10 ms·

Popular Family Safety App Life360 Selling Precise Location Data on Its Users

mahrain 5y ago
"On Nov. 22, Life360 also announced plans to buy Tile, a tracking device company that helps find lost items. Hulls said the company doesn’t have plans to sell data from Tile devices." I thought this sounded familiar. Combined with the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, for IoT devices you should therefore not only consider the current owner and its policies, but also future ownership? This will make it even harder for me to buy anything from an IoT startup.
- derwiki 5y ago
  I’d argue that’s the same for any service. Privacy policy is ok now, wait for the company to be acquired, new company doesn’t have to adhere to old privacy policy.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  It certainly makes open standard, open source home iot more of a priority. (Or in my case no home iot).
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    I found the sweet spot for IoT to be whether or not my phone's MAC is connected to my router. It's enough to trigger meaningful automations without killing battery life or sending sensitive data all the time.
    - tragictrash 5y ago
      Please elaborate, I'm intrigued
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        I run HomeAssistant as the brains of my IoT. It connects to my Mikrotik router via api and treats every connected device as a presence sensor (this is mostly automatic aside from initial setup). From there you just treat the presence sensor like any other sensor in your automations.
    - jetbooster 5y ago
      I had issues with that since my phone's Wifi chip seems to have powersaving in it also, which means if my phone is screen-off in my pocket, it's not necessarily 'connected' to my router as far as the router is concerned. It effectively reconnects sporadically to grab push notifications or when I turn on the screen, but otherwise is mostly sleeping. I wasn't able to come up with a presence detection system more reliable than the one HomeAssistant uses, which is "is $my_phone inside $gps_fence"
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        What kind of granularity do you need? When I had that running I set the timeout to an hour which seemed to be enough to cover those disconnection periods. Of course, it meant that it takes an hour for Home Assistant to actually notice that my phone is gone but that was OK for my use-case.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > Combined with the acquisition of ... you should therefore not only consider the current owner and its policies, but also future ownership? That's been an unfortunate fact for a lot of things. Your loans, your bank accounts, your email accounts, your phones, your car... It's very depressing to think that you can purchase something with one set of terms. Then the company can fold and you are unilaterally forced into a different set of terms, or else the Service is denied and your purchase is rendered to be a literal waste of money.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Think about this for just half a second though -- What would be the value in buying location data on someone's Tile? Phone location data is valuable because it tells you where a human being with a wallet is. If someone attaches a Tile to something (say their backpack), what's the use in buying that location data? Are you going to try to show location based ads to someone's backpack that they accidentally left in the library?
  - stevehawk 5y ago
    well. if you know where the tile is for my car keys, my backpack, my wife's purse, whatever, but my phone is turned off.. then you probably still know where I am.
  - SiVal 5y ago
    After a half second of thought: A backpack is usually with a human with a wallet. So is a phone, but the phone may not be reporting its location, or at least not reporting it to you, so the Tile is an alternative way to get the person's location.
  - sailfast 5y ago
    The Tile app is also installed on your devices. The tiles ping back to those devices. There's probably some play or other in that data.
  - gmm1990 5y ago
    No but if a backpack gets close to the phone it would be an indication a person is about to leave. Could show a <insert coffee shop here> add. Not sure if it’s actually valuable but more info than phone moving around the house.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    99% of the time it tells you where the tile's owner is. "But couldn't you just get that data from their phone already?" No, because the Tile is the reason those people have the phone app installed and give it location data permissions. I wouldn't expect that they're selling locations of individual Tile trackers (thought they very well might), the more resellable data that Life360 gets here is access to the locations of all Tile owners.
colinhb 5y ago
This is a couple of years old, but look at the data transfer notifications for Life360, which are required under GDPR: > https://twitter.com/alexbremora/status/1211336821747179527 https://twitter.com/alexbremora/status/1211336821747179527
- egberts1 5y ago
  where is the current list?
  - colinhb 5y ago
    Easiest way to discover would probably be going through the signup flow in the EU
  - bennyp101 5y ago
    According to the current privacy policy[1] they are Cubiq[2] and Cubiq's trusted partners[3], and then if you are in the UK/EEA then they have (interestingly) images that list who they share with right at the bottom - not searchable text ... [1] https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 [2] https://www.cuebiq.com/privacypolicy/ https://www.cuebiq.com/privacypolicy/ [3] https://www.cuebiq.com/trusted-partners/ https://www.cuebiq.com/trusted-partners/ Edit: https://support.life360.com/hc/article_attachments/1500000496802/Annex_1-2.png https://support.life360.com/hc/article_attachments/150000049... is the one about precise location data
