Life360 becomes already years recommended as one of the best apps for sharing your location with friends or family. Recently, Life360 announced the acquisition of Tile on, a popular gadget for finding lost items. The Life360 app has 33 million users, who share their precise GPS location live with whomever they want via the app. And with numerous data traders, research by The Markup.
Two former Life360 employees state that the app is even considered one of the largest sources of information in the user data market. The employees point to a lack of measures to prevent misuse of the data. Life360 would not take any measures to ensure that location data cannot be traced back to individual users.
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Topman: ‘This way the app remains free’
The most obvious data would be removed from the location data, but the data would not be merged or made less precise. And so it is quite simple to find out which location data belongs to which person, especially by data traders who can also combine the data with other data.
Life360 CEO Chris Hulls told The Markup that selling data is “an important part of the business model” that allows the popular app to be offered for free. “We can neither confirm nor deny whether Life360 is one of the largest sources of data in the industry,” he said.
An engineer from X-Mode, a major location data merchant, says Life360’s data is among the “most valuable offers” his company has received due to the “huge volume and precision of the data.” Life360 is said to have sold its data to companies such as X-Mode, Cuebiq, Arity and Safegraph.
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Small print is fair
Location data merchants resell the data to other customers: everything from mobile games to science apps. Some of those companies bundle the location data, so that individual users can no longer be traced. For example, the company Cuebiq worked on an app for mapping the corona spread in collaboration with the CDC, the American equivalent of the RIVM.
Life360 does state in its fine print that location data is sold, but many people will not be aware that that data is sold on to data traders. By default, data sharing is enabled. Users can manually disable sharing, but must take a number of steps to do so.
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Turn off sharing
To disable sharing, users must navigate to ‘Privacy & Security’ in the settings of Life360, which contains the button ‘Do Not Sell My Personal Information’ and after pressing it a slider will appear. If users disable the ‘Personal Information Sales’ button, their location data will no longer be sold to data merchants.
Data trading important source of income
Tracking location and user activity has been one of the main ways free apps and services make money for years. For example, the apps of Facebook parent company Meta follow what customers do in other apps and on the internet. In this way they get to know the user better and they can advertise in a more targeted way. Apple is now giving users the possibility to stop that secret following. Facebook and Instagram responded to that move with a message to users: “apps are not free without your data‘.
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