Life360 sells your location data
LIFE360 CLAIMS TO BE the world’s leading family safety service. Essentially, it uses your smartphone’s GPS to track your movements and sends alerts under specified conditions to designated people. Naturally, this creates a lot of location data, which is quite an asset. Two former employees have revealed that Life360 has been selling it to leading data brokers for years. It transpires that Life360 is one of the largest providers of location data in the country, part of a $12bn phone tracking business.
The privacy policy on the Life360 website says it may share collected data with partners for “tailored advertising, attribution, analytics, research, and other purposes”. You can opt out, but by default, it is on. Founder and CEO of Life360, Chris Hulls, said that “we see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for users”. The truth is that if you don’t pay in dollars, you pay in something else, that’s why social media is free. Selling the collected data brought Life360 $16-22 million in 2020. Thankfully, your location data is not connected to your identity, although one data point is your home. However, once the data is with a broker, it is available to almost anybody willing to pay for it.
When you give a company data, you have no control over who gets it or what use they make of it. Companies are not even obliged to tell you who buys it, and you usually have to take active steps to keep it private. We shouldn’t be surprised that even a company whose stated aim is safety resorts to selling your data. Only legislation can curb these practices, which would be a huge step and a mammoth job to remove. We may not like it, but we may be stuck with it.