Friends help CHP track suspected kidnapping victim in LA; 2 in custody

LAKE BALBOA, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Two men were taken into custody for allegedly kidnapping someone in Los Angeles overnight.

Officers responded to a 911 caller who reported their friend was forcefully taken and put in a white SUV around 1:30 a.m. Thursday morning, according to the California Highway Patrol.

The reporting party tracked the victim's phone and CHP used their location to find the SUV.

Officers stopped the driver at a gas station in the 16500 block of Victory Boulevard in Lake Balboa, near Hayvenhurst Avenue. Two men were taken into custody and are now facing kidnapping and robbery charges.

The alleged kidnapping victim was saved in part because his friends were tracking him and relaying information to the California Highway Patrol.

"It's the hottest thing around for people who are going places and they want to make sure that they're safe," Karen North, a professor of digital social media at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said in an interview.

Location-tracking apps like Life360 or Apple's Find My allow people to share their location with others who have the same app.

The main audience for these apps are minors, North said. Teens use them for social reasons, and parents like them for safety reasons.

"People realize that the world is potentially dangerous, and so they decide: 'These are the people who I want to follow me,'" North told ABC7. "I want somebody to know who I am."

Letting others track you 24 hours a day, seven days a week means you are giving up a significant amount of privacy. But North pointed out that even if you don't share your location with others, just having a mobile phone means you're probably still being tracked by various companies.

"Your location on some level is always shared if you have an electronic device," North said.

That could be a problem for some people. Those who need to keep their destinations discreet may end up being burned by trackers.

But in the case of Thursday's alleged kidnapping, location-sharing paid off.

The Los Angeles Police Department's investigation into the alleged kidnapping is now underway.

"Looking it at from a safety perspective, it's really an asset," North said.