Family Tracking App Sells Customers’ Locations: Report

Life360, an app designed to help parents track the movements of their children, reportedly sells customers’ locations to data brokers.

Life360 claims that 31 million people use it. The company’s privacy policy states that it sells “identifiers, Internet/Network information, Geolocation, Inferences, and Other personal information, including driving event and movement data” to third parties.

Life360 reportedly sold this information to Safe Graph, X-Mode and other companies. These companies reportedly sell the information the Center for Disease Control and Department of Defense (DOD).

Chris Hulls (CEO and Founder Life360) told Markup the Markup that Life360’s company policy forbids sales of customer information to federal agencies.

“From a philosophical standpoint, we do not believe it is appropriate for government agencies to attempt to obtain data in the commercial market as a way to bypass an individual’s right to due process,” he said.

According to reports, former employees of Life360 told the Daily Caller News FoundationThe company fails to take sufficient steps to safeguard user data.

Hulls said the company follows “industry best practices” to protect data and only sells “raw” data to third parties.

“We are not aware of any instance where our data has been traced back to individuals via our data partners,” he said. “Furthermore, our contracts contain language specifically prohibiting any reidentification, and we would aggressively take action against any breach of this term.”

Some experts worry about the possible long-term impacts of such data sharing.

Justin Sherman, a cyber policy fellow at the Duke Tech Policy Lab, told the Markup that the transactions could have “unforeseen effects that may not be immediately obvious:”

“I’m sure there are lots of families who do find very real comfort in an application like this, and that’s valid. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that other people are harmed with this data. It also doesn’t mean that the family couldn’t be harmed with the data in ways that they’re not aware of, such as that location data being used to target ads [or] used by insurance companies to figure out where they’re traveling and increase their rates.”

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