sites from their phones. People who do this regularly may be protecting their general safety because of the fact that a large group of people will be alerted if something might be wrong.

For example, let’s say that you’re typically active on your mobile photo blog on a daily basis. If you don’t post anything for a week, a large base of people is going to be concerned about you. That means that if something has happened to you, you’re going to have people trying to find out what it is. In extreme cases, such as in the case of an abduction, you may be able to post a photo or an announcement of the danger using your phone so that you could get the help that you need.

Or let’s say that you’re arrested in a foreign country and have the ability to use your phone to send a message to your mobile social network. Sound farfetched? That exact thing recently happened when a Berkeley (U.S.) student was arrested at a demonstration in Egypt. He used his phone to send a message to his Twitter network and a lawyer came and bailed him out the next day.

The flipside: dangers of mobile phone use

Unfortunately, every tool that can help you also has the potential to harm you. As a result, you should also be aware that there are risks associated with always having your cell phone with you. Because of the combination of GPS tracking features and regular updates about your location to your mobile social network, people will always know where to find you. Typically, that’s a good thing in terms of your safety. However, it also means that if anyone is interested in harming you, they’ll know where to look to do so.

As with most things in life, the person you’re most likely to do damage to with your mobile phone is yourself. The biggest cause of this is in the area of driving safety. Many parts of the world have laws about driving while on the phone but you should think about your safety even when it’s not illegal to drive and talk. Your phone can be a great tool for keeping you out of harm’s way but you’ll want to always be on the alert and follow rules of common sense in order to keep yourself safe.