What makes this worse is, it just announced that it was going to acquire Tile. That’s right, the Bluetooth Tracking company, Tile. Which is going to give them a whole lot more location tracking to sell to advertisers. Now Life360 says it has no plans to sell Tile data, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Life360’s ToS clearly states that they sell data
Now, to play the opposite side of the equation, Life360 does clearly state in its Terms of Service that they may sell user data. But as is the case with most ToS, most users likely did not read it before signing up for the app. It’s also very unlikely that most users are aware of just how much data is sold, and how accurate that data might be. Life360 says that it only sells the location data of users that are ages 13 and up. Life360’s founder and CEO, Chris Hulls has said that the company has not sold any of this data to government organizations involved with law enforcement. Hulls also stated that he would support any legislation that would make data-selling more transparent to the user. With that said, it’s probably time to uninstall Life360 from your smartphone. Given the fact that there are over 33 million users of this app, it’s likely installed on a lot of phones right now. And the best way to keep them from selling your location data, is to stop using their app. It may not be quite time to give up on Tile just yet, but you may want to look elsewhere for that too. Thankfully, Samsung and Apple have created their own competitors to Tile, which work really well.
