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Hi, I appreciate the sentiment and agree that some small portion of our customers use the product for monitoring or tracking, but it is a minority. We have bee

Hi, I appreciate the sentiment and agree that some small portion of our customers use the product for monitoring or tracking, but it is a minority. We have been one of the few family focused location apps where parents and kids are treated as peers, anyone can pause location, and we have a "bubbles" feature where you can obfuscate your location to a 20 mile radius bubble. When used properly, we empower parents to give their kids more freedom, not less. And, our safety features, such as automatic crash detection, have literally saved thousands of lives. That is not hyperbolic. We run on over 10% of all iPhones in the US and have had a very positive impact on a large number of lives.

michaelt 4y ago
From the perspective of a teenager in the 1990s, I think you must be very young indeed if you think the product you describe represents 'more freedom rather than less'
- crhulls 4y ago
  I was a teenager in the 90s as well. And I was raised as a free range kid. It is all in how it was used. People pushed back on cellphones for the same reasons people pushed back on location sharing apps today. A big part of our fundraising pitch in the early days was to tell VCs to "try it yourself for two weeks and see if your perceptions change." 90%+ of people have the lightbulb go off after using it for a couple of weeks. We truly are not used as a "tracker" in the majority of cases. We have had over 100 million downloads - I'm not saying outliers don't exist. Nor am I saying there isn't some meaningful (10%?) of the base who have parents who go a bit too far. But the average family is really not using it nefariously.
  - vasco 4y ago
    We're getting somewhere. People who oppose tracking are not thinking of a rosy family. They are thinking about what an abusive parent can do when you normalize location tracking for kids and it becomes the expectation. I would hate to be a kid now if what it meant would be that my parents would have my exact location 100% of the time. Kids are kids but they still have rights.
geoduck14 4y ago
I have several children that walk home from school. Having an app like this would be really handy for us.

michaelt 4y ago

From the perspective of a teenager in the 1990s, I think you must be very young indeed if you think the product you describe represents 'more freedom rather than less'

crhulls 4y ago
I was a teenager in the 90s as well. And I was raised as a free range kid. It is all in how it was used. People pushed back on cellphones for the same reasons people pushed back on location sharing apps today. A big part of our fundraising pitch in the early days was to tell VCs to "try it yourself for two weeks and see if your perceptions change." 90%+ of people have the lightbulb go off after using it for a couple of weeks. We truly are not used as a "tracker" in the majority of cases. We have had over 100 million downloads - I'm not saying outliers don't exist. Nor am I saying there isn't some meaningful (10%?) of the base who have parents who go a bit too far. But the average family is really not using it nefariously.
- vasco 4y ago
  We're getting somewhere. People who oppose tracking are not thinking of a rosy family. They are thinking about what an abusive parent can do when you normalize location tracking for kids and it becomes the expectation. I would hate to be a kid now if what it meant would be that my parents would have my exact location 100% of the time. Kids are kids but they still have rights.

geoduck14 4y ago

I have several children that walk home from school. Having an app like this would be really handy for us.