Lookalikes 13: Google Family Link and Safety e-Report

The app logos for Google's Family Link and the Korean government's Safety e-Report look suspiciously similar. 


You know that Family Link is an app to add parental controls and limits to Android devices. 

The other app is produced by the Korean government Ministry of Public Administration and Security. The app allows you to report various safety and well-being issues, such as illegally parked cars, illegal signs, damaged public infrastructure, Covid quarantine violations, basically anything that makes life uncomfortable. The report gets checked and forwarded to the relevant authority, and includes a function to notify you with what course of action, if any, was taken. 

Foreigners can conveniently make reports in English. Though interesting, I noticed an interesting reply in the app comments on the Play Store:

행정안전부

September 6, 2019

"안녕하세요, 안전신문고에 관심을 가져 주셔서 감사합니다. 영어신고앱으로 신고하실 시 자동번역의뢰가 진행되며 일반신고보다 시일이 다소 소요됩니다. 한글로 신고를 원하실 경우 일반 안전신문고를 이용해주시기 바랍니다. 모든 국민이 더욱 편하게 신고할 수 있도록 지속적으로 노력하겠습니다."

안전신문고(구 생활불편신고) - Google Play 앱

So it looks like English reports are filtered through an automatic translation software into Korean. Makes sense since I doubt they have many fluent English speakers in public civil servant jobs. Scratch that, I bet most public civil servants have zero interest in reading a bunch of English-written complaints. But anyway, good to know since if you really want your complaint dealt with, probably best to write it in the most specific, clear, direct possible way to ensure whatever gets spewed out of the translator is readable. 

You don't actually need the app to make most of these reports. It's really just a frame for the website which works fine for most issues at 

https://www.safetyreport.go.kr/eng/#main

Some reports, like parking violations, need to be filed with photos taken specifically in the app though. You can take the photos with the in-app camera first, then go home and upload them via the website if you prefer (or just right in the app of course). They get a timestamp encoded to ensure the photos were correctly taken in the right time apart, which I think is 2 minutes if I recall right. 

Anyway it's interesting that they went with the same tricolor scheme as Google. Of course Google uses this basic pallet for most of their apps now so not specific to Family Link exactly. I haven't seen any other uses of these 3 colors together in Korea. Maybe some app developer just saw it on his Google app and thought it looked nice. Who knows. 

I've only used the app once, to report a broken portion of rope fence along a hiking trail. They took care of it within a week. Not too shabby. Even sent me a photo of the new one. 


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