For a while now I've been like many other drivers, constantly fighting the urge to respond to every beep, blip and flashing light on my phone while driving. Working in IT, I have an "on call" position, and I've found that the urge to respond to every alert, IM and email I get is hard to resist despite my best intentions. More and more, I find I have to force myself to keep my eyes on the road, and not on whatever fan or cpu alert has popped up in the data center. I keep having to tell myself "it can wait til I get there".
So I had an idea for an app that would fix this problem once and for all. Basically, it would use GPS to detect movement and any time it went past a set speed, say 10 MPH it would instantly lock your phone to a non interactive screen and block all alerts, possibly even sending automated responses like "Can't talk now, I'm on the road. I'll contact you when I get there". Brilliant. Simple. Safe.
So after doing a little digging, it looks like a European Car Insurance company, Esure (not to be confused with eSurance here in the US) created EXACTLY that app. It's called DriveOFF, and the last known iterations of which seem to have disappeared from the play store about 2 years ago. What I can't figure out is why every trace of the app seems to have been eradicated from the face of the planet. It's been removed from the Play Store, and I can't even find it as an .apk download on any of the shady app sites floating around the web. I guess there's not a whole lot of demand for apps that make your safer among the seedy, side of the Internet with questionable legality. But as far as I can tell, DriveOFF somehow violated Google's design criteria and thus was pulled from the Play Store. If that is the case, it really is a shame that a legal loophole has destroyed an app that should (in my honest opinion) be the STANDARD behavior for all smart phones, period. On the other hand, I know that when I am driving, if I see a billboard or something that catches my attention, I'm frequently tempted to Google it. I'd hate to even consider that Google would place more value on ad revenue generated by reckless driving than on the health and safety of it's users. But that certainly is worth consideration...
So, I am BEGGING. If ANYONE happens to have this app or knows where I can still get it, please feel free to contact me.
EDIT:
Okay, so after doing some more digging I was able to find that the app was in fact available on the app store perhaps as recently as January of 2014. It seems as though the rights to the app were handed over from the Esure Insurance Company to a non-profit organization based out of Surrey, UK called "Safe Drive, Stay Alive" or "safedrivesurrey.org"
http://www.esure.com/media_centre/safe_drive_stay_alive.html
I've contacted both Esure and Safedrive in order to try and track this app down.
Related
I just wanted to share with all of you a fantastic app called Glympse.
It is free and very useful.
It allows you to send a link to a map that tracks your location. You choose how long the link is active for and whether it displays your speed.
So, for example, if you are on your way to a friends and they txt you asking where you are and when you'll arrive... you can send them a link that is only active for 30 min (or how ever long you wish) and they can track you on their computer or smartphone.
This is better then Latitude because it works with all phones, all addresses (email or sms), and is temporary. Check out their website for a better explanation of the app.
I love it... you might too. Give it a shot and support a great dev.
http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.glympse.android.glympse
http://www.glympse.com
pretty neat, thanks for sharing
Hate to bump up a super old thread however I think this needs some re-hashing on how great this app is.
I've been fighting to find a decent real time GPS tracker for quite a while. Each one I find has some sort of obnoxious limitation that drives me insane. Google Latitude was one of the ones I thought for sure would be a home run, except.. it wasn't. I mean, it works great, don't get me wrong... but it's a little ridiculous that I have ZERO configurable options to enable GPS to run even in the background. Nearly every other app I've used does. Not even the option to have GPS "check in" every 10 minutes? Really?
That said, I moved on, and now have been using Glympse. Super handy, super accurate, and doesn't require a specific kind of email address. Makes it that much more cross-compatible and less of a headache. "Oh, you need a Gmail address, just go register for one quick." None of that.
Overall, it's a must to at least have installed. I find it much easier to just Glympse a family member my location so they know when I'm getting home. Recently I would have had a huge use for this as we got hit with some nasty floods. I was driving for many hours to find other roads that were not closed. It would have been nice to have had this just so family members knew I was still on the move and still on my way home.
Anyway, check it out. I'm a fan.
Have had HTC7Pro for a few days now and generally impressed.
However;
How exactly are the pushpins in Maps supposed to work?
This site from Microsofts Windows Phone area, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-GB/howto/wp7/web/use-maps-to-find-a-place.aspx seems to be the only thing that I can find, here or out on the Web, that isn't related to Developers.
