5 Personal Safety Features Every iPhone User Should Know

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you five ways that your iPhone can help keep you safer. 

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So, of course, your iPhone being a phone you can always use it to dial 911 or your local emergency contact number and that's a great safety feature. But Apple has built in five other functions that everybody with an iPhone should know about.

The first one is called Emergency SOS. It's been around since iOS 11. You can trigger it one of two ways. One way is to hold down either one of the volume buttons and the side button on your iPhone. Hold is down for five seconds to trigger it. Another way is to press the side button five times quickly. This will trigger this special mode. But it depends on which iPhone you have. Older ones only have the five press method. You can find out by going into Settings and then looking for Emergency SOS. There it will show you in a diagram at the top how to activate it and you'll see other options. 

For instance the Call with Side Button I can turn that on or off. Also you can turn off the main point of this feature which is Auto Call. What Emergency SOS does is it will automatically call the authorities. You don't even need to know the local number. So it's 911 in the U.S. but other parts of the world it's slightly different. The phone automatically knows which number to call. So using this you get a countdown if you continue to hold and if you release it won't call. But you still have this little slider here to slide over the SOS to make the call. So you can reach your hand into your pocket and hold down one of the volume buttons and one of the side buttons and it will automatically call. You can do the same thing using the side button pressed five times. So even if you turn off Auto Call in the Settings you can still use the slider to actually call SOS.

One of the reasons some people may want to turn the Auto Call feature off is to prevent accidental calling. I actually did this myself once. I reached into my pocket and I thought I was turning the volume up and I was actually pressing the other button on the other side five times and it called 911. I tried to stop the call but I was a little too late and actually 911 called me back to check on me to make sure I was okay. So it's nice to know the feature does work.

A couple other useful things about this feature. One is that it shares your location with emergency services so emergency services are not only getting your call but if for some reason you can't talk to them at least they get your location. It also locks your phone which simply means you need to enter your passcode to get into it again. Touch ID and Face ID won't work until you enter your code. So if you're in danger and somebody takes your phone from you they can't use their fingerprint or face to get into the phone. Another thing it does is if you have an emergency contact set it will send them a message and start sharing your location with them automatically. So let's look at how to set the emergency contact and how other people can get ahold of that. That's the second safety feature we're going to look at. 

So say you're in trouble and somebody finds you and wants to help and finds your phone on you. They can't, of course, unlock your phone but they can turn it on and see the locked screen. They try to unlock it and it doesn't work. So they get to enter a passcode and they can't do that. But there is the Emergency button at the bottom left. They tap that and they can make an emergency phone call on your phone but they probably have their own phone to be able to do that. The Medical ID button at the bottom left that's actually really useful. They touch that and they get all sorts of information about you. Paramedics and other emergency service workers know to look for this and they know how to get to it on various phones like the iPhone. So here it has got a bunch of information and you can set this information to whatever you want. In addition to basic information about you, like who you are and allergies and stuff like that, you also get an emergency contact number at the bottom. So they can call that person on your behalf. Also they can tap that number and your phone will actually call it. That's really useful. So instead of that person seeing an unknown caller coming up they see it as you and are more likely to answer.

So for setting that information you actually go into the Health app on your iPhone and tap Medical ID at the bottom right. Here's where you set it all. You hit the Edit button at the top right. Edit your Medial ID and change what's there. You can also Edit emergency contacts. You can add more than one as well. The contacts, of course, are coming from your Contacts app. So make sure you've got who you want in your Contacts app first and then you could add them here. As I mentioned before when you use the SOS feature you're emergency contacts will be sent a text message after you're done with your emergency call and it will include your location. Your location will continue to be shared with them for a period of time afterwards. So make sure the phone numbers you include there are, if possible, phone numbers that can accept text messages.

So the next two safety features I want to talk about are both ways to share your location with someone else. The first one is Find My Friends. This is a great way to voluntarily share your location with other people. Typically you do this with your family members so you know where each other is located at any given time and it's done automatically. So you can automatically check on someone. It's great if you have elderly members of your family or very young members of your family. You can keep track of them and if something happens you know where they're located. 

So the Find Friends app is pretty simple to use. It shows people's location on a map. You can dig down to see a specific person or you can see all the people there. There's an Add button and you can use this to basically join the group of friends. So if the people in your family were to share their location with you, you can then see their location or at least their phone's location on the map anytime that you want. They don't have to do anything special on their phone.

Now safety feature number four is a temporary way to do this. This is really useful, say, if you think you might be heading to a situation where you feel a little bit uncomfortable and you just want to make sure somebody knows where you are. Right in the Messages app you can go into a conversation, you're having a text message conversation, you tap on their name at the top and you go to Info. Share My Current Location just tells them where you are right now. But Share My Location gives you the option to Share for One Hour, Share Until End of Day, or Share Indefinitely. They get a message they can tap on to see where you're located. So if you're feeling a little uncomfortable you can send them a text message to let them know what's going on and then at least you know somebody knows where you are.

Now the last safety feature I want to show you is a little bit different but I believe it's very important. If you go into Settings, you've got Do Not Disturb, which is useful for making sure you don't get woken up in the middle of the night by text messages or alerts or things like that. But there is also the Do Not Disturb While Driving Function. You can set it to Manually, When Connected to Car Bluetooth, or Automatically. If you set it to Automatically what it will do is will detect when your moving in a car and automatically go into this Do Not Disturb mode. Using When Connected to Bluetooth is great when you're using Bluetooth already with your car. It just automatically knows when you're in the car because it's connected to your car.

Now, of course, you don't want to be interrupted by phone calls or text messages or notifications while driving. But the problem is then you're unresponsive to people that are trying to get in touch with you. The great thing about Do Not Disturb While Driving is your phone automatically responds to them to let them know that the reason you're not responding is you're driving. So you can look underneath the Do Not Disturb While Driving options and you can see Auto Reply To. You can turn that off, you can  Auto Reply only to people you've communicated with recently or only people in Favorites or anybody that's one of your contacts. So it's not going to reply to spam. You can set the Auto Reply to a message that you want. So somebody trying to text you gets the message back and knows that you're driving and you'll get back to them when you're stopped.

So these are really no brainers. You want to make sure you know how to use Emergency SOS and also how to temporarily share your location with somebody. You want to make sure that in advance you setup your Medical ID and you have Do Not Disturb While Driving turned on automatically. Then you want to make sure you've shared your location through Find Friends with your close family members. All five of these things are great personal safety features of the iPhone that everybody should use.