    - colinhb 5y ago
      Applaud you working to track this down! For others following this trail: 1. The linked Life360 privacy policy has two parts, the first part is non-EEA, the second part is EEA: https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 2. Cuebiq is not mentioned in the Part 2/EEA section of the privacy policy. Instead, as parent points out and according to non-searchable Annex 2, "precise location" data may be disclosed to: Arity 875 LLC, Foursquare Labs UK Limited, Google Inc., Placer Labs Inc., AvantGuard Monitoring Centers LLC, OnCall International LLC, Sontiq Inc. I have decoded many privacy policies in my life, but unfortunately don't have time to work on this one. :D
devy 5y ago
And Tile just sold themselves to Life360... https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/life360-to-acquire-tile-creating-the-world-leader-in-finding-and-location-solutions-301430364.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/life360-to-acquire-...
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  Whelp, time to get rid of my Tiles. Shame, I was just about to refresh. Anyone have a recommendation for something else? I only need BLE, don't need crowdsourced finding, but I really want a slim form factor for my wallet and a more rugged form factor for my keys. I'm in the Android ecosystem (GrapheneOS).
  - antoniuschan99 5y ago
    Are you able to use the Samsungs? I know of Chipolo and I've used Trackr (looks like they stopped updating their product). But not sure if they sell your data.
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    If you want a better guarantee of privacy, there's not much of a choice right now but to go with Apple.
barbazoo 5y ago
I'm not sure what Life360 does but if it's primarily family tracking, I recommend using a private HomeAssistant instance which has the same functionality plus lets you do all kinds of automation based on people's location.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  I just looked into that, and it seems it can tell if someone is at the house or not, but nothing beyond that? My family doesn't use Life360 just to know if someone is at each home or not. They also use it to see if they're on the way home, or stuck somewhere, or if we've left our phone somewhere.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    You can see exact location too via the map card: https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/ https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/
    - wccrawford 5y ago
      I don't see anything there that shows the location for the user is exact, or that it can be shown away from the home. I see exact locations for events near the home, but not the user itself.
      - barbazoo 5y ago
        It's as shown in the screenshot [0], you get a map with your "Home" and devices' location. [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/ https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/
Syonyk 5y ago
Of course they are. Everyone is double dipping anymore. Pay for the app, but you're really the product being sold. Any app that can get location access is probably doing something you don't like with it. Your "Smart TV" is hoovering up as much as it can to send upstream (including using content recognition algorithms on the DVD and game console inputs), your "connected car" is almost certainly doing the same thing, your OSes are probably doing it... the whole of the modern tech industry is rotten, and nowhere is this more clear than the cell phone data mining industry. There's big money in this sort of backend data analytics... deception? deceit? Whatever you want to call it. > He did confirm that X-Mode buys data from Life360 and that it is one of “approximately one dozen data partners.” Hulls added that the company would be supportive of legislation that would require public disclosure of such partners. You don't "accidentally" end up with a dozen data partners unless your goal is data collection and sale. I'll offer a guiding principle that's been serving me well: If you can imagine how the data is being abused, it certainly is. If you can't come up with a possible way for some bit of data to be abused... someone else is more creative than you and has found a way to monetize it.
- ljm 5y ago
  Would not surprise me if there were people in these businesses who thought, "why would we leave FREE money on the table?" A promotion or two later after palming off their customer's data to whoever had the cash handy, they're off to do the same at another business. I think they're called MBAs but I don't think it's unique to that style of professional.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I think they are called everyone.
- baylessj 5y ago
  I'm disappointed in myself for being surprised by this article, you're exactly right about this being the norm for similar software. I've found Life360 to be a helpful free tool in many regards but as is so often the case, if you aren't paying for the product then you are the product.
xyzzy21 5y ago
The only "safe" option is: 1. Absolutely minimize your internet exposure in ALL ways - avoid using internet-enabled tools AS A DEFAULT 2. Take personal responsibility for your and your family's security by non-internet means. In some cases that means less "convenience". And some cases absolutely include 2A means. The government is under ZERO responsibility to do jack for you when it comes to crimes and safety!