In Google Maps of old, I had around 100 pins stored locally (on the phone rather than up in the cloud or on the wider web) for places all over the UK.
I need this to hand as my work often finds me traveling from and to various repeated locations such as Building Sites, Suppliers and (especially) Guest Houses.
It appears that the only way to have a location stored "on the phone" is to pin it to the Start Screen as a link to Maps. As you can imagine, this is going to be very impractical with that many potential places to store.
Is this the case? I don't really want to have to resort to downloading address information for Hotels (which could be stored in Contacts, I know) and other places of Interest every time I want to get directions in Maps. Building Sites are not generally even available through the Internet due to there very nature. The address for them could be stored as a note in One Note I suppose.
Whatever, all these work arounds are just that. Long Winded and unintuitive. Hopefully I am doing something wrong with the Maps application and some one can point me right. If not, bugger!
Just wanted to say thanks. I didnt even know we had pins in bing maps.
Your welcome, Stillriza, even thoughthe pins are no where near as functional as I would like.
That page you linked is basically the extent of the functionality of Maps at the moment. I don't think there is much more.
I'm waiting for the day when it sync's pins to the cloud, so I can look up stuff online, and jump on my phone and have my saved pines or favorites show up on the map.
Otherwise at the moment, Maps is very basic.
That's what I figured prjkthack.
Basic, however is not an issue for me. I despise "turn by turn" sat nav totally. A 2D map is, in my opinion the way to go. I find that when I arrive at my destination I have some idea in my mind as to where I actually am. This is unlike using turn by turn which, find to be akin to driving down some anonymous "pipe", oblivious to my surroundings.
I do think that Maps looks and generally behaves far better than Google Maps on my Blackstone did, although I admit that this may be largely down to hardware limitations on the older handset.
I just wish the pins were more functional.
Ah well, maybe for the update.
Of possible interest to Orange customers in UK. Their "Orange Maps" app, free from Marketplace but subscription required on most tariffs, addresses the Push Pin issue.
It does have issues of it's own however, when compared to Bing Maps. Not least, as a third party app, it switches itself off when the phone "sleeps" or takes a call, or anything else, and has to go through the start up procedure again to relaunch it. It does offer to recall any ongoing routes however which at least means that you don't have to reset the route every time.
Also, it appears, so far, that it does not allow the phone to go to sleep when it is actually following a route. This is better than Bing maps can manage at the moment.
I have several outdated android smartphones laying around and would like to re-purpose one for an 8 year old.
The thing is, I cannot trust him not to install tons of adware and games on it and play it during school hours which will just cause trouble for everybody. What I'm thinking:
I need the ability to remotely enable/disable lock/unlock the phone and/or turn the phone on or off and/or time periods during which device is automatically locked or unlocked.
I need either a locked down modified cyanogen ROM (or equivalent) or I need to somehow setup everything from scratch.
GPS tracking (realtime constant monitoring isn't necessary but I'd like to be able to ping his location if I'm worried about him and maybe have some sort of perimeter alert system in case he strays into a dangerous neighborhood/gets kidnapped/whatever)
I also need to lockdown which contacts can be called/SMSed/telegramed/IMed/emailed
This kid is sharp, so if there is a way to circumvent these measures, he'll probably figure it out. But I'd like you're ideas and I'll try anyway. How would you go about this? If you're going to tell me I'm a horrible person for tracking my child, I know already.
wow your asking for alot OP. lol eaither this is a really dangours kid, or your extremely protective lol
eaither way il try and help as best as i can. for tracking you can use "wheres my android" app. its gps tracking after you text it a certain phrase, it gives the location to the phone you texted.
you can try cnmod and just install wa app passwors to lock the settings, so the kid wont change anything
Thanks for the reply. He isn't dangerous, he is more of the absent minded genius type. I'm more afraid a stranger will say "lets go to my place to build model rockets" and he won't be able to resist.
What do you mean "wa app passwords"?
You sort of addressed the tracking and locking down apps. Any ideas for contact control so he doesn't just use up all of the minutes calling buddies and 900 numbers?
Hello, what phone are you going to give your child?? What I'm thinking is putting custom rom on the device and use the multi user option if the rom supports it. Then maybe, (maybe) you'll be able to omit which things can see/use and disable some of the things you're asking for.
Good luck.
