Northeast college students who get nervous walking home alone in the early hours of the morning may soon be able to find comfort in a phone call. Starting soon, campus police departments at some area schools will support the Campus Guardian Emergency Notification system, a GPS tracking system that would alert campus security to a caller's whereabouts after an emergency phone call.
The company will begin testing at Roger Williams University this spring, and use at Brown is not far away.
Brown has been working with Campus Guardian for over a year and a half, said Mark Porter, director of public safety and chief of police.
"We're looking to test it out," Porter said. "We think we're going to do it."
If a student with a GPS-enabled phone calls an emergency number, it alerts the campus security dispatcher and gives the caller's location, said Michael Glier, who founded Campus Guardian with business partner Mark Laird. The caller's location is periodically updated so the software can "determine who is closest to the caller to respond to them," Glier said.
The Campus Guardian Emergency Notification system, a project that began in 2003, won the 2007 Rhode Island Business Plan competition. The award was based on the "commercial potential of the business," according to Peter Lowy, business manager for the competition.
The project began when Glier and Laird started looking at the "crime on campus problem," Glier said. He and Laird interviewed campus security officers and administrators in schools throughout the Northeast. They also interviewed current students, alums and rising freshmen.
Glier and Laird also addressed the legal issues of the technology before embarking on the project. The people they consulted with found it "very appropriate," Lowy said.
The technology aims to get "campus security involved in the response ... (so) people have a chance of getting a much faster response," Lowy said. "We like to look at it as feet away, not miles away."
Students who download Campus Guardian's software onto their cell phones - currently only Sprint phones are supported - can choose to have the program either automatically turn on or turn on only when they want. Glier compares installing the software to downloading a ringtone.
Like ringtones, the software is voluntary, Glier said. "It never sends your location under any circumstances unless you dial for help," he said. "There's no Big Brother attached to this, nor is there any way that campus security ... can ask for your location."
Even in the face of a subpoena, Glier said, students' locations will be protected. "The company's integrity about Big Brother issues is very important," Glier added. "Part of the technology in the cell phone software is software that allows the cell phone to remain autonomous ... without sending the location information back to campus security."
Porter emphasized that the software will be optional at Brown, too. "Of course it'll only be students who want" the software who will use it, he said.
According to Glier, the Campus Guardian's cell phone technology is popular. "We've received interest from virtually every school we've talked to," he said.
The company's short-term plan is to limit its expansion to the Northeast. After the second year of operation, however, the company plans to expand to other cities, Glier said.
