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Sex traffickers used family safety app to control victims
- itsthecourier 4y agoHow difficult is to gain critical mass for custom bluetooth trackers?
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y agoBluetooth? Not very useful without the p2p find my iPhone/tile network. A more interesting business model is subscription based cellular GPS trackers like tryfi.com
- crhulls 4y agoLife360 CEO/Cofounder here - it takes a lot of devices. We bought Tile because we could use our 50 million users as finding nodes. It works quite well in urban and suburban areas, but not rural ones
- expertentipp 4y agoMost personal electronics and appliances nowadays have bluetooth, it's enabled by default and reenabled after every software update... and no, you cannot reliably connect headphones or speakers to them...
- jeroenhd 4y agoStalkerware is no joke. It's more ubiquitous than people realize and it can effectively ruin someone's life. Even when these tools are used for their intended purpose, I personally find their abilities borderline creepy when employed against kids beyond a certain age. It's not just trafficking victims either. Abusive partners with a modicum of technical skills can make their victims' life hell through these apps. There are organizations and sites out there (https://stopstalkerware.org/ https://stopstalkerware.org/) but they can't always help you if you're completely powerless.
- JoshTriplett 4y ago> Stalkerware is no joke. It's more ubiquitous than people realize and it can effectively ruin someone's life. Even when these tools are used for their intended purpose, I personally find their abilities borderline creepy when employed against kids beyond a certain age. s/ beyond a certain age// Abuse begets abuse. Stalking begets stalking. Tracking begets tracking. People shouldn't be raised to think it's normal to be stalked and tracked.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI tend to agree. I never snooped on my kids phones or computers. I never considered installing tracking software. I told them how to stay safe, not to trust strangers online, or things that sounded too good to be true, etc. and hoped that they would do that. The world isn't perfectly safe, and hovering over them at all times causes its own set of harms.
- decremental 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Retric 4y agoI really don’t get that specific fear. It’s likely your kids are already going to school with “predators.” Meanwhile the overwhelming majority of people online live very far away. The actually risks are online are just so low by comparison is seems like being deathly afraid of pigs rather than say cars. Yep, sometimes pigs eat kill and eat people, but it’s hardly something that’s likely to come up.
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoIf someone is going to abuse your child, odds are you already know them. They are friends or family members, not strangers on the internet. We just don’t want to think about it.
- olliej 4y agoIt’s sad that literally no one has ever realized that stalkerware would be abused. If only someone could have predicted this.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoI heard about Life360 from a guy at work and it really creeped me out. Him, his wife, and kids all have the app so they can keep tabs on each other throughout the day. Super creepy.
- bombcar 4y agoIt’s just build into all Apple devices (look up Find My)
- TylerE 4y agoWhich can be...turned off.
- atomicnumber3 4y agoIs it though? I have FindMy turned on for my wife and I's phones and we share our locations. It's nice to know that if I pass out at the gas station or something she knows where to send the police, and vice versa. Or yknow if I lose my phone. I'm sure it can be and is abused by some people, but my wife and I trust each other so this has literally never been a problem for us. We've never used it and I don't think about it at all - but if something happened it's nice to feel safer. I'm sure other people with healthy relationships probably find it the same way.
- whaleofatw2022 4y agoThis really is big. I'm in my late 30s and for the first time in my life I am in a relationship where I'm never afraid of my partner knowing where I am.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoI'm the type of person who will go on vacation to another state or country without telling my friends or family.
- halper 4y ago
- iamleppert 4y agoMy ex forced me to install Life360, so he could monitor my movements. I was okay with it at first because it was sold to me by him as "reciprocal" -- I could also see his movements and a way to build "trust". But of course, his location would be turned off when he didn't want me to see what he was doing. So I turned mine off, and an argument ensued. We kept the app for a few more weeks before I had enough and just deleted it one day. Afterwards, I wondered how many people have that exact story with Life360? For some people, it likely causes more problems than it solves as it did in my case. What was also interesting to me was that in order to see the history of someone's locations past a certain point, you needed to pay for their premium service. It can't be an accident they chose that as a hook for their conversion funnel -- under what circumstances would a user want to use that feature? My guess is they arrived at this through a lot of A/B testing but could probably care less what the actual circumstances are of its use anyway.