m-p-3 5y ago
I was thinking of buying some Tile to put on my keychain, laptop bag, etc but now that it belongs to Life360 I scratched that off my list..
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Who would buy location data about your Tile? What would be the point in buying that data?
  - notRobot 5y ago
    Your tile location is also often your location
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      But unlike a phone's location data, the point of a Tile is that it won't be the location of you.
      - notRobot 5y ago
        But it would, at minimum, be the location of someplace you've probably been?
      - Terretta 5y ago
        You know anyone using Tile who doesn’t put a Tile on their keys? But more to the point, the Tile app makes a strong case to turn on, and leave on, location data. Easy to convince users, since they want to locate things.
  - nerdawson 5y ago
    I'd guess you could use assigned names and location patterns to get a decent sense of what the tile is attached to. If it's on someone's keyring for example it's probably outside as much as their phone is. Then if the user has denied location tracking on their phone it becomes available through another route.
  - 5y ago
ralmidani 5y ago
I think (hope) there’s an open niche for companies which contractually bind themselves to not sell your data. I’ve switched to Neeva for search and mobile browsing, but for now I just have to take them at their word. Same with Apple.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  If these companies had nothing to hide, I'd bet they'd be a bit more transparent. It's your trust though, I won't tell you which horses to bet on.
- Accujack 5y ago
  There's a major "open niche" for up to date privacy legislation in the US. The privacy laws of the United States have never really been updated for the computer age. It's still safer to write a letter on paper and mail it than to send an e-mail, because the paper letter is protected by law. The generation that's been in power since the 1980s and before has never chosen to protect citizens' privacy the way it was protected when they were growing up, because there's a profit in it for them and their supporters now. Even creating a law like the GDPR on a national level in the US would be an improvement.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Bhilai 5y ago
I have seen my friends use Life360 to track their kids and I was honestly surprised that they trust this company with real time location permissions. But I also understand the need for parents to keep a tab on their kids. So I ask this crowd are there any non-shady companies in this business? What methods are parents of HN using for tracking their kids? I realize people might have opinions on privacy of their kids and you are free to not "track" your kids but for some safety and assurance is also a big deal.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Ask them where they are and randomly verify every now and again by either showing up yourself or calling someone else you trust who is where they say they are. You and I weren't subject to epidemics of child kidnapping and murder because our parents weren't able to plant beacons on us.
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    This is it! Don’t use Life360, random calls are the best way to check up.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  We put an AirTag in our kid's backpack. That way we know when the bus left the school and when to go to the bus stop. Don't know what we'll do when our kid is more independently mobile...maybe an Apple Watch for real time communication over wifi.
  - dragonsky67 5y ago
    You could give them a phone and ask them to call you when they get to the bus stop. Consequences of not calling you would be them getting board and having to wait for you to arrive.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  > But I also understand the need for parents to keep a tab on their kids. It's weird how quickly this has become normalized. Parent's weren't able to track their kids' location with this level of fidelity until fairly recently. Yet now this isn't just a convenience but a "need" that parents have. This all points to looming acceptance of 24/7 location tracking in society. If you're used to having your every move tracked as a kid, why wouldn't you accept it as something the government "needs" to do when you're an adult? Eventually, everyone who remembers what it was like before you carried a GPS tracking system on you 24/7 is going to die of old age. What will the world look like then? We're building a pretty grim future.
grammarnazzzi 5y ago
So a predator with access to this data, even if anonymized, could use it to discover locations frequented by children. A company that ostentatiously presents its mission as making children safer actually makes money by making children less safe
- djrogers 5y ago
  Ok there - I’m on board with the whole ‘this is scummy’ thing, but you’re really really stretching here. You know what someone can do to ‘discover locations frequented by children’? About a million things. One of which involve paying a bunch of $$ to Life360 and trying to filter the data by age. Like walk around the neighborhood. Look on Facebook/nextdoor (old people complain about congregating kids all the time), follow a kid after school, or just GO TO A SCHOOL (oh my God - the government forces kids into a single location every day of the week, now they’ll be victims!).
  - grammarnazzzi 5y ago
