Pet Emergency Info on Your Phone Lock Screen: What Is Safe to Put There

Put a first name, a phone number that reaches you, and one line saying animals depend on you. Leave off your home address, on every mechanism. Anything on a phone lock screen can be read by whoever holds the phone, which is why it is useful and why it is a risk. Below: what Apple and Google publish, which pet fields are worth that trade, and how to set it up without publishing more than you meant to.

The rescue sticker stays on the door and the alert card stays on the fridge. The vaccination folder stays in the go bag. The phone is the only one of them with you when the emergency happens, and the only one a stranger can read if you are hurt or far from home.

Apple’s Medical ID support article (published March 10, 2026) opens with the pitch: “Medical ID helps first responders access your critical medical information from the Lock screen, without needing your passcode.” Google publishes a similar feature. Read Apple’s sentence again with a different person in mind. Without needing your passcode is the whole benefit and the whole problem, one fact seen from two sides. Anything you put on a lock screen is published to every person who will ever hold that phone: the paramedic, the neighbor, the person who picks it up off the sidewalk, the person who takes it out of your bag, and the person you moved house to get away from. The phone cannot tell them apart.

Our fridge pet alert card covers the copy that stays at the house for a caregiver who lets themselves in. This is the copy that travels with you, and because it travels, the audience and the rules differ.

Four mechanisms, four levels of exposure

“Put it on my lock screen” describes several different things. Getting this wrong is the likeliest way to publish more than you intended.

Mechanism	What a person has to do to read it	Access control
Lock-screen wallpaper image	Wake the screen	None at all
Android lock screen text message	Wake the screen	None at all, per Google’s own caution
iPhone Medical ID with Show When Locked	Swipe up or press Home, tap Emergency, tap Medical ID	No passcode required
Android emergency info with Show when locked	Pick up the locked phone (Google does not describe the taps)	Google says anyone who picks up the phone can find it

A wallpaper is an image and nothing more. Apple’s iPhone User Guide says you can change the wallpaper on the Lock Screen and the Home Screen in Settings or through the wallpaper gallery. If you set an image with text on it, every word is visible the instant the screen lights up, to anyone within reading distance, with no tap. It is the most exposed option by a wide margin, and it is the one people reach for first because it is the easiest to make.

Android has a text field that behaves the same way. Google’s Android Help article documents it under the heading “Put a message on your lock screen”: open Settings, tap Display, then under Lock display tap Lock screen, then Add text on lock screen. Google’s own suggestion for what to write is narrow: “Enter your message, like info that would help someone return your phone if you lost it.” That is scoped to returning the phone, not running your household.

iPhone Medical ID is a record you reach through the Emergency screen. Apple’s iPhone User Guide says a first responder views it from the Lock Screen by swiping up or pressing the Home button (depending on the model), tapping Emergency on the passcode screen, then tapping Medical ID. That is three deliberate taps and no passcode. The same guide says Medical ID information can be shared automatically during an emergency call (U.S. and Canada only) and also appears on the Lock Screen of your iPhone and Apple Watch.

Android emergency info has its own switch. Google’s Android Help article says the information goes in through the Safety app, and that showing it on a locked screen means tapping Emergency info access, then Show when locked. Google’s Pixel Phone Help article names the same two controls.

“I put it on my lock screen” can therefore mean a note the whole world reads at a glance or a record someone has to go looking for. Neither is protected. The difference is between information handed to a room and information left in a drawer with no lock.

What Apple publishes

Menus move between iOS versions, and Apple publishes its iPhone User Guide as separate editions for several of them, so read the one that matches your phone.

Apple’s support article (support.apple.com/en-us/105072, published March 10, 2026) says: open the Health app and tap the Summary tab, tap your profile picture in the upper corner, then tap Medical ID underneath it. Then comes the switch this page is about: “To make your Medical ID available from the Lock screen on your iPhone, turn on Show When Locked.” The article adds that in an emergency this gives information to people who want to help. Apple’s iPhone User Guide compresses the step: “Tap Edit, scroll to the bottom, then turn on Show When Locked and Emergency Call.”

