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Hi All, I'm the cofounder and CEO of Life360, which is the relatively new owner of Tile. Stalking hasn't been much of an issue for us, but we are in the process
by crhulls 5y ago
Hi All, I'm the cofounder and CEO of Life360, which is the relatively new owner of Tile. Stalking hasn't been much of an issue for us, but we are in the process expanding the finding network via our 35 million+ active user base (will require opt-in consent) and we also do offer a location device for kids and pets (Jiobit) that has its own cell connection which is actually meant for finding people in real-time.
We have a number of initiatives in the works to help allay concerns. I would be curious if the community here has any suggestions. I know our very existence is controversial - so please be kind - I'm here to listen.
- latchkey 5y ago> Stalking hasn't been much of an issue for us How would you know?
- crhulls 5y agoWe get I think something on the order of 10,000 customer service tickets a week, and we regularly get subpoenas. We've heard almost every story you can think of. Although we are getting inquiries with this recent press, in terms of actual reports of stalking via our devices it is essentially zero. AirTags has a much broader network than us as of now. Part of why we bought Tile is because we can expand their network. We aren't as big as Apple but we have about 10% of devices so it will get us way up the S curve. So I could see it becoming more of an issue, which is why I'm looking for ideas. One thought would be to rate limit updates - at some frequency you get 90% of the benefit for lost items (since they don't move unless it was lost on say a train) but it dramatically hampers more nefarious use cases. That is just one thought. Or perhaps requiring ID verification and registering each device to a real human.
- chaircher 5y agoWhat do you mean by "actual stalking report"? ID verification is the way to go IMO. So much stalking isn't like in movies, it's just seemingly normal people seeing how far they can push things and get away with it. And potentially some way to get people to register what it's being used for, as well as a way to register it missing. That would be very useful in a stalking case to cross-reference with how a the alledged stalker claims the tracker ended up in someone's bag/car/etc and could potentially be the break through that gets the conviction
- crhulls 5y agoI mean that we do know what it is like when users are stalked with our product - we've heard all sorts of crazy stories over the years about our app being used for stalking - it sucks when we hear it and we help with law enforcement. This just hasn't been a thing for Tile (yet anyway - probably due to the much less dense network). I think we will end up with ID verification - I bet Apple could do that too. Then you'd be risking a felony if you use the product illegally.
- latchkey 5y ago> in terms of actual reports of stalking via our devices it is essentially zero I'm confused, now you're admitting that stalking is an active part of the product and this has gone on for years.
- crhulls 5y agoWe learned early on that people would very very occasionally use our APP for stalking .000001% of the time. That was easy to fix - we send regular push notifications, we let you know when someone is added to your group, we participate in subpoena's from law enforcement etc. We have had over 100 million downloads so we have heard it all, it is just the law of large numbers. I'm talking about Tile devices - that is where we've yet to see anything concrete, and as mentioned we don't yet have a network that rivals AirTags. But we want to get ahead of it.
- chaircher 5y agoHow are you arriving at the .000001% statistic? What is your methodology here?
- chaircher 5y agoID verification will help rule out a lot of casual stalkers but it won't help with the slightly more experienced ones who know how difficult it is to prosecute. "Oh they must have stolen the tracker to frame me!" "I accidentally dropped it in their bag" and similar WILL be a case's undoing in court. If you make people register what the tag is for as part of the verification process, actually have a human check the answer on the other end when they submit their answer that it's specific enough, and periodically make them re-verify this (eg every time they cange the battery, have a pop up "are you still using the tag for xxxxx") means only the most meticulous planner can use it to stalk. At which point the tracker is realistically no more of a vector than the victim's laptop. You can't convince the police or a judge that you dropped the tag in someone's car if you're supposed to be using it on your cat's collar for example.
- hedgehog 5y agoI think your best bet is to fund a study group to do an independent public report on the risks around these products and recommendations for mitigating them. Put domestic abuse survivors, parents, infosec people, lawyers, etc on there. Stakeholders and people good at reasoning about risk. You might not like all of the conclusions but to the extent you adopt them it will give you the most credit for having done the right things.