- WatchDog 4y agoMy partner and I use apples “find my”, I know other couples that use it too. At least in our case, no one pressured the other to set it up, and it hasn’t caused any issues so far. I think it comes down to trust, I think setting up something like this can certainly quickly draw attention to trust issues in a relationship.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeroenhd 4y agoI've heard others do this as well. Some people use things like WhatsApp's/Google Maps' location sharing 24/7, others use the find-my features baked into their phones' OS. The people I've heard use this feature all do so because one person decided to share their location just in case, with no pressure for the other to reciprocate. Then the other realizes how useful it can be to estimate when their partner will be home/where they are at a large event, so they turned it on as well. I've also heard from at least one person who turned on location sharing where their partner didn't (or only did so periodically, i.e. when driving somewhere), and that wasn't a problem either; he simply respected his partner's wishes and for all he cared his partner could've never turned the feature on in the first place. Being pressured makes all the difference here. As long as you can freely disable the feature without judgement (or worse), I think it makes total sense to consider location sharing inside a household. If you and your partner are totally fine with sharing your location and the idea wasn't introduced because of some kind of trust/jealousy/control issue, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
- toolz 4y agoSomething about this article calling out specific apps just feels gross and accusatory for no reason. It seems rather obvious these apps were made with good intentions and provide useful features. It feels akin to posting some hammer manufacturers brand and responses in a line of questioning about how their hammers kill people. I even think it would be more interesting to approach the article from the perspective of "see how tracker apps can be misused" without the accusatory tone.
- detaro 4y agoIt's not for "no reason" if the apps actually enable this kind of thing. It's not like any of this is new and something the poor companies making those apps couldn't know is happening.
- patmcc 4y agoThis assumes that "track the location of your child/spouse/whatever 24/7" is a useful and positive feature that someone with good intentions would make. I think that's on the spectrum from misguided to abusive, depending on the details. I see this closer to a gun manufacturer being shocked that some criminals use their cheap and easily concealed handguns for muggings. Are there some valid and acceptable uses for this product? Maybe. But not a lot.
- crhulls 4y agoLife360 Cofounder/CEO here. You might not appreciate what we do, but most families use this in mature ways and it is indisputable that we have saved literally thousands of lives through our SOS and crash detection and emergency dispatch features. We also have a “bubbles” option that enables you to leave safety features on without sharing exact location
- codezero 4y agoHow much hands on onboarding is done with each install to educate them about how this software can be abused before they use it? To be clear, I’m hoping to be schooled here as I haven’t onboarded with the product before, not to dunk. Are people informed about how others have been manipulated with the software, and software like it? Put another way, what do you do to make sure the software is used in a mature way that is pragmatic about the possible abuses, and the realities of how abusive people can manipulate others?
- crhulls 4y agoI’m the founder and CEO of Life360. We are very used to criticism but this one feels odd. We have had over 100 million downloads and this use case is the most extreme of outliers. It is a bit ironic this article is highlighting traffickers who went to jail because they stupidly used the app to incriminate themselves. You’d think a trafficker would use one of the many location apps that doesn’t have the same collaborative stance with law enforcement that we do (we store location data and will share it with a legal subpoena). There are many apps that explicitly market the fact that they use encryption in a way that makes this legal discovery impossible. For the rationalists on this thread this article about evil cardiologists come to mind. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DSzpr8Y9299jdDLc9/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DSzpr8Y9299jdDLc9/cardiologi... PS: while I don’t appreciate the story I do appreciate the reporter gave me a fair hearing. So many journalists these days have no ethics and literally cut/paste quotes to distort the meaning. Thomas didn’t do that here, so kudos to him.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- maxerickson 4y agoDo you think that beneficial use absolves you of responsibility for harmful use? I ask because you say "We have had over 100 million downloads and this use case is the most extreme of outliers.", which sounds like you might. I would think the better calculation compares the cost of preventing the harmful use to the harm (where focusing on beneficial use is dismissive of the harm).
- xvector 4y agoIf Life360 has indeed saved thousands of lives as he mentions, then of course the moral calculus is in the company's favor. This is the same drama as the whole AirTag stalking debate.
