[t0mbstone]

My wife and I use Life360 every day for giving us notifications whenever we leave work, arrive at home, arrive at our kid's school, etc.

We use these tracking notifications for all sorts of things. For example, my wife won't start prepping dinner until she gets the notification that I've left work.

I will be very annoyed if Apple's changes break tools like Life360. I opted into the tracking for a reason. I don't need Apple making privacy decisions for me. I'm more than capable of making the decision myself.

[NobodyNada]

FYI, Life360 sells your location information, driving habits, and registration details to third-parties including advertisers and insurance companies. From their privacy policy (https://www.life360.com/privacy_policy/):

> One of the 3rd parties who we share data with is Arity. [...] Arity may use this data to [...] provide and service insurance products, including using personal data to perform profiling activities and to provide you with relevant and personalized advertising.

[EDIT] The "more detailed" privacy policy is more explicit (https://life360.helpshift.com/a/life360-family-locator/?s=pr...):

> We share your personal information, driving event data and other information to Arity 875, LLC (“Arity”), which provides driving analytics behavior services to enable us to provide certain functionalities of the Service, such as driving event history. Arity may also use this information to calculate discounts, rewards or pricing offers by third parties such as insurance companies, and to perform various profiling activities in order to produce a score which may predict the level of driver riskiness, and to develop its risk predictive models for its own analytics purposes. You hereby acknowledge and consent to the collection and use of your data and information by Arity as set out in this policy and in Arity’s privacy policy, which is located at https://www.arity.com/privacy.

So, in other words, they sell your driving information along with your name, phone number, email address, etc. to insurance companies so that they can adjust the prices you're charged based on how you drive.

[pcora]

I don't think that they are trying to make privacy decisions for you, but they are making sure that an API created for a specific reason stops being abused by many other use cases then the original one.

* edit: typo

[pwinnski]

What does Life360 provide that Apple's own 'Find My Friends' app does not? That's what my partner and I use to track locations.

[entee]

Find My Friends rarely works reliably for me. It regularly says the person can't be located, while if I use services like WhatsApp this never happens. It's also way slow, I've tried meeting people while we were both on the move and missed them because the update rate was too slow. I don't use Life360, but Find My Friends hasn't worked for me for a long time.

[simcop2387]

Actively notifying you about changes in location, rather than it being a passive thing that the other party has to check.

[acdha]

Find Friends also allows you to request notifications when someone leaves or arrives at a location. It's great for timing when to start dinner.

[morpheuskafka]

Android cross compatibility is the only real feature I can think of.

[cromwellian]

I also used Life360 to geofence my kids and get notifications when they leave school and return home. It actually caught my son running away from school one time, and when the guidance counselor couldn't find him, I was able to locate him outside the school wandering around the streets.

[jakear]

Not a parent, but a recent kid, and I’d hate my parents having that kind of control over me. Though I guess I’d just turn off the phone. Which then makes me even more unreachable than if the tracking had never been instituted in the first place.

[jefftk]

A lot of these tools depend a lot on the age of the kid and how they're used.

I have five year old, and they're nearly to the point where they could go the the park by themself if they had some sort of device where (a) we could tell where they were and (b) they could easily contact us plus (c) it was socially acceptable to do this. This would be using tracking to allow our kid more freedom, since the alternatives are (1) go to the park on our schedule and under full supervision and (2) stay home.

As kids get older we would want to pull back that kind of supervision, so that by the time they're 12 or so we can get their location with something active and visible to them, and by the time they're 15 or so we can just call or text them.

The technology can be used in a lot of ways, and whether it makes kids more or less free depends on parenting and culture.

[hombre_fatal]

Running away from school is pretty serious. When I was a kid, I'd expect some serious repercussions from my father if I did such a thing. The phone just made the consequences arrive sooner, but it's not the root of the issue. And the commenter didn't give us nearly enough information to judge them, so let's not.

[vonseel]

It doesn’t sound like anyone is judging here. And I agree, I would hate being tracked on my phone. I don’t share my location permanently with anyone. That just seems odd for adults to do. I was a kid before all of this was possible, but I’ve seen the tracking relatives have on their kids and it abhors me.

[cromwellian]

If you have a kid who is being monitored for depression and in therapy, it is a totally different story, and the monitoring is completely transparent, my son is not unaware of it, in fact, he specifically has an agreement not to disable location permissions for that app.

[gnicholas]

Isn’t this possible with Apple’s Find Friends functionality?

EDIT: downvote because why?

[cromwellian]

I didn't downvote you, but Find Friends doesn't geo-fence. So unless I'm actively tracking him, I won't know.

I only want to be notified if he leaves the school premises during school hours, I don't want to micromanage his location otherwise.

[gnicholas]

Thanks, I understand that the feature is enabled at a more granular level in some of these third-party apps. I don't have smartphone-aged kids, so thankfully I've not dug into these details yet...

[facethrowaway]

Sometimes I forget that this is a community full of engineers, many of whom have poor social skills.

Invest less time in apps and more time in trying to understand your kids.

[hombre_fatal]

Speaking of poor social skills, let's give each other the benefit of the doubt here, please. You have no clue what they're dealing with nor how well they understand their kid.

[cromwellian]

My son and I have a fantastically close relationship, we talk about everything, including deeply negative feelings. But unless you know how anxiety panic attacks work, don't make comments like this.

Regardless of the relationship and understanding I have with my kids, being triggered at school to ditch it from a panic attack is not a rational understanding.

It is precisely because my son and I have a good relationship, that we can come to an agreement that he needs outside supervision and monitoring.

I attend group therapy seminars with trouble teens. Some of them have been the victim of serious abuse, like revenge porn by peers on campus. This is not something "social skills" solve.

Your own comment to me suggests you lack the very social skills you claim others lack.

[RandallBrown]

I can't see any reason that Life360 would be using a VOIP API for location tracking when Apple's own location tracking APIs work quite well.

[paggle]

You may be more than capable of making the decision yourself, but most people are not (cf Facebook's user count), so it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to set rules to minimize risk rather than enabling the most capable users.

Lewis Hamilton could probably safely drive at 150 miles an hour on Highway 101, that doesn't mean that the speed limit should be 150.