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Life360 website: "Feel Free to Together"
Photo: Life360
This means that you have the safety of your family "in view" everywhere, according to the description of the Life360 smartphone app in Google's Play Store.
The software has been downloaded to Android devices more than 50 million times, and in Apple's App Store it ranks 20th in the “Social Networks” category.
And it's free, at least in the basic version.
According to a report by the online magazine “The Markup”, however, users pay via a detour, namely with their data.
The company sells the position data of its 33 million users - including apparently many children - to around a dozen data dealers.
These in turn would sell the information to "virtually anyone who wants it."
Where are you and how do you drive
Life360 is an app that allows family members to share their location information with each other in real time.
For example, parents can set zones that they consider safe for their children.
If the offspring leave these areas, the parents will be alerted.
If you have older children, the app can use the smartphone's sensors to record their driving behavior when they are behind the wheel.
The company advertises on its website that parents can check whether the teenagers are not adhering to speed limits or write text messages while driving.
In his allegations that Life360 sells such data to third parties, "The Markup" refers to conversations with two former employees of the company and two former employees of data dealers who are said to have been among the customers.
When asked, the founder and CEO of Life360, Chris Hulls, told the magazine that he could neither confirm nor deny that "The Markup" claims that his company is the largest data source in the industry.
He also writes: "We see data as an important part of our business model that enables us to keep the core services of Life360 free for the majority of our users, including functions that have improved driving safety and saved many lives."
Tile will soon be one of them
In fact, Life360 points out in its data protection guidelines that it shares its customers' data with third parties.
This includes "personal data, including your exact location data, driving sensor data" as well as unique identifiers that can be used to target advertising.
His former employer, the company Cuebiq, would not have been able to carry out their marketing campaigns without the data from Life360, said an ex-employee of the company "The Markup".
Just like CEO Chris Hulls says, selling data has become a second pillar for his company.
According to financial data from Life360, this division had sales of $ 16 million in 2020, which is 20 percent of total sales.
Money that Life360 needs, among other things, for the takeover of Tile, a company specializing in hardware trackers.
The deal cost Hulls $ 205 million.
Hulls promises that he does not want to sell the data recorded by the tile trackers, which are comparable to Apple's Airtags.
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