A second, separate switch is easy to confuse with the first. Apple says to turn on Share During Emergency Call to share your Medical ID with emergency responders: when you call or text emergency services from your iPhone or Apple Watch, your Medical ID is shared automatically. That is a transmission during a call you place. Show When Locked is a display on a screen anyone can wake. Turning on one does not turn on the other.

Note who Apple says the Lock Screen audience is. The headline says first responders. The instruction says people who want to help, which is not a credentialed category. It is anybody.

What Google publishes, and the warning Apple’s consumer pages do not carry

Google documents the same class of feature in two help centers, and both put a caution in a highlighted Important block before the setup steps. Google’s Android Help article “Get help during an emergency with your Android phone” says: “Anyone who picks up your phone can find your lock screen message and emergency information even if your phone is locked.” It adds that you can turn this setting off in the Safety app.

Google’s Pixel Phone Help article “Get help in an emergency using your Pixel phone” makes a close but not identical point: anyone who picks up your phone can view your lock screen message and emergency information even with the phone locked, and you can turn this off in the Personal Safety app. The version notes differ too: the Android Help article says some steps work only on Android 12 and up, and the Pixel article says Android 13 and up. Read the page that matches your device.

Apple’s Platform Security guide comes closest to a warning, though it is not phrased as one. It says Medical ID is stored using “the Data Protection class No Protection so that it’s accessible without having to enter the device passcode.” It also names the trade-off: “Medical ID is an optional feature that lets users decide how to balance both safety and privacy concerns.” That is the same fact Google states as a caution, written as a design specification for developers and security researchers. The Apple consumer pages cited here (Medical ID, Lock Screen access, wallpaper) describe the access path and say Show When Locked gives information to people who want to help. They do not say in so many words that anyone holding the phone can read the record, so a reader who follows them alone can finish setup without meeting the sentence Google puts first.

The trade-off, and the rule this page uses

Apple and Google document how to turn these features on. None of the sources cited here, from either company or from ASPCA or Humane World for Animals, says which fields are worth publishing to an unknown reader. Google names the hazard in one sentence and moves on to the steps. So the field list below is this site’s own reasoning, not a published protocol. It comes from three questions asked of every candidate field.

One: does this help the person holding my phone act for my animal in the next hour? A vet’s number does. A phone number for me does. My dog’s full vaccination history does not, because nobody standing over an unconscious stranger is going to act on it.

Two: what does this hand to a person who means me harm, or who is simply not honest? The audience is unfiltered by design. Any field that only makes sense to a helpful reader has failed this question.

Three: is this someone else’s information? A second person’s name and number is that person’s data, and they cannot see what you published about them.

Almost every hard call resolves under those three questions, and the two that resolve most sharply are the address and the animal count.

The field list

What goes on

• Your first name and a phone number that reaches you. This is the field the whole message exists for, and the one Google’s suggested use is scoped to.
• A second number that is not yours. Prefer a contact outside the affected area, because a local contact is likely to be in the same evacuation, on the same overloaded network. Our microchip registration audit works through the out-of-area contact chain, including which registry fields hold the alternates and why a single cell number is the weakest configuration. Out-of-area before local is our recommendation, not a published lock-screen standard, and you are free to reverse it.
• Your veterinarian’s clinic name and number. It is the cheapest useful field, but not free: a clinic has a public address, so naming it narrows where you live. For most readers that is worth the route it opens to the animal’s care, and ASPCA’s rescue alert sticker recommendation includes your veterinarian’s name and number for strangers to read. If anyone has reason to look for you, leave this field off with the rest.
• That animals depend on you, and roughly what they are. Two cats and a dog. A parrot. Without this line a finder has no reason to keep calling after the first voicemail. Read the next list before you write it, because it does not travel safely with anything that locates your home.

