The Markup: Life360 sells precise location data

I saw that The Markup, a tech accountability news site, had a story on Life360. According to sources they spoke to, the app was selling user data to data brokers.

From an earlier post I see that Life 360 is a standard integration and therefore likely quite popular in this community.

It is unclear if the practice is U.S. specific, but it appear that Life360 shares data with Arity for users within Europe, according to their privacy policy Artiy uses the data for: “information to analyze your driving behaviours, such as speed, change in speed and other aspects of how, how much, where and when you drive in order to predict driving risk and calculate a driving risk score.”

Full disclaimer: I am a journalist working for the Norwegian public broadcaster. If someone in Norway uses Life360 and want to talk to me they can reach me here.

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

I don’t think this is much of surprise to anyone. Always assume they are going to sell / expose your data and conduct yourself accordingly.

1 Like

I don’t pay for Home Assistant or Linux, just because the product or service is free doesn’t mean you are the product or need to be the product.

Do you really fail to see the fundamental differences between a profit driven corporation and organizations who develop FOSS?

Organisation’s like Nabu Casa that develop HA you mean? HA is free, I don’t pay for it, I’ve got a free lunch and I’m not the product. Please explain why a on-line service should by different, it still costs money to develop software as it does to run services so just because a service is free it doesn’t mean you should be the product.

“open source”

As said your getting a free lunch which was kinda my point. Open source products still costs money to develop and companies do the majority of the developing. Basically I’m saying you can give people free lunches and have a business model to still make money off that product without making the users of that product the product.