According to The Markup’s report, it turns out that third-party app Life360 is selling user location data to “anyone willing to buy”. The application allows parents to track their children’s movements and see their location information via their mobile phones. It is known to have a user base of around 33 million people using Life360.
Life360 was actually one of the premium apps that Samsung offered for free to Galaxy S6 series customers years ago. So it’s no surprise that countless Galaxy smartphone users tend to continue using the app on newer Galaxy devices today.
It has been revealed thanks to former employees who chose to remain anonymous that location data was sold by Life360 without regard to the misuse of sensitive information. A former Cuebiq employee quoted by The Markup says that without the constant stream of location data provided by Life360, Cuebiq cannot run its marketing campaigns.
“We have not identified any instances of tracking individuals through our data partners,” Life360 officials told The Markup.
Technically speaking, Life360 already has a disclaimer that states “Your location data may be shared with Business Partners for crash detection, research, analytics, attribution and custom advertising purposes”. It is also possible for users to disable the sale of location data through their privacy settings. But the disclaimer we’re talking about doesn’t clearly communicate this to the user. In addition, the fact that the application “sells” the data to anyone, as stated, means that personal information can be obtained by almost anyone.
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