What stays off

• Your home address. Always, on every one of these mechanisms. Not on a wallpaper, in a Medical ID, in Android emergency info, or in the Android lock screen text field. During an evacuation, an address printed next to a note that animals are alone in the house tells whoever holds your phone that a specific building is empty right now, which is the condition an evacuation creates for entire neighborhoods at once. A phone number does the useful half of the job and withholds the dangerous half, because the person who wants to help has to reach a human being who decides what to tell them. No cited source publishes this warning for lock screens. It is our reasoning, and it has a cost: someone genuinely trying to help your animals cannot get to them without an address. This rule accepts that on purpose, because the route to the animals should run through a phone call, not a broadcast.
• The count and species of your animals paired with anything that locates your home. The count beside a phone number is fine and useful. The count beside an address, or anything that lets a reader work out which house is yours, is the disclosure this section warns about. If you write the animal line, keep the locating half off the same screen.
• Your full legal name. A first name is enough to return a phone or reach a family. A full legal name is a search key into voter files, property records and data brokers, and it turns a helpful note into a lookup that ends at your front door. That is our reasoning, not a published finding.
• Anything about a second person beyond a first name and a number, and none of that until you have asked them.
• Your own diagnoses, unless you are putting them there for their real purpose. Medical ID is a medical record; see below.

The door sticker publishes more, and ASPCA recommends it anyway

There is an obvious objection to the rule above. ASPCA’s disaster preparedness page recommends a rescue alert sticker that lets people know pets are inside, is visible to rescue workers (ASPCA recommends placing it on or near the front door), and includes the types and number of pets as well as the name and number of your veterinarian.

That is a national animal welfare organization recommending disclosure of the same animal inventory this page says to keep away from anything that identifies your home, at the most identifying location there is. Three things are true at once.

• A door sticker cannot avoid publishing the location. Being at the location is the mechanism. There is no version of the sticker that keeps the count and drops the location, so the trade-off is not available to the sticker as a choice.
• A lock screen does have that choice. You can carry the animal count and drop the address, and lose nothing a phone call cannot recover.
• ASPCA builds in an update step. If you must evacuate with your pets, and time allows, ASPCA says to write EVACUATED across the stickers. A sticker that says animals are inside after they have left is worse than none. A lock screen has the same failure mode, with no equivalent instruction in the cited sources, so keeping it current is on you.

Our page on how firefighters know pets are inside covers a working firefighter’s published account that crews get no training to search for pet alert stickers, so a decal is one clue rather than a protocol. That applies with more force to a phone than a door. If you want the sticker itself, our printable rescue alert sticker builds one, and the trade-off it makes is ASPCA’s.

Nobody promised that anyone will look

Apple’s guide describes a first responder reaching a Medical ID. That tells you the route exists. It does not tell you that responders check phones for animal information, that any agency trains them to, or that a lock screen is part of any response protocol, and no cited source establishes any of the three.

The sticker is the closest comparison. A door decal is bigger, older, more standardized and physically in a responder’s path, and even there the firefighter’s account is no training and no protocol. A lock screen is smaller, newer, entirely non-standard, and needs a person to pick up and interact with a stranger’s phone during an emergency.

So write it for the audience that will use it. Not a rescue system: a person. A neighbor, a coworker, a bystander, the person at a hospital front desk, someone who found a phone on the ground and is decent enough to try. Write it for them, and the fact that a paramedic could also read it becomes a bonus rather than the plan.

Medical ID is a human medical record

Every example field in Apple’s and Google’s descriptions is a medical fact about the phone’s owner. Apple’s guide says Medical ID provides information about you that may be important in an emergency, like allergies, medical conditions and your emergency contacts. Google’s Android Help page says you can add “personal emergency info to your phone’s lock screen, like your blood type, allergies, and medications.” Apple names first responders as the audience it built Medical ID for.