- maxerickson 4y agoNo! The reasonable moral calculus incorporates what is possible, not just the outcomes of what they are actually doing.
- connor11528 4y agoDo you think protection under Section 230 is relevant here? Seems like it might be giving the company extra protection
- DoreenMichele 4y agoIn some cases, she had seen sex workers using Life360 to stay safe by sharing their location with friends. “What happens if you are reporting somebody who's not engaging in trafficking but they're engaged in consenting adult commercial sex? What if they're engaged in survival sex, and you just criminalized a mother who came out of an abusive situation?” Trafficking is actively aided by the illegality of sex work in so many places. This problem won't be solved by criminalizing tracking apps. It will be solved by decriminalization of sex work so that people forced into sex work against their will are more able to complain to law enforcement rather than fearing law enforcement.
- kelipso 4y agoThere has been plenty of studies that show that decriminalizing sex work leads to increase in human trafficking. Legalizing sex work increases demand leading to increase in sex trafficking.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoPlease post links to those studies. I have previously had a conversation on HN where someone arguing with me fundamentally did not understand the term trafficking. Edit: Also, decriminalization and legalization are not synonyms, though lots of texts mix them up and different people use them differently. I have things to do. I can clarify later if necessary.
- kelipso 4y agoHere's the most popular one https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1... And summaries of the above study https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/ https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-... https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalized-prostitution-safer/legalizing-prostitution-leads-to-more-trafficking https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalize... Seems very evident to me that legalizing sex work will increase sex trafficking due to increased demand, both logically and in terms of how it turned out in the real world.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI think these tracking apps are pretty harmful to parent-child relationships and also create a false sense of security (what parents fear most is their child being kidnapped, and of course a kidnapper would throw the phone away). They're really only one step away from a court-ordered GPS ankle monitor. https://achonaonline.com/top-stories/2020/01/why-tracking-apps-are-more-harmful-than-helpful-opinion/ https://achonaonline.com/top-stories/2020/01/why-tracking-ap... > "Although parents may trust their kids and believe they will make the right choices, the use of tracking apps implies that they do not truly have faith in their children. This can be disheartening and discouraging for kids and adolescents; the sense of distrust makes children less likely to confide in their parents when a situation does arise..." > "Hundreds of stories detailing the micromanaging and aggressive behavior of parents using tracking apps have appeared online since the advent of these apps..."
- DoreenMichele 4y agoWe need better parenting education or something. The app per se is not the problem. The problem is how parents use it.
- swayvil 4y agoSystems for keeping us safe are invariably used for controlling us. Everybody knows that.
- AussieWog93 4y agoAnecdata, but the only people I know who use an app like this are my South African in-laws. A lot of strong opinions in this thread, but it's quite obvious that there are certain people for who such an app can be genuinely useful.
- bastard_op 4y agoConsidering the companies like NSO Group offer the same feature-rich tracking software, but on a far, far worse government/terrorism level or to anyone with deep pockets, I'm not surprised companies like Life360 sell their wares as low-hanging fruit doing much the same in the name of pristine parental concern. Really all the same in the feature set, just with different levels plausible deniability, at least until now. Now at least the cat is out of the bag, so if someone has 25 wives or kids, hey that might be just a bit weird to flag for abuse and turn them into the thought police. Even if one spouse and one child in a family, a parent could still be terrorizing the others with the app, so who's to say where to draw a line to determine abuse. I don't see Live360 stopping sale of their wares whether tracking families or tricks as a low-cost leader in herding humans. Better they exist or not at all? Can't put the cat back in the bag now.
- mpeg 4y agoHow is this app anywhere near NSO Group’s software in terms of features? Life360 doesn’t attempt to hide itself, and makes its features clear to the user (eg you have to opt in to being tracked) while NSO makes spyware that exploits the phone to bypass user controls and hide itself. The two couldn’t be more different.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI feel bad for all those kids who have no power to reject the notion as patently outrageous, no ability to even think about it since it happens before they have any chance to think about a thing like that for themselves. They just have to grow up with a 24/7 observer and never even consider that this is inhumane and stunting like living in a box, since they know nothing else.
- IYasha 4y agoSomeone produces surveillance tools and is genuinely surprised they are used to surveil people against they will. I wonder what would makers of social rating system say.