Love it or hate it, Snapchat has become deeply interwoven into the lives of millions of its customers in the past few years. Although it is still primarily a photo-sharing platform, it also offers several other capabilities, like stories and live locations. Today, Snap Inc. has announced a new safety feature for its popular application utilizing its existing set of capabilities.
Snap is debuting a feature called Home Safe in Snapchat, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Rather than periodically checking the location of a close one to verify that they have reached home safely (provided that they have shared their live location with you), or constantly pinging them to find out where they are at an exact point in time, Snapchat will now automatically inform certain people when a user reaches home safely.
Home Safe has the guardrails that you would expect it to have. It will only share the alert with friends that you already share your live location with, and it will "shut off" automatically after being displayed once - which is a sort of trademark behavior for Snapchat capabilities.
To get started, you need to navigate to your Bitmoji on Snap Map and then tap on My Home. This location will now become visible to you and your friends who have access to your live whereabouts. Following that, whenever you are leaving for home, all you need to do is open a friend"s chat, tap the Map icon, and then press the Home Safe button. Now, whenever you reach home, Snapchat will automatically trigger a one-time alert to said friend.
This is a very important safety feature and it will likely be utilized by many to have peace of mind regarding the people they care about. It"s also nice that it uses existing capabilities such as Snap Map (boasting over 400 million monthly users) and live location to implement a safety mechanism rather than reinventing the wheel needlessly.