- latchkey 5y agoThanks for the response. Thinking this through a bit more from a use case perspective: 1. If I was stalked by someone using your product, would I contact your customer support? 2. If I was doing the stalking, would I contact your customer support? Pretty sure the answer would be no in both cases. In 1), I wouldn't necessarily even know it is your product. In 2), what am I going to say to customer support? "I'm trying to stalk my husband and your product isn't working well."? Subpoenas might reveal a percentage of stalking activities, but if the OPs post is true, then I don't even think police would be involved here.
- Klonoar 5y agoI have a slightly unrelated question about Life360. When Life360 sold Couple in 2016, did it sell all the data that users had stored up to that point as well? As best I can tell it was announced via tweet and sold to what looked like a 1-person dev shop. Myself and a number of others who used to use the app have often wondered this[1]. If I’m incorrect on anything in this article I would be happy to edit it, but I’d really like to know. https://rymc.io/blog/2019/decoupling/ https://rymc.io/blog/2019/decoupling/
- crhulls 5y agoWe sold the app in its entirety, which did include data, to a startup run by a former employee. It didn't really get going and the servers are all wound down, so I assume the data is gone into the ether for good (I am 90% confident on this last point - I will confirm).
- Klonoar 5y agoThe confirmation would be greatly appreciated. :) Would you also be comfortable with me linking to this discussion/comment on that post as a 2022 edit? I still get people emailing me asking if anything was ever determined on it.
- crhulls 5y agosure - do you want to send me an email at chris at life360 .com and I'll follow up with you there?
- xeromal 5y agoAnother couple user in the wild. My girl and I used that for SO long! It's sad to see it gone. I stole the cute little dog and beaver emojis before it went offline and incorporated them into whatsapp.
- dstaley 5y agoHello, Tile owner here! I have a Tile on my house keys and my wallet, which are the two devices I misplace the most often. They've saved me countless times, primarily helping me find them when I leave them in my car, or put them someone in my house that they aren't supposed to be. I'm most excited for the upcoming UWB tracker, and especially for the work that Google and Tile are apparently doing to ensure devices with UWB support are all compatible. I was wondering if you could give a quick update on the status of UWB tracking on Android? As far as I know, there's only two devices that support it (Samsung's S21 Ultra and S22 Ultra), but it hasn't been confirmed whether Tile's UWB tracker is compatible. As mentioned in the article, BLE tracking isn't as accurate as UWB, so I assume that UWB support would be necessary for most of these tracking concerns to materialize with Tile's trackers.
- crhulls 5y agoGlad we have you as a customer. UWB is coming - I imagine there will be compatibility and chipset issues in the short run, in particular on Android, but over the long run it will be a game changer. I'm a couple degrees removed from this part of the business so sorry about the vague answer. One thing to note - UWB is very short range now. Even now AirTags and Tile are primarily BLE. Upcoming chips and standards updates will be dramatically increasing range. I think that is when the magic happens.
- CharlesW 5y agoIt's interesting that you decided to appear here in an effort to position Life360 as a more-private alternative to Apple solutions. "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." — You "In 2020, the company made $16 million—nearly 20 percent of its revenue that year—from selling location data, plus an additional $6 million from its partnership with Arity." — The Markup https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-... This is the part where you respond how you're sharing surveillance data to the CDC for people's own good, and that you've stopped selling "precise location data".
- crhulls 5y agoI was a bit worried about posting here because I had a suspicion I would get comments like this which assume I'm here on a PR pitch and clearly come at me with assumptions of negative intent. I'll make a few points: 1) Stalking is completely different than a data platform used for targeted advertising and research. 2) Good minds can disagree on how user data should be used. We decided to shut down our data business because it wasn't worth the distraction - we have over $200m of revenue and it is not core to our business so we decided to move on. It should be noted we have always been extremely transparent with our customer and allowed anyone, whether a free or paying user, to have fine grain control over how we use data. 3) I am not positioning us as a more-private alternative to Apple. If this is a real problem that is emerging, I'd like to understand how we can address it. There are a lot of smart minds here. 4) Our user base is largely middle American moms - this is not the place we go to do PR!
- mleonhard 5y agoYou shut down your data business, but are you still saving location data? If you are, then it is an asset that your company will sell someday.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI am a mostly happy user of Life360, not currently paying (but I have in the past). I would be more likely to pay real money for the service if it came with a contractual guarantee that by paying for it, my data would never get sold. Not even in aggregate, 'anonymized'. I like the service, I'm willing to be a customer, but I hate the privacy leak.
