Stephanie Bellevue, a student at American University, held down the “5” key on her cellphone, and a loud alarm soon began to ring in the cramped operations room of the university’s public-safety office. On one of the facility’s many computer monitors, the student’s location popped up as a dot on a campus map, and next to it was a photograph of her and a list of details to help find her: height, weight, hair color, and eye color.

In this case it was a false alarm — the student rang the system to demonstrate it to The Chronicle. The university’s director of public safety, Michael McNair, explained that cellphones have become an important additional safety feature on the campus — used for more than just sending mass text messages in case of emergencies. Since just about everyone on the campus has a cellphone these days, the devices are easier for students to get to than the 28 emergency phones (noted by shining blue lights) positioned around the campus. “Students can have at the touch of a button instant access to public safety,” said Mr. McNair.

Sure, people can use their cellphones to call 911 in an emergency, but at American University, those calls go to city police rather than to the campus’s public-safety office. So when officials installed an emergency text-message alert system last year, they looked for other features to turn any cellphone into a mobile “blue light” phone.

Perhaps the most unusual service American University set up is called “guardian.” It lets students who have signed up for the service call for a virtual police escort late at night if they’re walking home alone. Students simply call a number (or use their cellphone’s Web browser) to request the service. They set a timer, and if the student has not called back to deactivate the service by the end of the time limit, campus police are notified, along with the student’s location information. Students can also leave a voice message detailing their route, to help police track them down should trouble arise. For instance, a student might leave a message saying: “I’m about to walk from the library to the parking lot.”

So far few people have used the guardian service. Other than in tests, the alarm for it has only rang once so far, and it turned out to be a student who accidentally set it off. Ms. Bellevue said that some of her friends are reluctant to sign up, wary of sharing their location information with the campus police. “Other students think it’s a tracking system,” she said. Officials say that the system gives them no way of seeing any student’s location until the timer runs out on the guardian or unless the students ring the “panic button” feature.

Students decide how much identifying information to give officials when they sign up for the AU Campus Connect service (so far 3,000 people have signed up). All of that private information is kept on servers off the campus run by Rave Wireless Inc., which the university has hired to run the campus alert service. Todd Miller, vice president for operations for Rave, says the company take pains to protect that data. —Jeffrey R. Young

Categories: Mobile-College-Apps