    > but you’re really really stretching here. I certainly hope that's the case > One of which involve paying a bunch of $$ to Life360 and trying to filter the data by age. The fact that the data is being made available to larger audience than it needs to fulfil it's stated purpose is a violation of trust. The expectation of the parents is that the data is exposed to minimum of people - employees of Life360. Instead, the data is shared with the employees of potentially hundreds of companies. None of whom need pay anything to Life360. > About a million things. ... Like walk around the neighborhood ... In less time than it takes to search one neighborhood by foot, someone can use big data to search a million neighborhoods. And thereafter rerun that search day after day, week after week, year after year. With no effort. There's a reason so many companies are tracking everything, and so many companies are paying for that tracking data: it's powerful.
Klonoar 5y ago
Fun fact: they also bought Couple (later known as Pair) - an app from a decade or so ago - and then never revealed what they did with the data that users uploaded to it. It’s murky who has it now but it’s always been odd to me that there’s little awareness there as the app was quite popular for a bit.
diebeforei485 5y ago
Of course they are. Only naive people would have thought otherwise. This is why I am inherently suspicious of all "parental control" apps. The entire category is filled with these shenanigans. I suppose I trust Apple's inbuilt Find My Friends feature. Weather apps were full of this, too. I gladly paid for Dark Sky because they didn't do this.
randomstring 5y ago
This is very disappointing. I would love to hear from user crhulls https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crhulls https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crhulls the CEO Life360 (or so claimed, I can't verify). Too bad Hacker News doesn't have a notify on @ mentions. Then again, not being discord is a feature not a bug.
- crhulls 5y ago
  I am probably a little bit late here - would have loved to jump in sooner. This is the most twisted reporting that has ever happened to us. We participated in good faith and they cherry picked individual phrases from our written answers and omitted including the ones that hurt their narrative. I literally gave them a list of suggestions on how the industry could be better regulated for all involved and they didn't even mention that. I do acknowledge we have a data platform. They made it sound like we have no safeguards and anyone can buy data which is patently false. I also pointed them to this blog post which we sent out to 100% of our email list which is highly transparent. We are one of the few companies to have a privacy center which outlines everything we do in plain english with no legalese. I'm very sad and disappointed. And an @ notify feature could have helped but as you say this is not Discord https://www.life360.com/blog/understanding-how-life360-uses-and-protects-your-data https://www.life360.com/blog/understanding-how-life360-uses-...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - grammarnazzzi 5y ago
    You're literally trying to portray Life360 as the victim. If Life360's mission is to keep children safe, exposing their location data simply cannot be part of that. These two activities cannot coexist without undue risk. No parent is ever going to be okay with sharing thier kids location with countless 3rd parties. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous. > This is the most twisted reporting that has ever happened to us. You're being obtuse and confusing "twisted reporting" with reporting a twisted business.
bubblebubabub 5y ago
This is where Apple shows itself as a leader in privacy, as their location data is encrypted from what I understand, at least after iOS 15. This protects you from rogue employees, at least this is what is claimed. At Life360 it would be very easy for many employees to creep on someones location history. My understanding is there isn't really much auditing in the way of this functionality, and that customer support can easily go through your location history with zero to minimal auditing. They use an 'impersonate' feature to log into your profile on a web-app when supporting customers typically, which would make it easy for a bad actor to track you. Or they could just buy the data straight from the broker.
fatboy93 5y ago
My recent gripe is a ach and every app seemingly wants to have location access, and just bluntly refuses to function without it. My insurance providers app is really on the nose for it though! They want to monitor my movements to suggest a better fitness regimen. It really is a terrible state of affairs, that you can't really survive these days without a smartphone, but you also get exploited a bunch. For eg, in India, they made covid vaccine registrations via their app and more or less you couldn't get the vaccine by walking-in. Given the abysmal existence of personal space and privacy in India, I'm not sure when my data has been breached.
msla 5y ago
Some interesting information: https://web.archive.org/web/20201201220754/https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d22i83/i_am_life360s_misunderstood_cofounder_and_ceo_ama/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201201220754/https://www.reddi... https://web.archive.org/web/20191225060351/https://www.reddit.com/r/Advice/comments/chysom/im_a_gay_college_student_and_my_family_is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191225060351/https://www.reddi... https://web.archive.org/web/20210609133523/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/dont-leave-campus-parents-are-now-using-tracking-apps-watch-their-kids-college/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210609133523/https://www.washi...

