It can take many hours to surmise that someone has been kidnapped. Getting people to pay direct attention to someone's whereabouts, without having to constantly nag the person, is a huge win.
Anyone who has ever expected an at-risk person to make contact at an estimated time can relate how worrying it is when that person is delayed.
> But cant police use the tracking info already once you report someone missing?
1. Police can, but won't until they consider it a missing person scenario, which oftdn involves considerable delay, at least for an adult -- and that's even if the police happen to prioritize that case.
2. For many people in various places for a variety of reasons, even aside from delay issues, the police aren't the first people they'd want to rely on. Or even on that list at all.
> This just seems like a way for busybody and manipulative people to stir up drama
There is some risk of that, but there's also empowerment of people to create their own effective support networks of real, personal trust.
Late reply: there are 800,000 missing persons cases in the US each year, but 12,000,000 victims of intimate partner violence.
I just suspect that your solution to the smaller problem will make something that's a much larger problem (as in, more than an order of magnitude larger) worse.
This just seems like a way for busybody and manipulative people to stir up drama.