The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users (themarkup.org) 32
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. From the report: Through interviews with two former employees of the company, along with two individuals who formerly worked at location data brokers Cuebiq and X-Mode, The Markup discovered that the app acts as a firehose of data for a controversial industry that has operated in the shadows with few safeguards to prevent the misuse of this sensitive information. The former employees spoke with The Markup on the condition that we not use their names, as they are all still employed in the data industry. They said they agreed to talk because of concerns with the location data industry's security and privacy and a desire to shed more light on the opaque location data economy. All of them described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry.
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Tile (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they know... (Score:1)
... where all the cream cheese went to?
Seriously, what are they supposed to *do* with all that data they're sitting on? Hoard it for a rainy day? Help to track/find missing and exploited youth! No! This is 'merica! Of course, you moneti$e it by selling it to the highest bidder with the shadiest reputation - and let *them* exploit the youth! That way your corporate hands are clean when it comes back that your data actually caused youth to go missing and/or exploited.
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I agree. It's a free service. If people have not figured out that free is paid for by their privacy, that is on them.
That said, if it's also doing this for it's paying customers, that's a lot different.
I just checked... There is a setting under privacy to turn this off.
"Free" (Score:2)
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True.
Maybe these things should be marked as "Cost : Data harvesting". I'm sure there is a better PR way of phrasing that but at least it would be upfront.
That said, there is an opt out setting.
Missing the point? (Score:3)
All of them described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry.
From TFA:
“We have no means to confirm or deny the accuracy” of whether Life360 is among the largest sources of data for the industry, Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls said in an emailed response to questions from The Markup.
Not sure this is actually the main issue here Chris ...
Privacy invasion olympics (Score:2)
He points out an obvious problem: We have no way of comparing the privacy invasion of the different companies. How could they know whether they are raping their customers enough or should up their game? How can we, the cust^H^H^H^Hproducts, know that we get raped the fullest?
We clearly should fix that How about a Privacy Invasion Olympic Games competition?
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
People need to learn to stop trusting software.
And no one would traffic lovely, healthy kids (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm curious why this matters here.
Were I a wanna-be child trafficker, I could:
A - Buy location data described herein, mine it, extract individual identification information, match it with photos, stake out the locations found in the data, and intercept the child
or...
B - Go the nearest playground. Wait.
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True. And unless the data being sold is real time with age identifiers (which the app doesn't ask for), not sure how useful this would be for that purpose.
the cost is your personal information (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes but there is one crucial difference in that Google is not selling the data, they are selling a service that allows advertisers to target certain demographics of users. That's a very different thing to if Google were selling your emails or your location history.
The problem is that alarmists and hyperbolists have been trying to (unsuccessfully) drum up opposition by re-framing what Google is doing as "selling your data". These campaigns that pretend that Google is "selling your data" to make it seem more
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now be shocked when bad things happen.
I've been using Google's services for close to 2 decades, still waiting for those bad things to happen. I can see the problem with a company like Life360 that sells your location data to anybody but that's not what Google does.
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The words "safety app" should have told them... (Score:2)
CEO's tiktok... (Score:1)
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Well, unless somebody cross-posts it to youtube the only people who will know what he said are idiots who don't care about data privacy and signed up for tiktok!
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... or just click on the link, showing the video just fine in the browser without signing up.
Still don't know what he said because the sound was off by default and it looked expectedly silly.
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You're right, I turned on a few JS sources and there was some crazy dude bro flexing and I screamed and closed it.
That's scary shit. In the old days we only had to worry about goatse when we clicked a link. I'm gonna go listen to some Rick Astley and find a happy place.
Why 3rd party? (Score:2)
Why would anyone trust a 3rd party app for this? The functionality is built-in to both Android and iOS, and even if Google/Apple aren't wholly trustworthy, they're orders of magnitude better than some 3rd party tracker.
It's time Personal data collection and sale .. (Score:2)
... is made illegal.
Sure, it would kill off shady scumbag businesses.
Cloud based services should use zero knowledge storage.
Sure we may need to pay for services. OR we say 'screw big data' and start our own zero knowledge distributed cloud solution that is peer to peer via hardware you purchase.
To the surprise of no one...? (Score:2)
This really should surprise all of no one.