"On Nov. 22, Life360 also announced plans to buy Tile, a tracking device company that helps find lost items. Hulls said the company doesn’t have plans to sell data from Tile devices." I thought this sounded familiar. Combined with the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, for IoT devices you should therefore not only consider the current owner and its policies, but also future ownership? This will make it even harder for me to buy anything from an IoT startup.

derwiki 5y ago
I’d argue that’s the same for any service. Privacy policy is ok now, wait for the company to be acquired, new company doesn’t have to adhere to old privacy policy.
dv_dt 5y ago
It certainly makes open standard, open source home iot more of a priority. (Or in my case no home iot).
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I found the sweet spot for IoT to be whether or not my phone's MAC is connected to my router. It's enough to trigger meaningful automations without killing battery life or sending sensitive data all the time.
  - tragictrash 5y ago
    Please elaborate, I'm intrigued
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      I run HomeAssistant as the brains of my IoT. It connects to my Mikrotik router via api and treats every connected device as a presence sensor (this is mostly automatic aside from initial setup). From there you just treat the presence sensor like any other sensor in your automations.
  - jetbooster 5y ago
    I had issues with that since my phone's Wifi chip seems to have powersaving in it also, which means if my phone is screen-off in my pocket, it's not necessarily 'connected' to my router as far as the router is concerned. It effectively reconnects sporadically to grab push notifications or when I turn on the screen, but otherwise is mostly sleeping. I wasn't able to come up with a presence detection system more reliable than the one HomeAssistant uses, which is "is $my_phone inside $gps_fence"
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      What kind of granularity do you need? When I had that running I set the timeout to an hour which seemed to be enough to cover those disconnection periods. Of course, it meant that it takes an hour for Home Assistant to actually notice that my phone is gone but that was OK for my use-case.
inetknght 5y ago
> Combined with the acquisition of ... you should therefore not only consider the current owner and its policies, but also future ownership? That's been an unfortunate fact for a lot of things. Your loans, your bank accounts, your email accounts, your phones, your car... It's very depressing to think that you can purchase something with one set of terms. Then the company can fold and you are unilaterally forced into a different set of terms, or else the Service is denied and your purchase is rendered to be a literal waste of money.
missedthecue 5y ago
Think about this for just half a second though -- What would be the value in buying location data on someone's Tile? Phone location data is valuable because it tells you where a human being with a wallet is. If someone attaches a Tile to something (say their backpack), what's the use in buying that location data? Are you going to try to show location based ads to someone's backpack that they accidentally left in the library?
- stevehawk 5y ago
  well. if you know where the tile is for my car keys, my backpack, my wife's purse, whatever, but my phone is turned off.. then you probably still know where I am.
- SiVal 5y ago
  After a half second of thought: A backpack is usually with a human with a wallet. So is a phone, but the phone may not be reporting its location, or at least not reporting it to you, so the Tile is an alternative way to get the person's location.
- sailfast 5y ago
  The Tile app is also installed on your devices. The tiles ping back to those devices. There's probably some play or other in that data.
- gmm1990 5y ago
  No but if a backpack gets close to the phone it would be an indication a person is about to leave. Could show a <insert coffee shop here> add. Not sure if it’s actually valuable but more info than phone moving around the house.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  99% of the time it tells you where the tile's owner is. "But couldn't you just get that data from their phone already?" No, because the Tile is the reason those people have the phone app installed and give it location data permissions. I wouldn't expect that they're selling locations of individual Tile trackers (thought they very well might), the more resellable data that Life360 gets here is access to the locations of all Tile owners.

colinhb 5y ago

This is a couple of years old, but look at the data transfer notifications for Life360, which are required under GDPR: > https://twitter.com/alexbremora/status/1211336821747179527 https://twitter.com/alexbremora/status/1211336821747179527

