A few months ago my son, then seventeen, was heading to a festival
without us for the first time. I had one of those slightly uncomfortable
parent thoughts on the way there. What happens if his phone dies? Or he
loses it, or somebody takes it. Could he call me?
A university open day, a few months later. In a year he will
be the one heading off on his own.
Then I realised he does not know my number. Like most teenagers, almost
everyone he knows is a name in Snapchat rather than a number in a phone
book. And I did not know his either, which was worse, because I am old
enough to remember when knowing them was normal. His entire ability to
reach us depended on one object in his pocket.
That bothered me enough to start building something. We used to know
phone numbers. Now we know names: Mum, Dad, and whoever else. You tap the
name and the phone does the rest, which works brilliantly right up until
the phone is not there. I wrote about this on LinkedIn expecting a few
sympathetic replies from friends, and instead got parent after parent
saying they had never thought about it either. That is when it stopped
being a thing about my family and started being a product.
What we built instead
Every other answer to this assumes your phone still works. Find My needs
your phone. A contacts backup needs you to be signed in to something. A
written-down number in your wallet needs the wallet.
So ZeroPercent does the opposite. Your people live on our side,
not in the phone, and you reach them from a web page on
anybody's phone by proving who you are with three things you carry in
your head: your own number, your date of birth, and a PIN you chose. Nothing
is installed on the phone you borrow, and nothing about you is saved on it
when you hand it back.
The people you reach do not need the app, an account, or to have heard of
us. That was the whole requirement. A safety net that only works if everyone
you love has already downloaded something is not a safety net.
How we build
Three rules, and they explain most of the decisions you will notice.
The rescue page has to work on the worst night of your year.
It is why that page carries almost nothing: no analytics and no marketing.
The only outside code on it is Twilio's calling library, which we host
ourselves, and Cloudflare's check that stops automated guessing.
We collect what the product needs and nothing we might like
later. There is no location tracking in ZeroPercent at all, which
for a family safety app is a deliberate and slightly unusual choice. Your
the people who run your family see your battery, not where you are.
The people on your plan see less than you would expect.
They see how many backup contacts you have, never who they are, never who
you contacted, and never what you said.
Who we are
ZeroPercent is made by a small team in North Yorkshire. It is a real
company with a real address, which matters more than it should for an app
that asks for your family's phone numbers.
If the app is not doing its job, tell us and a person
will read it. If you want to know how we protect your family, or how to tell
a real ZeroPercent text from a fake one, our security
page covers it in plain English. If you have found a security flaw,
there is a page for that with what we promise
in return. All of these reach the same small team, which is the advantage of
being this size.