Sent from my 1+1
go0 said:
Thanks for the reply. He isn't dangerous, he is more of the absent minded genius type. I'm more afraid a stranger will say "lets go to my place to build model rockets" and he won't be able to resist.
What do you mean "wa app passwords"?
You sort of addressed the tracking and locking down apps. Any ideas for contact control so he doesn't just use up all of the minutes calling buddies and 900 numbers?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We use MMGuardian Does everything you want and more and it's pretty cheap. I just assume you know a thing or two about Android so I'll tell you this, mmguardian is amazing, the only thing is you have to turn off persistent notifications for the app. I get why they don't have that built in, but just do that and hide that app and your as good as gold. You can add 'key words' that when come up in a text, IM, email or search, it will send you and alert on your phone. You get transcripts of their texts, im and email (which I was happy for, now I just find creepy and intrusive to my childs privacy) but it's pretty sold service OP
Hey all and thanks in advance for any help you can provide as I have been racking my brain trying to figure this one out, but keep falling flat. A few days ago I received a Google Assistant notification on my Nexus 5X running the current stock Android (no rooting or modification on this device in any way). It was bringing to my attention an "important" email about one of my credit cards. I was immediately suspicious as this was the first time I had ever gotten a notification of this kind from Google Assistant. Usually it is sports score updates, bill reminders, breaking news, etc... But it did appear to be a legitimate Google Assistant notification so I did click it (I later confirmed this as I checked my notification history and it did show up as a Google App notification). It then opened Google Assistant, but then immediately opened either Chrome itself or a Chrome custom tab. The address that it opened appeared to be the legitimate Gmail domain, and unless it was using non Latin characters then I have no reason to believe otherwise. Not only that but it was showing an already opened email claiming to be from one of my credit card companies stating that there were important changes to their policies and/or my account.
It was at this point that I knew something was amiss. Images were being blocked in the email and just the whole process seemed "off". I opened Inbox/Gmail on my desktop and sure enough there was no such email there, it was at this point that I knew beyond doubt it was a scam. I was very careful not to click anything in the email but I could see that the "To:" label was to my legitimate email address and the "From:" address was typical of a phishing/scam email (eg. the name of the credit card company but with some kind of modifier attached). I wish I would have taken a screenshot of it, but it all caught me off guard. If it happens again believe me I will.
What made this all even weirder was when I tried to access this link on my desktop as I wanted to try and run some tests on the link that it was trying to get me to click on. I went on my Chrome history to track the link down but it was not there. So I checked my Chrome history on my phone and sure enough it showed up there, but not on my desktop. It was the only link not showing up on my desktop's Chrome history, all other links were there and I could see the same two links that were before and after the link in my phone's Chrome history but not that one. I have since factory reset my phone to be on the safe side and sure enough on my new install that link is also not showing up there either.
Now I am fairly well versed in tech, am very disciplined in "think before you click", and pride myself in being able to spot a scam - but I am also no expert and this is where I am needing some help in figuring out what exactly happened. I need to figure out if my device was compromised or if there is any way a malicious actor could have triggered my Google Assistant to open up a link like it did.
There is more to this story though which makes it a bit more complicated. Towards the beginning of the year I had a credit card that got compromised, this credit card was from the same company that the scam email was claiming to be from. Luckily I have alerts turned on and I was able to spot it almost immediately and reported it. The card was cancelled and I received a new one. I had my suspicions about how it was compromised but nothing for sure (I have never had a security problem like this, and I had recently used a website that I had never used before to purchase something - not damning itself but definitely suspicious). A couple months later and it happened again. At this point I was about 95% sure which website had compromised it. I believe the website itself was not malicious but that it's database had been breached, meaning the card only became compromised if it was "stored" in my account as a payment option. Also of note was that I have two cards with this particular company and only the one card I used on this website was compromised, not both cards nor the account itself (no other cards, companies, or payment options either). Further confirmation of my suspicions are that since I narrowed which website I thought that it was and it has not happened again.
My whole reason brining all of that up is that without it, to me anyways it would seem like my device is compromised. But with that story, and the fact that scam email was obviously phishing for my login credentials to that company makes it seem like someone somehow figured out a way to trigger my Google Assistant. Not only that, but triggered it to open up someone else's Gmail in a Chrome tab with an email already opened. Is that even possible? Do third party apps or services have this kind of access to Google Assistant? If not, it would seem to indicate for certain that my device is/was compromised, yeah?
