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"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 d

"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.

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.