Sex traffickers used family safety app to control victims
forbes.com
forbes.com
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/) but they can't always help you if you're completely powerless.
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.
Now, ideally, I think children up to certain ages simply shouldn't have access to social media and the internet. In practice, they will have smartphones and laptops these days. I don't like it, but I don't think getting kids bullied or held back socially because they can't participate in things with their peers is a good idea either.
I still think there are limits to what parental controls should be allowed to do (i.e. no silently forwarding messages) and I think late middle school/early high school ages these apps will do a lot of damage if used wrong, especially to the amount trust a kid will have in you if you refuse their desire for privacy. However, for young kids, either parental controls or not having access to these devices are simply essential. There's a lot of shit out there that kids shouldn't have access to, from abusive porn to gambling games (which includes "lootboxes" in my opinion).
I think transparency is key here. Show kids what kind of stuff you can and can't control, set up rules that you adhere to when and how you use the tech. Don't use it as a mysterious force of God that says you can't open this app, don't do this stuff behind their backs. Don't use controls you use for their safety as a quick and easy punishment. Also make sure to reduce the influence you hold over the years and disable parental controls at some point.
You can apply rules like "no more than x hours of games per day/week" without turning phones into surveillance devices. As a teenager, I would've definitely preferred a time limit on my phone if it meant not having to hand over my phone after a certain amount of phone time, though I would've never accepted the kind of parental controls that also uploads your browsing history. And in hindsight, I do agree with my parents' decision not to let me buy GTA San Andreas back in primary school, even though it sucked at the time.
I've heard way too many stories of people abusing parental controls because they don't trust their kids, or because their kids don't trust them. I think that's incredibly sad more than anything, and a sign of something worse going on. The more invasive abilities of this spying software should be considered worse than reading a kid's diary: they're a violation of trust that can irreparably damage a developing mind, and they're only acceptable in the most extreme cases (i.e. when a child goes missing). Things like GPS trackers can still be useful (i.e. when going out to a theme park so you don't lose each other) so I don't think they're inherently bad, but some people seem make terrible choices when it comes to using this kind of tech. Late teenagers (16+) to even adults being completely restricted online because "what if they look at porn" or even "what if they deviate from the Lord's ways" are the worst I've heard, often from households that are (in my opinion) incredibly repressive, stemming from religious reasons more than anything.
The only slight upside of this abuse of technology is that often the kids restricted most by bad parenting will pick up a knack for bypassing these systems and get interested in things like computer science, hacking, and other types of systems analysis.
In the end, I think a lot of this stuff isn't as black and white as "don't use it" or "use it as you please". Through a child's development, this tech changes from an essential safety net to a dangerous tool that can be incredibly harmful, and it's hard to say when exactly that transformation begins and ends.
There's no other "intended purpose". These apps are designed for this. The fact that we shrug off abusive levels of controlling behaviour when they're directed at kids is a huge part of the problem.
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't know either of you, but this makes me feel like the app helped you dodge a bullet, because I bet he would've been just as much of an ass via different methods without it.
PSA: If you are in an intimate relationship and they try to force anything like this on you, this is a huge red flag. Best practice: View saying no to this as a hill to die on as in "You are free to leave, but I'm doing no such thing." (Edit: Though obviously don't pick a fight unnecessarily. This should be an internal metric, not a position you broadcast.)
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/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.
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).
This is the same drama as the whole AirTag stalking debate.
The reasonable moral calculus incorporates what is possible, not just the outcomes of what they are actually doing.
If we are extending the sex theme, how often is alcohol used to limber up a young woman to lower her inhibitions? Having gone to college I wouldn’t even consider that an outlier, yet alcohol is prevalent and almost expected at almost all social functions. Should we move back to prohibition?
And it is provable we have saved thousands of lives. So yes, I do think the fact that this an extreme outlier vs the good we provide is relevant and does absolve us. And we do take action as evidenced in this very article - these creeps went to jail in no small part because of us.
That's what it means for the beneficial use to absolve you of responsibility for the harmful use, you don't have to think about whether you need to spend that next $5.
Going a bit deeper though, and putting aside the question of prevalence, how would you suggest we solve this problem?
-We have actively collaborate with law enforcement (sidebar: we are used to the HN crowd going after us for this due to data privacy issues) -We are a "noisy" app - no one can install Life360 on your phone without you knowing -We have a resources page specifically to help people who feel Life360 is being improperly used -We have a "bubbles" feature that allows you to keep safety features active while hiding your exact location -We have a customer support team that passes all reported instance of misuse to our legal team, which contacts authorities as needed.
If there were some easy way to do more, we would certainly consider it.
But, getting more philosophical, in some ways you are advocating that all for-profit companies pay for their own externalities. In some respects this makes a lot of sense (e.g. pollution, carbon credits, etc). How do you do this though when an externality is extremely rare or almost impossible to quantify?