egberts1 5y ago
where is the current list?
- colinhb 5y ago
  Easiest way to discover would probably be going through the signup flow in the EU
- bennyp101 5y ago
  According to the current privacy policy[1] they are Cubiq[2] and Cubiq's trusted partners[3], and then if you are in the UK/EEA then they have (interestingly) images that list who they share with right at the bottom - not searchable text ... [1] https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 [2] https://www.cuebiq.com/privacypolicy/ https://www.cuebiq.com/privacypolicy/ [3] https://www.cuebiq.com/trusted-partners/ https://www.cuebiq.com/trusted-partners/ Edit: https://support.life360.com/hc/article_attachments/1500000496802/Annex_1-2.png https://support.life360.com/hc/article_attachments/150000049... is the one about precise location data
  - colinhb 5y ago
    Applaud you working to track this down! For others following this trail: 1. The linked Life360 privacy policy has two parts, the first part is non-EEA, the second part is EEA: https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 https://support.life360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043228154 2. Cuebiq is not mentioned in the Part 2/EEA section of the privacy policy. Instead, as parent points out and according to non-searchable Annex 2, "precise location" data may be disclosed to: Arity 875 LLC, Foursquare Labs UK Limited, Google Inc., Placer Labs Inc., AvantGuard Monitoring Centers LLC, OnCall International LLC, Sontiq Inc. I have decoded many privacy policies in my life, but unfortunately don't have time to work on this one. :D

devy 5y ago

And Tile just sold themselves to Life360... https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/life360-to-acquire-tile-creating-the-world-leader-in-finding-and-location-solutions-301430364.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/life360-to-acquire-...

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Whelp, time to get rid of my Tiles. Shame, I was just about to refresh. Anyone have a recommendation for something else? I only need BLE, don't need crowdsourced finding, but I really want a slim form factor for my wallet and a more rugged form factor for my keys. I'm in the Android ecosystem (GrapheneOS).
- antoniuschan99 5y ago
  Are you able to use the Samsungs? I know of Chipolo and I've used Trackr (looks like they stopped updating their product). But not sure if they sell your data.
- chaostheory 5y ago
  If you want a better guarantee of privacy, there's not much of a choice right now but to go with Apple.

barbazoo 5y ago

I'm not sure what Life360 does but if it's primarily family tracking, I recommend using a private HomeAssistant instance which has the same functionality plus lets you do all kinds of automation based on people's location.

wccrawford 5y ago
I just looked into that, and it seems it can tell if someone is at the house or not, but nothing beyond that? My family doesn't use Life360 just to know if someone is at each home or not. They also use it to see if they're on the way home, or stuck somewhere, or if we've left our phone somewhere.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  You can see exact location too via the map card: https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/ https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    I don't see anything there that shows the location for the user is exact, or that it can be shown away from the home. I see exact locations for events near the home, but not the user itself.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      It's as shown in the screenshot [0], you get a map with your "Home" and devices' location. [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/ https://www.home-assistant.io/lovelace/map/

Syonyk 5y ago

Of course they are. Everyone is double dipping anymore. Pay for the app, but you're really the product being sold. Any app that can get location access is probably doing something you don't like with it. Your "Smart TV" is hoovering up as much as it can to send upstream (including using content recognition algorithms on the DVD and game console inputs), your "connected car" is almost certainly doing the same thing, your OSes are probably doing it... the whole of the modern tech industry is rotten, and nowhere is this more clear than the cell phone data mining industry. There's big money in this sort of backend data analytics... deception? deceit? Whatever you want to call it. > He did confirm that X-Mode buys data from Life360 and that it is one of “approximately one dozen data partners.” Hulls added that the company would be supportive of legislation that would require public disclosure of such partners. You don't "accidentally" end up with a dozen data partners unless your goal is data collection and sale. I'll offer a guiding principle that's been serving me well: If you can imagine how the data is being abused, it certainly is. If you can't come up with a possible way for some bit of data to be abused... someone else is more creative than you and has found a way to monetize it.

ljm 5y ago
Would not surprise me if there were people in these businesses who thought, "why would we leave FREE money on the table?" A promotion or two later after palming off their customer's data to whoever had the cash handy, they're off to do the same at another business. I think they're called MBAs but I don't think it's unique to that style of professional.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I think they are called everyone.
baylessj 5y ago
I'm disappointed in myself for being surprised by this article, you're exactly right about this being the norm for similar software. I've found Life360 to be a helpful free tool in many regards but as is so often the case, if you aren't paying for the product then you are the product.

xyzzy21 5y ago

The only "safe" option is: 1. Absolutely minimize your internet exposure in ALL ways - avoid using internet-enabled tools AS A DEFAULT 2. Take personal responsibility for your and your family's security by non-internet means. In some cases that means less "convenience". And some cases absolutely include 2A means. The government is under ZERO responsibility to do jack for you when it comes to crimes and safety!

