The image is called OneMapToRuleThemAll.
The marketing image of acquiring Tile is a reminder of how much data it has.
The image is from Life360.
The company that bills its product as a family safety service has been selling location data on its 31 million customers since the beginning of the year.
The data broker companies that former employees worked for had Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the phone location tracking industry. The company announced in November that it had reached a deal to acquire the popular item tracking company Tile for $205 million and that it would be pursuing a dual public listing in the US.
There are no plans to sell Tile's data.
Hulls said that their philosophy was to be open with their users and give them control. Users would need to opt out of the app settings in order to prevent sharing of their personal data.
The acquisition will maintain Tile as an independent entity led by CEO Prober and will connect Tile accounts to the Life360 app. He said that the APIs could allow customers to combine all family members in one interface.
Today is the beginning of a new chapter. I am excited to announce that Life360 is acquiring thetileapp. This is an amazing moment in our vision of being the world's leading platform for safety and location services. Welcome to the team Tile!
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Chris Hulls is on November 23, 2021.
Life360 sold location data in 2016 and generated almost $700,000. This would become a more important revenue stream for the company. Chris Hulls, the company's CEO, told The Verge that the company brought in about $16 million in 2020, even as it reported a loss of $16.3 million last year.
A Tile representative said that the company does not sell or monetize personal data and that they have the full support of Life360. Hulls told The Markup that there are no plans to sell Tile's data.
Companies in the location data industry pay for access to Life360's customer tracking. A former Cuebiq employee was quoted in the report as joking that their former employer wouldn't be able to operate its marketing campaign without Life360 data. A former X-Mode employee said that Life360 had the most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision.
The Markup asked Hulls about the claim that his company is the largest hub for the phone location tracking industry, but he said that they have no means to confirm or deny the accuracy. Hulls told The Markup that Life360 does not share information with government entities, but once the data is purchased, they can't comment on the practices of other companies.
Hulls continued in the email response that Life360 does not allow tracing back information to individual customers. Hulls says that Life360 follows privacy practices that are industry best, and that he is not aware of any instance where a customer was re- identified.
Data brokers depend on people not knowing where things are coming from.
Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the EFF, told The Verge that most apps don't reveal what companies they're sharing data with because they aren't required to. The companies that pass the data on refuse to tell their customers how it was obtained, and the apps aren't telling users where their data is going. Data brokers that deal in location data consider the apps that they collect data from to be trade secrets and won't reveal that to anyone.
The EFF has seen situations where the government has obtained location data from a broker, but the government has no idea where the data is coming from. Secrecy is the bread and butter of these companies. Information brokers depend on people not knowing where things are coming from, where they are going, and how they are getting their data.
The full privacy policy of Life360.
We may share your personal information, including your precise location data, driving sensor data, unique identifiers or AD IDs and other data with our partners, such as Cuebiq and its Partners, for their marketing and business purposes.
Hulls told me that there is a list of companies that can purchase data from Life360 and that the data is not identifiable. This data is put on a server that allows companies to process it and then distribute it to other parties. Hulls said that no one can just buy someones random data. A majority of Life360's customers are using the free application experience and the company explains how some services are kept free by subsidizing revenues from location and ad data sales on its website.
If we found that the average user had a problem with it, we would reexamine it.
Hulls feels that Life360 giving precise location data equates to the workings of targeted ads and how the industry as a whole, down to media sites like The Verge, is doing this. The New York Times had a dashboard that used phone exhaust data. Hulls believes that the services Life360 provides are valuable and compared his company to Credit Karma. They take what is pretty personal information, they have established trust that is okay, they give you credit card offers, and we want to do the same with insurance in a very transparent way.
In response to the anonymization of location data, Cyphers pointed out that it isn't enough to separate a device ID from a real person. The phone that stays where you sleep at night, then follows you to your workplace in the morning, and spends weekends at the places you hang out is unlikely to belong to anyone else.
In comparison to services like Credit Karma or insurers that have launched tracking apps or devices, Cyphers pointed out that people join Credit Karma frequently with the sole intent of finding a credit card or loan. Signing up for a family safety app may not be aware of how much money is changing hands, how much data is being collected, and how those goals could be realigned.
We asked Hulls if he thinks Life360 has competitors that have not been scrutinized, and he wrote in an email that the positioning of us as some giant shadow player is simply wrong. If we found that the average user had a problem with it, we would re-evaluate, but we haven't had users complain about it. In a follow-up email, he asks if users have reported they were unaware of how their data is used and shared, and if most of the ones that come in ask technical questions about our opt-out.
Hulls said that there is enough data available to identify individuals, but that the company has never done it. He thinks that most companies are not going to break their contract and law as casually as he thinks that companies would. Hulls would not confirm active investigations, but he did say that if X-Mode were confirmed to have sold data identifiable data to the government, it would be sued by partner companies.
The demand for user data is seen as an opportunity by companies like Life360, according to a report by the Markup. Hulls stated to The Markup that selling location data is an important part of their business model that allows them to keep the core Life360 services free.
While Life360 is a safety company that sells peace of mind and perhaps a better offer on your insurance, it is also like many other companies where mining the data generated by users could ultimately be more valuable.
Real-time location information is sensitive enough that it's hard to trust anyone to keep it out of the wrong hands, even though the company and Tile have said there are no plans to sell Tile tracker data. With the ability to opt out after registration, rushed decisions to get through the process fast could determine who owns your information.
