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I'm not sure focusing on the statistics is really a great move when it comes to such extreme cases, especially involving young adults/teens.

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.

Do you think that beneficial use absolves you of responsibility for harmful use?

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).

If Life360 has indeed saved thousands of lives as he mentions, then of course the moral calculus is in the company's favor.

This is the same drama as the whole AirTag stalking debate.

No!

The reasonable moral calculus incorporates what is possible, not just the outcomes of what they are actually doing.

Well, to calibrate our calculus, let's say this is the best that is possible. Is it okay then?

Yes, I think it does. I’m not sure where the line is drawn but 1/10 is different than 1/100 which is different than 1/10,000,000.

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.

So to restate my question, I'm asking if you are expending sufficient resources preventing harm. Like if you spent another $5, would you be likely prevent more than $5 of harm?

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.

My simplistic answer is, yes, I think we are.

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.

If there were some easy way to do more, we would certainly consider it.

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.

Seems to me he's given you plenty of evidence that they are actively working to prevent harm and investing considerable resources in that regard.

How do you even begin to calculate damages in a context like this one?

I guess I'm glad you answered the question but damn what a terrible collection of thoughts. Definitely makes it clear why your product would be prone to this sort of abuse and why you don't seem to consider it a major problem, or reflecting on you at all.

> 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?

Of course there are middle grounds, and I think we are already doing these middle ground style actions (see my comment on this same thread). The implication by many of these comments is that we just plain old shouldn't exist, and that is what I am pushing back on.

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.

Are you going to do anything differently so that your software is not used to facilitate sex trafficking?

Do you have suggestions? I am genuinely open to hearing them. I do, however, push back on the fundamental premise that we facilitate sex trafficking. Both Android and iOS have location sharing built into the OS - I don't think the feature is ever going away.

From the article and multiple police investigations it sounds like your software is used by them to run their illicit businesses. Having users register could be one option. If there's one guy and a bunch of teenage girls on a plan that might be a red flag or worth further review. Perhaps your company could look at all the people that were busted and see if there's commonalities with how they use the app. It's my guess that if multiple people were using it for trafficking and were busted there's probably traffickers using your software right now.

Invest in ML to spot patterns. I don't know specifically how it was done, but I heard that Whatsapp had a hard time with spam after e2e encryption since you couldn't catch spam by examining the text. So instead they started looking for patterns and found things like an account that was less than a week old sending out thousands of messages a week. It's an outlier in usage pattern. I believe credit card fraud systems do something similar. Like if you suddenly make a purchase far far away or in a category that you never do, then it gets flagged. I'm happy to help brainstorm more ideas.