m-p-3 5y ago

I was thinking of buying some Tile to put on my keychain, laptop bag, etc but now that it belongs to Life360 I scratched that off my list..

missedthecue 5y ago
Who would buy location data about your Tile? What would be the point in buying that data?
- notRobot 5y ago
  Your tile location is also often your location
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    But unlike a phone's location data, the point of a Tile is that it won't be the location of you.
    - notRobot 5y ago
      But it would, at minimum, be the location of someplace you've probably been?
    - Terretta 5y ago
      You know anyone using Tile who doesn’t put a Tile on their keys? But more to the point, the Tile app makes a strong case to turn on, and leave on, location data. Easy to convince users, since they want to locate things.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  I'd guess you could use assigned names and location patterns to get a decent sense of what the tile is attached to. If it's on someone's keyring for example it's probably outside as much as their phone is. Then if the user has denied location tracking on their phone it becomes available through another route.
- 5y ago

ralmidani 5y ago

I think (hope) there’s an open niche for companies which contractually bind themselves to not sell your data. I’ve switched to Neeva for search and mobile browsing, but for now I just have to take them at their word. Same with Apple.

smoldesu 5y ago
If these companies had nothing to hide, I'd bet they'd be a bit more transparent. It's your trust though, I won't tell you which horses to bet on.
Accujack 5y ago
There's a major "open niche" for up to date privacy legislation in the US. The privacy laws of the United States have never really been updated for the computer age. It's still safer to write a letter on paper and mail it than to send an e-mail, because the paper letter is protected by law. The generation that's been in power since the 1980s and before has never chosen to protect citizens' privacy the way it was protected when they were growing up, because there's a profit in it for them and their supporters now. Even creating a law like the GDPR on a national level in the US would be an improvement.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Bhilai 5y ago

I have seen my friends use Life360 to track their kids and I was honestly surprised that they trust this company with real time location permissions. But I also understand the need for parents to keep a tab on their kids. So I ask this crowd are there any non-shady companies in this business? What methods are parents of HN using for tracking their kids? I realize people might have opinions on privacy of their kids and you are free to not "track" your kids but for some safety and assurance is also a big deal.

nonameiguess 5y ago
Ask them where they are and randomly verify every now and again by either showing up yourself or calling someone else you trust who is where they say they are. You and I weren't subject to epidemics of child kidnapping and murder because our parents weren't able to plant beacons on us.
- sergiomattei 5y ago
  This is it! Don’t use Life360, random calls are the best way to check up.
gnicholas 5y ago
We put an AirTag in our kid's backpack. That way we know when the bus left the school and when to go to the bus stop. Don't know what we'll do when our kid is more independently mobile...maybe an Apple Watch for real time communication over wifi.
- dragonsky67 5y ago
  You could give them a phone and ask them to call you when they get to the bus stop. Consequences of not calling you would be them getting board and having to wait for you to arrive.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> But I also understand the need for parents to keep a tab on their kids. It's weird how quickly this has become normalized. Parent's weren't able to track their kids' location with this level of fidelity until fairly recently. Yet now this isn't just a convenience but a "need" that parents have. This all points to looming acceptance of 24/7 location tracking in society. If you're used to having your every move tracked as a kid, why wouldn't you accept it as something the government "needs" to do when you're an adult? Eventually, everyone who remembers what it was like before you carried a GPS tracking system on you 24/7 is going to die of old age. What will the world look like then? We're building a pretty grim future.

grammarnazzzi 5y ago

So a predator with access to this data, even if anonymized, could use it to discover locations frequented by children. A company that ostentatiously presents its mission as making children safer actually makes money by making children less safe

djrogers 5y ago
Ok there - I’m on board with the whole ‘this is scummy’ thing, but you’re really really stretching here. You know what someone can do to ‘discover locations frequented by children’? About a million things. One of which involve paying a bunch of $$ to Life360 and trying to filter the data by age. Like walk around the neighborhood. Look on Facebook/nextdoor (old people complain about congregating kids all the time), follow a kid after school, or just GO TO A SCHOOL (oh my God - the government forces kids into a single location every day of the week, now they’ll be victims!).
- grammarnazzzi 5y ago
  > but you’re really really stretching here. I certainly hope that's the case > One of which involve paying a bunch of $$ to Life360 and trying to filter the data by age. The fact that the data is being made available to larger audience than it needs to fulfil it's stated purpose is a violation of trust. The expectation of the parents is that the data is exposed to minimum of people - employees of Life360. Instead, the data is shared with the employees of potentially hundreds of companies. None of whom need pay anything to Life360. > About a million things. ... Like walk around the neighborhood ... In less time than it takes to search one neighborhood by foot, someone can use big data to search a million neighborhoods. And thereafter rerun that search day after day, week after week, year after year. With no effort. There's a reason so many companies are tracking everything, and so many companies are paying for that tracking data: it's powerful.

