Arlo Safe Review: It Offers Good Hardware, Faulty Tracking Software, and Some Safety Concerns

Do you feel like you’re not tracked in enough places? Sure, you can share your location via Google Maps, Apple Find My <iDevice>, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc., and your smartwatch is far too eager to ask every time you trip if you’ve fallen and can’t get up. But what if you want or need a dedicated way for someone to track you? Arlo thinks their Arlo Safe stands out, but does it help or hurt?

Here’s what Arlo Safe is offering:

• One-touch emergency response with agents who interface with emergency services for you
• Family safety, like alerts, if someone leaves a certain radius, being able to see where they are, and being able to see where they’ve been [!]
• Crash response, including the option to activate audio and video to record during an emergency
• Arlo Safe Button, which is a Bluetooth-enabled button that interfaces with the Arlo Safe app and can activate sending your location to emergency services

Okay, so before we get into more about this app and the service, we’ll look at the hardware. Size-wise, it’s about as tall as a AA battery but slightly beefier in thickness.

There is one button on the bottom, and you only press it for emergencies. Thankfully the button is recessed so that you won’t hit it accidentally. However, it is easy to depress, and it will vibrate to acknowledge the press.

The button on the bottom of the Arlo Safe.

Arlo did consider how people might want to carry the Safe button, and they provide a split ring as well as a clip for carrying.

The Arlo Safe connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and it can remain connected up to roughly 300 feet, depending on walls and other obstacles. It does take a weird battery (ER14250, aka 1/2AA), but Arlo says it should last for 18-24 months, so hopefully, it’s not something you’ll need to stock in your battery junk drawer.

Activating the safe button is easy. You press it once if you feel unsafe and can hold it down if you’re walking around and want it to be on “alert” for you. In both cases, once you let go, the app will immediately ask if you’re okay and require you to enter a PIN code; if you do not enter the PIN, it will activate Arlo to contact emergency services.

Incidentally, you can do the same with the app on your phone, just tapping an emergency button, but obviously, if you’re feeling unsafe, it’s a lot better to use a no-look button over fumbling with your phone.

If you’re concerned about walking late at night or in a situation where someone might not make it to a phone while needing emergency services, it’s a good concept. If you consider the Arlo Safe Button to basically be a “Life Alert but portable for all ages,” there’s very little to snark on or pick apart here. I do wish it came with a bit more to it, like offering a chance for it to clip in with pepper spray if you’re walking alone and feeling concerned.

What freaks me out is that you can see your history, or the history of anyone in your family, for 24 hours.

Let’s say you send your college-age child off to school with this. It’s one thing to make sure they’re at home asleep in the middle of the night; it’s another to look on Sunday morning and know your kid got home at 2 am. Do you really want to know if your kid stayed out late at a party? It feels deeply invasive, and I feel like there are only very specific instances where this would be helpful.

For instance, I could see this being useful for parents who are cautious about trusting a teenager with new driving freedoms. It could also be a somewhat weird, if helpful, way of showing you were driving a specific route or traveling to a specific location for work.

But honestly, aside from those two very specific scenarios, if you’re concerned about where your loved one was three hours ago, and you can’t just ask them about it, you need counseling, not a safety button.

24-hour tracking is a feature that just feels vaguely uncomfortable.

We’ll revisit this again shortly, but because Arlo Safe connects via Bluetooth to the user’s phone and needs that connection for GPS tracking, you can’t, for instance, connect this to your phone and hand the Arlo Safe device off to your kid for the day to make sure they made it to school.

You can check the location of anyone who’s on your Arlo Safe family plan from your phone, so as long as they have their phone and button more or less together, you’ll be able to see their location — which you could also do by sharing locations through built-in Apple and Android apps, like Apple’s Find My Friends or Google Maps Location Sharing.

I am also concerned with the concept of live agents who will interface with emergency services on your behalf. Hear me out for a moment.

Arlo says their experts get an 80-hour training specific to their services; they are trained in cardiac events, suicide threats, and other issues, and they have, on average, over six years of experience. These agents do seem to be extremely well-trained, but here’s a rather dystopian and disturbing thought experiment:

What happens when you can pay extra for a service like what Arlo Safe offers? Do you get ahead in the 911 queue because you’re a paying customer? Obviously, this isn’t what anyone wants, but think about it — anytime there’s a “special tier,” people eventually expect more from it, which is something I think we all need to guard against as services like this appear.

Admittedly I’m picking on Arlo Safe because we’re reviewing their device, but they’re certainly not the only company that utilizes this extra layer of responders. It’s great that Arlo has extremely well-trained individuals available to help at a price, but it feels like a libertarian dystopia more than a technological panacea.