As I already stated, I have since factory reset my phone, and every website and service I use has strong passwords and 2FA with alerts turned on if possible. But without knowing exactly how this attack was possible I still feel vulnerable. I have seen many phishing attacks in my day but this one seemed personalized, not mass targeted like the other which also makes me worry (again, even more so since I am not certain how this one happened). Plus I am worried that if it was my device that was compromised then a factory reset may not be enough. Many, many thanks for anyone who has a more intimate knowledge of Google's developer ecosystem that can help.
[EDIT} I will continue to add some things here that I think may be relevant to diagnosing this issue.
I was not doing anything at the time that this notification was sent. I was not even on my phone - I use Pushbullet to get notifications on my desktop and it was there that I first noticed it. And honestly, I do not even use my phone that much as I am near my desktop almost all the time. The rare times that I do use it, it is for listening to music or podcasts, almost no web browsing at all and very little app usage.
I was at home at the time of the notification, meaning no public or untrusted Wi-Fi. Nor at risk of any bluetooth type attack either.
I do use a VPN at all times.
I've never really used many of Googles apps and services and more specifically given it all the permissions for which it's asked. I decided for no particular reason other than morbid curiosity to go all in this time; give it everything, partake of every privacy smashing feature. So far I'm not really finding the phone experience to be different than when I blocked many of those features.
This had me curious, just how Goog is everyone else going with their phones? I don't want this to devolve into a privacy debate so please leave that for another thread. I'm interested in how Goog folks are going and if they feel the benefits are worthwhile to them.
I've never opted out of anything when I get a new Google device, or even on Chrome from that matter. And even when I get a prompt to opt in to something they ask to help development, or to better my experience I always say yes. I've been doing this since the Nexus One. I'm deep into the Google ecosystem. I use all Google products for everything I can think of (barring OS as I use Windows 10, and not Chrome OS). I've never had any privacy or security issues with Google having all my info, and I'm not worried about it in the slightest. They have millions of subscribers/customers. I'm sure they're not worried about any one individual's info. Anyway I know you said you don't want to get into the privacy/security aspect of it, and neither do it, but I just wanted to throw in my experience with opting in to everything.
Let Google be Google! Seriously though it's not like they track you like spies lol, you'll enjoy the little things that make Google different. Location based stuff mainly
I'm not noting much difference; I'd say none if given more time and I didn't notice some helpful feature between here and whenever I decide to call the experiment. And yeah, Bobby, it is kind of a fine line, privacy is a worthy topic but not the purpose of this thread. I'm just curious if people do go all in or not and if so if they find it beneficial. In other words I was wondering how many go full Goog and if so was it worth it to give Goog the works because of some benefit I haven't yet surfaced. Start talking about privacy,security, that sort of thing, the thread is as good as dead.
I like to use as many Google apps or services as I can. They're usually pretty handy and allow me to get the most out of my phone. This is supposed to be a Google phone, so why not use Google's stuff instead of third party apps? If my data gets leaked then I could always join a class action lawsuit with the others that were affected.
The only annoying thing I've found with signing up for every Google service is pretty much anything I search for on Google shows up in my Google Now feed. For example, if I search for barbershops in my area or ask Google Assistant to find me the nearest one I'll get a few cards in my Google Now feed the next morning related to hair cutting or the latest hair styles. They assume that I'm interested in that stuff and want more info, but in reality I could care less. I just wanted a damn haircut... To avoid this I've been doing all of my searching in an incognito window. I can't turn off search history because if I do I can't use Google Now or Google Assistant
Face_Plant said:
The only annoying thing I've found with signing up for every Google service is pretty much anything I search for on Google shows up in my Google Now feed. For example, if I search for barbershops in my area or ask Google Assistant to find me the nearest one I'll get a few cards in my Google Now feed the next morning related to hair cutting or the latest hair styles. They assume that I'm interested in that stuff and want more info, but in reality I could care less. I just wanted a damn haircut... To avoid this I've been doing all of my searching in an incognito window. I can't turn off search history because if I do I can't use Google Now or Google Assistant
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This exactly!
My wife is always being lazy and asking me to search for something for her (while she's holding her phone!) and she doesn't understand why I hate doing it. It's because I don't want to fill my google feed and advertising ID with info on her (very feminine) interests.