Something about this article calling out specific apps just feels gross and accusatory for no reason. It seems rather obvious these apps were made with good intentions and provide useful features. It feels akin to posting some hammer manufacturers brand and responses in a line of questioning about how their hammers kill people.
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.
This assumes that "track the location of your child/spouse/whatever 24/7" is a useful and positive feature that someone with good intentions would make. I think that's on the spectrum from misguided to abusive, depending on the details.
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.
> This assumes that "track the location of your child/spouse/whatever 24/7" is a useful and positive feature that someone with good intentions would make. I think that's on the spectrum from misguided to abusive, depending on the details.
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).
I'm not worried about people giving their location data to their family, I'm worried about people that require it from others in their family.
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.
When I was taking some history class, the professor noted that the veil for women was a huge boost to female freedom when it was invented because prior to that most women were essentially prisoners in their own home. The veil allowed them to go out in public.
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?
That's an interesting idea; surely it can go both ways though. Inventing the veil in a society where women must stay home moves things in one direction, doing it in a society where women roam free is another.
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 us it's never been about trust, spying or faith or anything. We often say things like: "let's meet at the park in half an hour; spy on me" and then everyone knows which part of the park the others are at. The first one to arrive sits down and listens to the birds a bit and the others just walk over, as if we were living in some glorious future where we are constantly connected.
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 … ?
Life360 Cofounder/CEO here. You might not appreciate what we do, but most families use this in mature ways and it is indisputable that we have saved literally thousands of lives through our SOS and crash detection and emergency dispatch features. We also have a “bubbles” option that enables you to leave safety features on without sharing exact location
How much hands on onboarding is done with each install to educate them about how this software can be abused before they use it?
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 wouldn't say we do that much in onboarding, but we do have a resources page specifically for misuse, and we made a feature called Bubbles that allows you to turn off exact location but still keep all safety features active. We also are a two-way street by default, e.g. if you can see me, I can see you. Our competitors usually have a parent and child version where one person is in control.
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)
Thanks for the response. I get that it's a tough space to be in, and I appreciate you taking the time to respond, especially to a crowd that is pretty aggressive about this kind of software.
> You might not appreciate what we do, but most families use this in mature ways
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 admit the data is squishy, but we have customer support data, user reviews, and general user feedback that makes me feel very confident extreme misuse is an outlier.
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.
I do appreciate it, especially those safety features. My concern is around the kind of power imbalances within families that make it very difficult for it to actually be used in mature ways. The 'bubbles' feature sounds great, except the parent knows it's been turned off. I saw your other comment and checked out your TikTok, from a quote there: "This is the middle ground. If parents didn’t get notified, they would go to more aggressive and restrictive apps."
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.
Style note: may I suggest prefixing your comment with "I’m the founder and CEO of Life360"? You did above, but not everyone will read in that order and it's useful context.
It's not for "no reason" if the apps actually enable this kind of thing. It's not like any of this is new and something the poor companies making those apps couldn't know is happening.
It'd be interesting to see what their features are.
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 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.