<story><title>Popular Family Safety App Life360 Selling Precise Location Data on Its Users</title><url>https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>missedthecue</author><text>Think about this for just half a second though -- What would be the value in buying location data on someone&amp;#x27;s Tile? Phone location data is valuable because it tells you where a human being with a wallet is.&lt;p&gt;If someone attaches a Tile to something (say their backpack), what&amp;#x27;s the use in buying that location data? Are you going to try to show location based ads to someone&amp;#x27;s backpack that they accidentally left in the library?</text></item><item><author>mahrain</author><text>&amp;quot;On Nov. 22, Life360 also announced plans to buy Tile, a tracking device company that helps find lost items. Hulls said the company doesn’t have plans to sell data from Tile devices.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I thought this sounded familiar. Combined with the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, for IoT devices you should therefore not only consider the current owner and its policies, but also future ownership?&lt;p&gt;This will make it even harder for me to buy anything from an IoT startup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djrogers</author><text>You’ve missed the point - the Tile app &lt;i&gt;agressively&lt;/i&gt; pushes users to enable always-on location, which is not the norm for iOS apps, so Tile knows where your phone is all the time.&lt;p&gt;It’s not about the bluetooth tags themselves.</text></comment>
<story><title>Popular Family Safety App Life360 Selling Precise Location Data on Its Users</title><url>https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>missedthecue</author><text>Think about this for just half a second though -- What would be the value in buying location data on someone&amp;#x27;s Tile? Phone location data is valuable because it tells you where a human being with a wallet is.&lt;p&gt;If someone attaches a Tile to something (say their backpack), what&amp;#x27;s the use in buying that location data? Are you going to try to show location based ads to someone&amp;#x27;s backpack that they accidentally left in the library?</text></item><item><author>mahrain</author><text>&amp;quot;On Nov. 22, Life360 also announced plans to buy Tile, a tracking device company that helps find lost items. Hulls said the company doesn’t have plans to sell data from Tile devices.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I thought this sounded familiar. Combined with the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, for IoT devices you should therefore not only consider the current owner and its policies, but also future ownership?&lt;p&gt;This will make it even harder for me to buy anything from an IoT startup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wlesieutre</author><text>99% of the time it tells you where the tile&amp;#x27;s owner is.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But couldn&amp;#x27;t you just get that data from their phone already?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;No, because the Tile is the reason those people have the phone app installed and give it location data permissions. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t expect that they&amp;#x27;re selling locations of individual Tile trackers (thought they very well might), the more resellable data that Life360 gets here is access to the locations of all Tile owners.</text></comment>