Life360 is getting out of the enterprise of promoting exact consumer location knowledge

Life360, a security and monitoring service that helps its customers to maintain tabs on the whereabouts of household and pals who additionally use the app, is scaling again its consumer knowledge gross sales enterprise to only two companions: Allstate Arity and Placer.ai (via The Markup). This information comes after the corporate introduced a deal to amass the merchandise tracker Tile in November and a December report from The Markup mentioned Life360 was the supply of exact location knowledge to as many as a dozen knowledge brokers. That report cited sources throughout the trade who referred to as Life360 one of many largest sources of knowledge.

At the time, CEO Chris Hulls pushed again on that assertion, saying that “with approximately 30 million active users, we account for a very small portion of the overall market,” whereas acknowledging that its knowledge gross sales introduced in about $16 million in 2020. The Markup reported that represented about 20 p.c of its total income for the 12 months, even earlier than together with $6 million created from its partnership with Allstate Arity. For 2021, the corporate reported 42 p.c income development year-on-year, which included the earlier knowledge assortment enterprise contracts.

Life360 has a brand new knowledge assortment take care of Placer.ai, which the corporate says is the beginning of its exit from the “traditional” knowledge dealer enterprise, which is able to solely embody “aggregated analytics” that it says will assist retail companies perceive prospects higher. From Life360’s quarterly activity report launched yesterday:

With this settlement, Placer.ai will present important knowledge insights and analytics providers to Life360, which is able to improve the product expertise for our customers. As a part of this partnership, Placer can have the appropriate to commercialise solely aggregated knowledge associated to locations visits through the time period of the settlement. We have begun terminating {our relationships} with all different location knowledge companions except Allstate/Arity, which is able to proceed.

Life360 recognises that aggregated knowledge analytics (for instance, 150 folks drove by the grocery store) is the wave of the long run and that companies will more and more place a premium on knowledge insights that don’t depend on device-level or different particular person user-level identifiers. As a end result, we consider this partnership will allow us to spend much less time navigating the quickly evolving regulatory and platform atmosphere, whereas concurrently decreasing enterprise danger.

This settlement features a minimal income assure primarily based on the scale of Life360’s lively consumer base, which we count on will protect income in-line with CY21 outcomes at some stage in the three-year settlement. Life360 can even be receiving a ten 12 months warrant exercisable to buy as much as US$25m in Placer.ai, which lately accomplished a US$100m capital elevate. The settlement additionally expressly excludes

Tile and Jiobit system knowledge to underscore our clear message that knowledge from Tile and Jiobit units isn’t, and can by no means be, bought or monetised.”

We requested Life360 CEO Chris Hulls in December what his firm would do if its (quickly to be ex-) companions, like X-mode or Cuebiq, did promote identifiable knowledge to the federal government — and Hulls responded saying companions could be sued for breaching their contract.

Allstate Arity is the second of the 2 exceptions in Life360’s scaling again of location monitoring. Functionally, Allstate would want to know the way quick the system in a automotive is touring, calculate the G-forces of an accident, and finally sign again the placement of the crash to authorities for the security options to work. How it’s going to use the journey data for knowledge insights aside from driver security stays to be seen.

User participation in sharing their aggregated knowledge to Placer.ai is elective, nevertheless, it’s going to stay as an opt-out motion within the app’s settings.