Elizabeth Smart, who survived her harrowing abduction in Salt Lake City two decades ago, has partnered with Portland-based tech company Q5id to launch an app that aims to locate missing children and adults.
Why it matters: More than 600,000 individuals go missing each year in the U.S., according to The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Details: Q5id Guardian, which launched Monday, allows app members to initiate an alert to other users the moment they believe their loved one is missing.
- Users can create profiles of their loved ones in the app that includes details of their physical appearance, temperament and medical history.
- The profiles provide more details about a missing person than the standard Amber alert, Smart told Axios.
- “The goal is that no matter how a loved one is missing, it could be that they have Dementia and simply wandered down the street, we want individuals to have the ability to alert their surrounding, immediate community into action,” Q5id Guardian brand manager Alexandra Farland told Axios.
I see this has good intentions but I want to know how long until they create a database that profiles us to the missing kids and somehow labels us as potential suspects.
I love this in the Article,
Why? Why would you check your users against the registry? Just shows more punishment for the registry!
How much is she getting paid to be a professional? She didn’t program the apt I’m sure.? It is another use. How good of a use is yet to be determined. I concerned about aggrandizing her victimhood. Doing so only glorifies injustice. Smart seems a repetitive word used by the purveyors.
This wasn’t her “idea.” Some tech company approached her to cash in on her story for a fear-for-profit “win win.” It’s a dishonest cash grab to sell ADS under the guise of protecting children.
You can’t make the world child-proof and kid-friendly, but you sure as hell can make people fall for that fairy while cashing in from that LIE.
“If that can lead to my rescue … it can lead to their rescues as well,”
How could this app have had anything to do with her rescue?
What exactly is the point of cross checking verified users (i.e. paying subscribers) with the registry?
How effective can it be if it only alerts paying subscribers (less registrants, even paying ones)?
I don’t see how this app would be useful for anything at all.
Elizabeth Smart’s abducters were Mormon cultists driven by religious fervor. They have a 19th century believe about making “wives” out of young teenage girls. Sex was not the motivating factor for Smart’s abducters. It was about power and control. So for Smart to go around the country doing photo ops with John Walsh, doesn’t address the underlying causes for her abduction.