Finally, most of what Arlo Safe offers, aside from the desire to check if your loved one was really at work at 1 pm yesterday, is redundant with features already baked into iOS and Android. You can check your loved one’s locations easily via both platforms, with far less invasive side features.

But let’s say those issues are my hangups and not necessarily yours.

The real problem here is that the Arlo Safe location services are terrible.

For instance, the Arlo Safe button has been on my couch while I’ve been home all weekend. According to the tracker, in that time, I’ve been in my neighbor’s house, down the street, and for the last hour, I’ve apparently been across the street at a different address.

While my neighbors seem like perfectly friendly folks, I think they’d be less than thrilled if emergency services came busting into their home by mistake because I hit the Arlo Safe’s panic button.

I’ve obviously blocked out all my address information in the following photo. But to be clear, at least twice a day, the Arlo Safe button is putting me a full QUARTER MILE away from where I’m actually located. That’s … not a small error.

Putting me at the next-door neighbors is understandable, as our townhomes share a wall. But, again, the Arlo Safe has shown me to be a full quarter mile away from my actual location, which is the equivalent of five city blocks (assuming 20 blocks per mile)!

We reached out to Arlo, and their main suggestion was to make sure that I had the highest level of location services activated in Settings. I did — on two different phones and with two different Arlo Safe buttons — and I had the same wandering location issue.

The only other explanation the company gave us was, “well, if addresses are close together there might be an issue.” So…if you live in a townhouse or close to your neighbors, this isn’t the product for you?

Arlo Safe feels like a bit of a niche product. It has competition from ADT’s Invisawear and Flare, both of which use the same concept of a discreet tracker and emergency beacon, although their trackers are integrated into jewelry, which might be less obvious than a small white canister dangling from a keychain or clipped to the wearer’s clothing.

I can’t comment on whether those others products have better GPS accuracy, but my point is that several companies share this particular vision, and Arlo isn’t the only game in town.

The Arlo Safe device costs $29.99 for the hardware, and the service is between $4.99 and $19.99 per month, depending on the features and bundle you choose. But if you choose the middle tier of family tracking at $9.99/month, you’re looking at $120 per year for a device that may or may not know precisely where you are.

Even if I loved the Arlo Safe concept and the features, it’s just incredibly hard for me to enthusiastically recommend a device that insists that I am located three blocks away half the time.

I truly believe Arlo Safe has its heart in the right place with these offerings, but it’s hard to come up with a compelling reason why these would be better than the long-standing existing options. In addition, the “extras” feel a bit excessive or stalker-like, which is not what you want people to associate with your app. On the upside, you might send your stalker to the neighbor’s house?

Editorial update: We heard from Arlo regarding the review and they asked us to clarify a few items. Here is what they said:

We first wanted to reiterate that the Arlo Safe app is a safety app designed to keep you and your family safe. Unlike our competitors, family safety has two modes:

• Live tracking mode: In live tracking, we keep the history for any significant location changes the user goes through. (suitable for families that would like to track each other at all times).
• Check-in only mode: For families that don’t want always-on tracking but would like to check-in on a request basis, can use this mode. For these users, history will only be stored at checked in locations.

We wanted to be sure you were aware of the check-in-only mode that can offer a less “stalker-like” feeling while using the app (as we didn’t see mention of this in the review.)

Additionally, we wanted to confirm that 911 Services has its own way of prioritizing dispatch. Arlo does not change or influence this process. If an emergency happens, live agents understand the customer’s situation, location and can provide contextual information faster to 911 services’ for proper prioritization.

Also, they asked that we clarify the location services issue as follows:

“The Arlo Safe Button does not have GPS, but rather uses the location on the user’s phone. The accuracy of the phone’s location could cause the issue, based on general location or precise location services. This can also happen if addresses are very close. That being said, Arlo is always working to make improvements to products.”

It’s worth noting that we did use three different phones for the testing, and had location issues across all three, but you may have different results depending on your phone’s GPS.

Arlo Safe costs $29.99 for the hardware, and the service is between $4.99 and $19.99 per month, depending on the features and bundle you choose; it is available directly from the manufacturer and from other retailers, including Amazon.

Source: Manufacturer supplied review sample

What I Liked: Compact; Long battery life; Several carrying options; The concept isn’t bad as a safety feature, especially if you’re often walking alone

What Needs Improvement: Geographic inaccuracies make the efficacy of the safety features questionable; Features like 24 hours of location data can be a bit intrusive; It’s questionable if the extra features are worth the subscription cost; The service duplicates features offered by a lot of smartphones already