Klonoar 5y ago

Fun fact: they also bought Couple (later known as Pair) - an app from a decade or so ago - and then never revealed what they did with the data that users uploaded to it. It’s murky who has it now but it’s always been odd to me that there’s little awareness there as the app was quite popular for a bit.

diebeforei485 5y ago

Of course they are. Only naive people would have thought otherwise. This is why I am inherently suspicious of all "parental control" apps. The entire category is filled with these shenanigans. I suppose I trust Apple's inbuilt Find My Friends feature. Weather apps were full of this, too. I gladly paid for Dark Sky because they didn't do this.

randomstring 5y ago

This is very disappointing. I would love to hear from user crhulls https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crhulls https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crhulls the CEO Life360 (or so claimed, I can't verify). Too bad Hacker News doesn't have a notify on @ mentions. Then again, not being discord is a feature not a bug.

crhulls 5y ago
I am probably a little bit late here - would have loved to jump in sooner. This is the most twisted reporting that has ever happened to us. We participated in good faith and they cherry picked individual phrases from our written answers and omitted including the ones that hurt their narrative. I literally gave them a list of suggestions on how the industry could be better regulated for all involved and they didn't even mention that. I do acknowledge we have a data platform. They made it sound like we have no safeguards and anyone can buy data which is patently false. I also pointed them to this blog post which we sent out to 100% of our email list which is highly transparent. We are one of the few companies to have a privacy center which outlines everything we do in plain english with no legalese. I'm very sad and disappointed. And an @ notify feature could have helped but as you say this is not Discord https://www.life360.com/blog/understanding-how-life360-uses-and-protects-your-data https://www.life360.com/blog/understanding-how-life360-uses-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- grammarnazzzi 5y ago
  You're literally trying to portray Life360 as the victim. If Life360's mission is to keep children safe, exposing their location data simply cannot be part of that. These two activities cannot coexist without undue risk. No parent is ever going to be okay with sharing thier kids location with countless 3rd parties. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous. > This is the most twisted reporting that has ever happened to us. You're being obtuse and confusing "twisted reporting" with reporting a twisted business.

bubblebubabub 5y ago

This is where Apple shows itself as a leader in privacy, as their location data is encrypted from what I understand, at least after iOS 15. This protects you from rogue employees, at least this is what is claimed. At Life360 it would be very easy for many employees to creep on someones location history. My understanding is there isn't really much auditing in the way of this functionality, and that customer support can easily go through your location history with zero to minimal auditing. They use an 'impersonate' feature to log into your profile on a web-app when supporting customers typically, which would make it easy for a bad actor to track you. Or they could just buy the data straight from the broker.

fatboy93 5y ago

My recent gripe is a ach and every app seemingly wants to have location access, and just bluntly refuses to function without it. My insurance providers app is really on the nose for it though! They want to monitor my movements to suggest a better fitness regimen. It really is a terrible state of affairs, that you can't really survive these days without a smartphone, but you also get exploited a bunch. For eg, in India, they made covid vaccine registrations via their app and more or less you couldn't get the vaccine by walking-in. Given the abysmal existence of personal space and privacy in India, I'm not sure when my data has been breached.

msla 5y ago

Some interesting information: https://web.archive.org/web/20201201220754/https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d22i83/i_am_life360s_misunderstood_cofounder_and_ceo_ama/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201201220754/https://www.reddi... https://web.archive.org/web/20191225060351/https://www.reddit.com/r/Advice/comments/chysom/im_a_gay_college_student_and_my_family_is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191225060351/https://www.reddi... https://web.archive.org/web/20210609133523/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/dont-leave-campus-parents-are-now-using-tracking-apps-watch-their-kids-college/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210609133523/https://www.washi...