Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users ⇥ themarkup.org

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, the Markup:

Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.

In 2019, Apple pulled about a dozen parental control apps from the App Store over privacy concerns, since they abused Mobile Device Management, though I cannot find any reports that Life360 was among them. However, I did come across a Wired article from later that year in which Louise Matsakis reported that Life360’s public trading prospectus indicated the value it sees in mining its vast collection of user data — largely of children — for profit.

Last month, Life360 announced it would be acquiring Tile.