Should car manufacturers pay into a fund that compensates people who are injured by speeding drivers who emulate racing in car ads? Should hammer and kitchen knife manufacturers do more to prevent murders? Should cigarette manufacturers pay insurance companies for their share of increased actuarial costs? Should social media companies pay for free therapy?
Life is grey and I don't claim to be the authority on right or wrong, but I don't feel the critique here zooms out and looks at the bigger picture. Odds and ratios matter.
Why is easy the line? My argument is that you should be actively working to prevent harm, whether it is easy or not. I'm not arguing that you should be expending unlimited resources on it, but I don't think asking other people to think of easy things for you to do is where you should draw the line.
> yet alcohol is prevalent and almost expected at almost all social functions. Should we move back to prohibition?
Can't think of any middle ground between "date rape as a social norm" and prohibition here? Any steps we might want to try on the way?
> the good we provide is relevant and does absolve us
Is that how anything else works? You consider moral responsibility merely a balance, and as long as you come out positive, your transgressions are forgiven? On that note, how about those "creeps" who went to jail? Did you check to make sure none of them had donated a kidney to an orphan or rescued a family from a burning building recently? It would absolve them, after all, right?
I am also not getting any pushback that this as an extreme outlier. If companies started reacting to every extreme outlier you can think of we would not have progress.
I agree with you on your point about moral responsibility. I was more trying to make the point that in a simplistic sense, if our good outweighs the bad, it is good. It doesn't mean we shouldn't also try to minimize the bad, which we do.
Going down that route of focusing on statistics, while they are important, is just going to result in further controversy regarding the app as more stories or cases come out - the common thought people will have is "what if that was me/my child?" When that happens, all bets are off, you are not going to logically talk someone down.
You highlighted a great point, you should have been hammering away at that when prompted instead of statistics.
Unrelated, but Life360's marketing tone is a pet peeve of mine, it lacks a clear perspective. It claims to be about family, but any family features get sidelined in favor of "stalking your kids". Kids just feel obligated to use it rather than it having any specific features for them to really benefit from. This approach is problematic because it makes kids want to communicate less (and btw your website highlights "We don't have to text or call like we used to" as a good thing), and in turn parents become more obsessive. Your entire company is positioning itself as just being about overzealous parents, rather than an actual family app for all members of the family to enjoy and feel safe in. Why not encourage more family communication? Look at how many flocked to BeReal, don't you think families could have done that easily within Life360? A fun way to engage with each other, but without the engaging just being "location data" (for the record, I don't think you need to implement this specific feature, it's just an example of why people feel comfortable outside Life360). Airtags focused explicitly on the individual - here's why you need one, btw here are cute accessories to go with it. Tile within Life360 just gets relegated to "find stuff your family loses". Can I not even buy a cute dog collar that supports Tile or something? It's like you want every family member to find the app and ecosystem so cold and "location data" obsessed only the resident control freak could enjoy it.
Apologies for ranting about marketing, but your app has quite a lot of good features that get buried because of how dysfunctional marketing is.
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.
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.
And summaries of the above study https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-... 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.
in contrast to their study, we use a global sample consisting of up to 150 countries.
Street prostitution differs from prostitution in brothels, bars and clubs, which also differs from prostitution offered by call girls (and boys) and escort agencies. Differences include, but are not limited to, the types of services rendered, numbers of clients served, types of clients served, sizes of payments, and also the share of illegally trafficked prostitutes working in each market segment. For simplicity, we will avoid such complications by assuming that there is one single market for prostitution.
One of the biggest challenges of doing research on human trafficking is the scarcity of reliable and comparable data. Human trafficking is a clandestine, criminal activity, with those being trafficked and involved in such activities being part of “hidden populations”
---
They handwave off the results of some other study that found a decrease in human trafficking associated with legalization, they use the term legalization throughout the piece without defining it, I've already noted that legalization and decriminalization are not the same thing and are terms used sloppily or inconsistently by a lot of sources.
It isn't talking about human trafficking generally. It is talking specifically about moving people from one country to another. You can be trafficked in your own neighborhood by someone selling you to a pimp.
The conclusion of this study seems to be that legalization of prostitution in wealthy countries encourages people to bring in girls from less wealthy countries to pimp them.
This isn't exactly shocking and it's also got little to do with my point.
Everything I've seen suggests demand for prostitution goes up in uptight cultures, having nothing to do with whether it's legal or not. If you're a 1960s hippie and can get laid easily without paying for it, you don't pay for it. In the Victorian Era, you saw more prostitution because good girls were virgins until the wedding night.
People who end up doing sex work tend to be vulnerable populations escaping abusive relationships, etc. This is routinely used to criticize sex work and say it's a bad thing, but trying to stamp out sex work doesn't per se provide these people with some other means to support themselves.
Such solutions tend to disregard the larger context.
