Life360 Reportedly Sells Location Data of Families and Kids

Life360, a preferred monitoring app that bills itself as “the world’s leading family safety service,” is purportedly promoting location information on the 31 million households and youngsters that use it to information brokers. The chilling revelation could make customers of the Tile Bluetooth tracker, which is being purchased by Life360, suppose twice earlier than persevering with to make use of the gadget.

Life360’s information promoting practices had been revealed in a damning report revealed by the Markup on Monday. The report claims that Life360 sells location information on its customers to roughly a dozen information brokers, a few of which have bought information to U.S. authorities contractors. The information brokers then proceed to promote the placement information to “virtually anyone who wants to buy it.” Life360 is purportedly one of many largest sources of knowledge for the trade, the outlet discovered.

While promoting location information on households and youngsters is already alarming, what’s much more horrifying is that Life360 is purportedly failing to take steps to guard the privateness of the info it sells. This might doubtlessly permit the placement information, which the corporate says is anonymized, to be linked again to the individuals it belongs to.

It’s essential to notice that Life360 does disclose in its privateness coverage that it sells the info it obtains from customers. However, they could not know that their information can find yourself within the palms of anybody who desires to purchase it, or that their id might be revealed. Life360 maintains that its contracts forbid its information dealer clients from re-identifying customers.

The Markup based mostly its report on interviews with former staff of Life360 and former staff of the info brokers that purportedly purchase information from the corporate, all of whom had been supplied anonymity.

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Chris Hulls, Life360’s CEO, advised the Markup that the corporate couldn’t “confirm or deny” the accuracy that it was one of many largest sources of knowledge for the trade. He additionally mentioned promoting location information allowed it to supply free providers. These include location sharing, location ETAs, household driving stories, two days of location historical past, and battery monitoring, amongst others.

“We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives,” Hulls said.

Life360 told Gizmodo on Monday that it was preparing a response to the Markup’s report. It claimed that the outlet’s report was full of misinformation and inaccuracies that it was taking further action on. In addition, Life360 affirmed that only a small part of the information it provided the outlet had been included in the report and that the quotes published weren’t accurate and had been taken out of context.

Nonetheless, selling location data on families and kids has proven to be an important financial lifeline for Life360, according to the Markup. The outlet reported that Life360 has struggled to make a profit and reported a loss of $16.3 million last year.

Case in point: Life360 obtained $693,000 from selling location data in 2016, but that amount seems paltry now. In 2020, the company made $16 million from selling location data, or 20% of its revenue, the Markup found. On top of that, it also earned $6 million from a partnership with the Arity, a mobility data and analytics company founded by Allstate, that year.

As far as Tile goes, Hulls, Life360’s CEO, told the Markup that the company has no plans to sell location data from Tile devices.

You can take a look at the Markup’s report in full here.