If you fill the notes area with feeding schedules, animal names and a paragraph about a cat under a bed, you have put non-medical text into the one screen both companies describe as holding your medical facts. No cited source sets a rule on this, so what follows is our conclusion from those two facts: keep the animal line short and keep it last. One sentence naming the animals plus a phone number is a small tax on a medical record. Three paragraphs of household logistics buried above a penicillin allergy is a real cost paid by the person the field was built for, which is you.

If your pet information needs more than a sentence, it belongs on paper: our printable pet emergency wallet card for the copy in your wallet, the fridge pet alert card for the copy a caregiver reads in your kitchen, and a crate or kennel emergency ID card for the copy that stays with the animal.

The out-of-area contact is another person

Advice on this usually says to add a second contact and skips the part where that contact has their own phone, household and reasons for not wanting their number published to strangers. They cannot see what you wrote. Your lock screen is a page about them that they will never read, in the pocket of someone they are not with.

Apple raises the same concern from the security side. Its Personal Safety User Guide says of Emergency SOS contacts: “it’s important to make sure that the person or people assigned as emergency contacts are people you trust.” Apple’s sentence is about your trust in them. Ours runs the other direction, and it is ours: ask them first, tell them exactly what you are putting on the screen and where it can be read, use a first name and a number rather than a full name, and never their address. Ask again if their situation changes, because they have no way to tell you about a screen they cannot see.

The same courtesy applies to the caregiver arrangements on our dog walker emergency card checklist and in the pet sitter emergency instructions tool, both of which involve writing down someone else’s details for a stranger to read.

If someone is looking for you

If you are dealing with domestic violence, stalking, a protective order, or anyone who has reason to search for you, everything on this page inverts. A lock screen is a publication to whoever holds the phone. So is a wallpaper, so is a Medical ID with Show When Locked turned on, and so is Android emergency info with Show when locked turned on. Google says the setting can be turned off, in the Safety app on Android and in the Personal Safety app on a Pixel.

For what to do next, the better source is the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Its front page says it focuses on the intersection of technology and abuse, and provides expert training, technical assistance and resources on technology abuse and safety. Its survivor toolkit index lists a Technology Safety Plan, a Survivors’ Guide to Phones, an iPhone Privacy & Security Guide, Password Safety, a Guide to Securing Accounts & Devices, a Stalkerware Overview, Phone Stalkerware & Safety for Survivors, and a Survivors’ Guide to Location Tracking. The index lists no resource specifically about lock-screen emergency information; its published expertise covers phones, location tracking, stalkerware and account security.

That index also lists national hotlines, including the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. The Safety Net pages carry a quick-exit link for readers worried about someone seeing that they visited.

For the animal half of that situation, the point is narrower and ours: anything that publishes an animal’s existence to strangers deserves the three-question test above, and anything that publishes where the animal lives deserves it first.

The case this page cannot cover: a dead phone

Everything above assumes a phone that turns on. Plan for the version where it does not.

Google’s Android Help page describes the limits. Without a SIM card or eSIM you may be able to place emergency calls, but “you won’t be able to call your emergency contacts.” Sharing your real-time location with emergency contacts needs a Wi-Fi or mobile network connection. Both features degrade when the SIM or the network goes.

The accounts a pet owner may need after a separation from the animal can sit behind that phone: the microchip registry that holds the record a shelter’s scanner points at, the tracker app, the pet insurer, the vet’s client portal, the boarding facility. Each has an account, the password may sit in a password manager on the phone, and a two-factor code may arrive by text to a number with no signal. There is no clever fix. There is preparation:

• Ask each provider for its account recovery process before you need it. Go to the company holding the account, not a forum post. Write down what it asks for from a person who cannot log in, such as an account number, a chip number, or an email address you can still reach.
• Get the numbers onto something that does not need charging. Our printable pet emergency wallet card rides in a wallet, not on a battery.
• Fix the registry side in advance, because it has a known slow path. Our microchip registration audit covers the registry lookup, what to do when a registry goes out of business with your record inside it, and why transfers between owners can take real calendar time. If you are weighing a scannable tag against the chip, the QR tag versus microchip comparison settles which survives which failure.

