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Comment by automatoney | Hacker News Reader

For anyone unaware, Life 360 is largely used as surveillance technology so parents can monitor their children's locations. Hardly comparable to a social media app - it essentially desensitizes children to pervasive surveillance, and sends the message that their parents don't trust them. I'm obviously extremely biased, but I'd suggest anyone looking at this company consider the implications of location tracking children, teens and young adults.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/dont-le...

https://www.wired.com/story/life360-location-tracking-famili...

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To add on, Life 360 has gotten in hot water several times for selling the location data of the people who use their service to 3rd party data brokers.

I'll push back on this a bit - we have always been transparent about our business model. We have always clearly explained how we use data to monetize. We did not have a single incident of abuse of this platform. When we started monetizing this way, it was not considered controversial, and the world has obviously shifted and evolved.

That being said, it was a small portion of our revenue, and we decided to shut down this part of our business. Well intentioned people can disagree in good faith, and we decided the controversy wasn't worth it even though our practices were misunderstood and sensationalized. We shifted our strategy to using a purely aggregated model that does not use any type of device level identifier (e.g. no IDFA, no in-house work around identifiers), which should not be considered controversial.

Trust is paramount for us, so we decided to stick to our core, which is subscriptions and devices.

If you sell anonymized location data, it would be trivial for whoever has the data to figure out who the individuals are.

If you work for a high profile company, hedge funds will use this data to determine where you are traveling and who you are meeting with. Governments buy this data to track their enemies. This is not something you want to be a provider of.

Additionally this is not something you want to brush off as an "agree to disagree" sort of thing, you should try to understand that this sort of thing puts your customers at risk.

The claim that "We did not have a single incident of abuse" holds no water because you would have no way of knowing something like that.

Honestly, how would you know that some foreign government or hedge fund isn't buying your customers data from the 3rd party you are selling that data to?

Please check out this article published in the NYT some years back. It's a long multi-part series, but worth your time.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

"Anonymized" is a controversial term. Let me be very clear about the model we are moving to.

We are going "aggregated" so there are no GPS lines or raw feeds as consumable outputs. It is instead counters on places...e.g. how many people went to Safeway? What was the average speed at this road segment? We will show big patterns, such as where did the people who went to Safeway come from, but that will be done in 50 user blocks with randomized locations within census zones. Even Apple, as ostensibly the most privacy conscious company out there, uses their aggregated location data in similar ways (see Apple Maps Mobility Trends Reports).

If using aggregated data is bad, that will mean that we will not have basic things we all rely on such as traffic ETAs in nav apps, because that data was ultimately from probes in the real world. Should we outlaw this? There is a ton of nuance.

Re your link to the NYTimes and that type of data feed, I still think there is a huge gap between perception and reality, and from what I know of the industry there are generally very strong contractual commitments by partners to limit how these databases are used. If a partner who has direct access to a location data feed that includes raw data and breaches a contract, yes, people could in theory be "de-identified." That would also apply to Amazon for your S3 storage, or your phone carrier. I don't know where the NYTimes data came from, but I can say that all of our prior partners had very strict limitations on how the data could be used.

I hope that one solution from all this is that there are much strong penalties, including criminal ones, for misuse of data. It isn't a data broker issue per se - employees at companies for example are probably a much more real risk vector because the tools to access the data on a user-level exist. People should go to jail if they abuse it, either in first party or third party form.

And, this is all for naught if some of the government rumors about direct taps into wireless carriers are true.... https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

To me there is a big difference between parent's rights and the government's rights. In a lot of ways kids could get more freedom because their parents can verify that they are where they are supposed to be. However, I do appreciate the concern for conditioning children into surveillance. I hadn't considered things from that perspective.

Here's a thought experiment/rhetorical question - how much should kids (of various ages) have the freedom to do things their parents don't approve of? Taking into consideration the full range of parents (amazing to abusive) and full range of children (needing lots of vs little guidance). I think how one answers that question probably guides a lot of how one feels about this sort of tech.

Honestly… I just want to make sure my kid isn't getting forced into something that even they don't want to do. Or maybe they want to but they don't have the context to understand how much it will negatively effect their life from that point forward. Think like serious injury or death… I totally understand the push back against over protective parenting but the opposite side is pretty rough too. Also, every kid is different. You might have one kid that seems to be able to adapt and understand situations and another who is totally underdeveloped in that area. It's kind of complicated

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.

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'

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.

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.

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

I have AirTags in my kids backpacks (also my father in laws pocket when on vacation).

I’m not trying to desensitize them to anything. It’s just handy to be sure they made it home, or that their bus is late and so on…

Intent and effect are different things. And certainly different ages call for different levels of freedom. My main critique was leveled at the company which directly facilitates the surveilance and not necessarily individual parents.

But I would hope that parents who do choose to monitor their kids in various ways also educate them (again age appropriately) on the importance (and potential safety tradeoffs) of privacy, as well as how to decide who to share their location data with (friends? internet friends? teachers? bosses? partners? police? corporations? governments?)

Again, not trying to criticize parenting decisions I have little context on, just trying to raise some discussion thoughts.

Yes, knowing where your children are is definitely surveillance. /s

Knowing someone is "at school" or "at a friend's house" is qualitatively different from being fed their geographic coordinates in real time. Kind of like if you were in the bathroom when a guest arrived at your house - There's a being difference between your spouse telling your guest, "They're upstairs" vs. "They're upstairs in the bathroom pooping".

Neither Find My Phone or Life 360 doesn't tell you when someone is in the bathroom vs upstairs. It just gives you information like "at school" or "at a friend's house". Not sure what you are arguing here.

No need to be sarcastic, both can be true. It's reasonable that you want to know where your children are, AND this desensitizes them to surveillance.

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