I'm all for improving women's rights, equality, etc. That's the ideal high-minded solution here such that no one needs to pay their bills this way.
But I don't see it as realistic to think that we can go from where we are today on this to no one needing to do objectionable but well-paid work by 6am tomorrow by simply criminalizing such labor.
The reality is that a lot of women marry well as a polite form of prostitution that's not illegal. And I think that's sometimes worse.
As long as we have a heteronormative society where men routinely out earn women, you are likely to see money changing hands related to sex. Pretending it isn't so doesn't actually make it go away.
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..."
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.
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.
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?
I've also taken a lot of vitriol for publicly calling out parents who misuse the app. This culminated in a TikTok campaign that got over 7 billion views publicizing our privacy features (look up #ghostmode - the number is not an exaggeration)
Respectfully, if you know this for a fact can you provide backing data (and methodologies) behind this conclusion? I think having concrete data here would go a long way towards making this a much more productive conversation.
To be clear: I do personally believe that you are trying to make a product with primarily or solely above board, legitimate usage -- I'm just not convinced that you have good data on this given the general difficulties around collecting data on abuse of the product. Certainly in the case of sex trafficking, the (ab)users will not admit to their behavior and the victims are likely unable to.
I'll admit I was a bit surprised how controlling some parents are, and we built our Bubbles feature to address this - you can turn off exact location and still keep safety features active. We encourage all teens to use Bubbles and have a conversation with their parents about responsible use of the app.
So you know parents are being overly restrictive and are making tools to help them.
(Thanks for adding that you're the Cofounder. I wasn't getting the sense you were hiding that or anything, but good to be open about it).
edit: also, want to be clear - I think you're misguided, not evil or anything.
That seems... completely reasonable? Like, if I had a way to passively give my family my location that I trusted, I'd use it (that is, I trust my family; I'm less convinced about Apple, Google, Android OEMs, 3rd party companies/apps).
This is going to be mostly used by people who want to know where their kid is every minute of the day or are super suspicious or controlling of their partner. I'm sure the sex trafficking and other really terrible stuff is incredibly rare, but the 'intended' usage of the service is already Orwellian. The location tracking anyway, the emergency stuff seems alright, but it's all pretty bundled together as far as I can tell.
For some people, it is likely used to give a child more freedom than they otherwise would have and if it is taken away one option is to just keep them home, which is potentially more problematic than tracking them.
Do we have data on that? How much it gets used to expand freedom while trying to keep an eye on the kids electronically?
I hope we're still at a point where (most) kids get a baseline level of autonomy and freedom that scales with age, and it feels like these kind of apps erode that. But I've got no hard data on it. I had parents that gave me a good amount of trust and autonomy, and that meant a lot to me. I made bad decisions a few times but I learnt from them, and overall I was responsible enough. I'm trying to prepare my daughter for the world and I'm worried for how many of her peers might grow up thinking this kind of tracking is reasonable.
For some, that likely means using a tracking app to give the child privileges they otherwise would not be granted.
It's also convenient when someone is driving: "I'll pick you up in about 20; spy on me". Maybe there is no good parking spot so it's great when the family member is awaiting at the side of the road for a quick embarkation.
My location is shared with quite a few friends and colleagues. I don't quite see the problem with my _location_ being known. Maybe we just have boring lives, with too few secret lovers, secret-society meetings behind hidden walls in underground bars … ?
Like is there a way for users of the app to report that they don't want to share their location with other users? Like that would be annoying for over-bearing parents, but should we protect those parents from inconvenience over other users that may face more concrete harms?
If there was a hammer that was popular for killing people, I wouldn't really see a problem with an article discussing it. Especially if the CEO of the company was like "Oh, I didn't know that".
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.
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.
The typical example when we use it is when one person is somewhere and another person is driving and will do a quick road-side pickup while passing by. Don't want to stand outside in the sleet for ten minutes waiting for the family member who is delayed due to weather? You could call every other minute and distract them, or you just check where they are right then.
i don't know if I could live that way, but i am jealous of them.
(Possibly because it is Apple? I honestly would not trust a 3rd party with a tracking app.)
As a parent (even though the kids are adults now) there is something akin to reaching out and touching them, for me, just by pulling them up on Find My. Seeing my oldest daughter at work, my middle daughter on campus ... things are right in the world.
There's another family that we (very) frequently travel with. We ended up always-on location-shared with them too, for the same reason. It's convenient, especially on road trips.
Maybe it's because we're well-established families in our 40s and 50s but this doesn't seem weird to us. None of us cares where the others are, unless there's a specific reason to care, and then it's really useful.
On the other hand, I don't understand why anyone would buy/install an app. It's built into the phones.
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.
The two couldn’t be more different.
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.
A more interesting business model is subscription based cellular GPS trackers like tryfi.com
If only someone could have predicted this.