The tag makes the same assumption. Humane World for Animals recommends that cats and dogs wear “collars with up-to-date identification tags, including your cell phone number,” because the average person who finds a pet cannot scan for a chip but can probably read a basic tag. ASPCA says a pet’s ID tag “should contain his name, telephone number and any urgent medical needs.” The two organizations give different field lists.

Now put either next to a dead phone. If the only number on your animal’s tag is the cell phone sitting in a puddle, the tag has a dead end printed on it. No cited source publishes this connection, so it is ours: whatever numbers you put on your lock screen and your animal’s tag, at least one should be a person who is not in the disaster with you.

What to actually write

A worked example, following the field list. Adapt it rather than copying it.

[your first name]. [a number that reaches you]. Two cats and a dog depend on me. If I am hurt, please call. Vet: [clinic name], [clinic number]. Second contact: [leave this blank until that person has said yes]

Every field is a placeholder, because the point is the shape. The vet line is the one field that is not free, so leave it off if anyone has reason to look for you specifically. The second contact line is left empty on purpose: a second person’s details are filled in after you have asked them, not before. And there is no home address anywhere on it, which is the point of the page.

If you are making a wallpaper image rather than using Medical ID or Android emergency info, cut it further. The image is readable at a glance across a coffee shop table. A first name, one phone number and one sentence about the animals is the whole safe payload.

Setup checklist

• Decide which mechanism you are using. A wallpaper image, a lock screen text message, an iPhone Medical ID with Show When Locked, or Android emergency info with Show when locked. The first two expose the most.
• Read the setup steps on Apple’s or Google’s own page for your version. Apple publishes its iPhone User Guide as separate editions for several iOS versions. Google’s Android Help article says some steps need Android 12 or later and its Pixel article says Android 13 or later. A screenshot in a blog post is not your phone.
• Write the fields from the list above, not from memory. First name, a number that reaches you, a second number that is not yours, the vet clinic, one sentence about the animals.
• Delete the address. If you typed one, delete it. If you made an image with one on it, remake the image.
• Ask the second person before their number goes on.
• If you use Medical ID, keep the animal line to one sentence and put it last, so the medical record still works as a medical record.
• Test it. Lock the phone. Hand it to somebody else. Ask them to read out loud everything they can reach without your passcode, including anything they can reach from the Emergency screen or the emergency information. Whatever they read is what you have published. It is cheaper to find a surprise at your kitchen table than in a shelter parking lot.
• Put the same numbers on paper. The phone is the thing that dies.
• Re-read it after anything changes. A new animal, a new vet, a contact who moved. A lock screen that describes a household you no longer have is the phone version of a rescue sticker for a pet who moved out three years ago.

Where to go next

This page belongs to the pet evacuation kits pillar, and it is the piece of the kit that lives in your pocket instead of in a bag.

• Copies that stay at the house. The fridge pet alert card is the sheet a caregiver reads in your kitchen, with the feeding and dosing detail a lock screen has no room for. The printable rescue alert sticker faces outward from your door, and how firefighters know pets are inside explains what a sticker does and does not accomplish.
• Copies that travel with the animal. The crate and kennel emergency ID card rides on the carrier, the QR tag versus microchip comparison settles which identifier survives a lost collar, and the microchip registration audit makes sure the record behind the chip has your current contacts.
• The moments this message is built for. If the order comes while you are at work, getting your pet out when you are not home is the playbook, and it is the scenario where a stranger reading your lock screen stops being hypothetical. If the animal is already missing, finding a lost pet after a disaster is the search sequence. The rest of the household planning sits on our pet emergency playbooks hub.

Do the two-minute version tonight. Open the feature, write one sentence with a first name, one phone number and the animals, leave the address off, lock the phone and hand it to someone else to read back. You will know within a minute whether what you published is what you meant to publish.