Most personal-safety apps are built around a panic button. We started from a different assumption.
A panic button assumes you can safely press it — that you have a hand free, a second of privacy, and nobody watching what you type. Sometimes that's true. Often, especially in the moments that actually matter, it isn't.
Defcon5 started from a simpler idea: instead of asking you to raise an alarm, ask you to check in — and let the absence of a check-in do the alarming for you. A missed interval is information on its own. It doesn't require you to have done anything at the worst possible moment.
From there, the rest of the design followed the same logic. Guardians shouldn't need an account and a login to find out you're in trouble — they should just see it, the moment they open an app they already have. And if someone is standing over you forcing you to check in, the app shouldn't have to know the difference between that and a normal check-in — it should let you signal it without your face or your hands giving anything away.
Unicorn United is based in Paris. Defcon5 is our first product, built under EU data protection law from day one rather than retrofitted to it — no data sold, no advertising, no third party beyond the guardians a person explicitly chooses.