- nostromo 5y agoConsider just using AirTags then if you can. It’s built such that Apple can’t even read the location data, and it’s a onetime cost. The value prop is much nicer for someone that cares about privacy.
- crhulls 5y agoIt is a much longer topic but there is some irony that privacy allows Apple and other giant platforms full use of 1st party data however they want. If we are worried about the hive mind (I am personally not) the attention needs to be on the big news and social media networks.
- crhulls 5y agoWe are now on record that data from Tile and Jiobit will NEVER be sold. Period. Some of the other stuff on our data practices were highly sensationalized, and we have a privacy center that allows any user - free or paid - to opt in/out of any portion of our platform they don't like, even ads within the system. So this is something you absolutely don't need to worry about.
- rootusrootus 5y agoI appreciate the direct reply and unequivocal promise, thanks!
- harry8 5y ago"We are now on record that data from Tile and Jiobit will NEVER be sold." I'm now going on record as saying pink unicorns eat the cotton candy shed by the fairies which will NEVER stop. Why should you being on record about data from your users be treated any differently to mine about pink unicorns? What consequence is there for you personally if you decide to flip that and say "Lol, I believed that at the time too but then we got an offer..." Would you personally go to prison for fraud, for example? Would you personally go bankrupt - against your will, like it or not?
- vineyardmike 5y agoSomeone else in another thread has a really good idea: tell people how often someone checks in on them (for location sharing info). > I don’t claim that there are simple solutions here, but a starting point would be tech companies making it easier to see an audit of how this “innocent” tracking tech is being used on the trackee. For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in. Doesn't solve the Tile problem, of course. A solution there might be counter-intuitive: make the battery worse. Its a lot harder to stalk someone if you need to re-seed a device every few days. Of course, i can barely remember to charge my phone, nevermind keys, so that might kill tile's utility all together. Or, maybe you could have some sort of "did someone else's tile follow me home" sort of feature. You set your home location, and if any tile that isn't yours is at home, you get notified. (unless the owner is with it, or you white-list one for eg. partner's, children, etc). This tells you if someone planted you with it to stalk (you'd have to have tile app even if you don't have one i guess). Don't tiles support findmy? That means that any apple device will already warn people, so you just need to cover android users. Maybe the alexa/sidewalk partnership can impl similar features for when you come home? Maybe partner with google for built-in tracking warning standards? If they're open to it. I think > half the use of tile is "ring my X at home" where x is probably mostly keys, or "did i leave X at Y place". Based on this, you might be able to not track tiles everywhere, but just at pre-set locations. Only if you set it to a "lost mode" can you track it everywhere outside of certain pre-set locations, but then it'll beep and have annoying antistalking features like airtags - where you notify people nearby. Maybe orphaned tiles could try to collect to random bluetooth devices after a period of time to make their presence known? It would help people who didnt set up an app to listen ahead of time. That could be annoying though if the balance isn't right. Can probs still be abused, but should make it a complex task, and you can never stop everyone anyways. ---- aside, I'm surprised tile never tried to build any static infra in major urban areas to supplement their phone-based network (which seemed lacking when i used it compared to airtags). Do you see the use of Alexa/Sidewalk as a significant boost or advantage? Have you considered things like LoRaWAN based networks (thing network etc) as a supplement? A lot of that is built in major areas, and would just need a mapping step which may be able to be collected by existing users phones+tags in day to day use. -- Aside again: this seems like a fun problem to work on, are you hiring?
- robocat 5y agoThere needs to be a privacy mode for the App, and the Tiles. I only want to enable Bluetooth on my Android when I am searching for keys - and I am happy with the admittedly large compromise that I need to be near the keys to find them. I do wish to be able to scan for keys, but only as I demand. For that purpose the App does not need any location information at all. I don’t want to have any location information shared with your company at any point in time, and I never want to be scanning for other people’s Tile devices either (I only have Bluetooth on when I am actively using it for speakers, which is rare). The App nags for many more permission’s than I wish to share.
- nicbou 5y agoThis sounds like it was typed by a department instead of a human being
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]