Why You Should STOP Using Life360!

this week was an interesting week for users of the life 360 platform with some revelations coming to light about the selling of location data of millions of its users and this definitely serves as an important reminder of why keeping your data private is so important and why these companies don't care about you or your privacy so let's talk about that and what you can do to make sure your data stays exactly that yours thank you to pcbway for sponsoring this video pcboy are a one-stop shop for all of your electronic project needs offering high quality pcb printing services cnc machining 3d printing injection molding sheet metal fabrication and everything else you need to make your diy project become a reality check them out with the link in the video description so if you haven't seen this already it has been reported last week that popular location sharing app life360 has been selling the location data of millions of its users to various data brokers including the location data of children this news which was reported by the markup comes as two former life 360 employees speak out about their former employer due to privacy and security concerns and to shed more light on the data industry as a whole now if you are unfamiliar with what life360 is or what they do they are known for their location sharing app allowing friends and family to share their precise real-time location with each other for safety purposes which does have a legitimate use such as being able to keep track of your children or making sure that your wife gets home safely due to its driving speed and crash detection features which is all fine there is certainly value in that for families who want to do it the problem comes is when you take that location data and in particular the location data of children and you sell that data to whoever wants to buy it and do who knows what with that information which is frankly appalling my audience is certainly going to be skewed towards the privacy first side of things but even if you are the type of person who thinks i have nothing to hide and so i don't care who has my data ask yourself if you would still feel the same way with these companies having access to the location of your family and children it's also not unreasonable to imagine that one of these companies holding your data could suffer a massive breach where all of your location and personal information was hacked and put on the internet and available for anyone to access on the dark web do you think you would still be happy with that we've certainly seen a lot of data breaches over the years and that certainly turns this whole thing into a far more scary situation life 368 apparently has 33 million active users right now or at least it did before this news broke and apparently the selling of this data made them 16 million dollars last year alone and is one of their biggest streams of revenue for their company now neither of these are confirmed so take them for what you will but apparently a former engineer from x mode which is a company that collects data from users and resells it to advertisers said that the location data received from life360 was among their most valuable offerings and a former employee from cubic apparently joked that they wouldn't be able to run its marketing campaigns without life 360's constant flow of data actually one other quote i wanted to just share with you was from life360 ceo chris hulls who said in response to the markup we see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core life 360 services free for the majority of our users including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives and i think that perfectly reinforces the analogy that we all know if something is free you are probably the product clearly there is some exceptions to this rule with the open source projects like home assistant where privacy is one of the key foundations and principles of the project where all of the code is literally online and available for anyone to view but if you are using a service or a product for free that is not open source then it is highly likely that your data is being used in some way now why am i talking about this story in the first place and how does this translate across to us as smart home users well firstly it's good to actually raise awareness about topics like this in general but when it comes to smart homes in particular it does serve as an important reminder to be aware of what services you are signing up for it's very easy to look at an app like life360 see that it has all the features that you want and need and then because it's free you overlook certain aspects like what are they doing with my data and how can they provide this service for free chances are if it's a free app that connects to someone else's cloud then it's likely that your data is being used to make the service profitable in some way when it comes to life360 specifically there is two things that you need to be aware of here firstly that the life360 app has become a pretty popular integration with home assistant users for present detection and using within automations to make stuff happen when you arrive home or leave for the day and the second thing is it was announced recently that life 360 is buying bluetooth tracker company tile which works with quite a few smartphone companies including al exa google home and home assistant 2. so if you are a user of either of these services from life 360 and you are against this kind of behavior which hopefully you are and you should be what can you actually do about this luckily because of the nature of home assistant there is tons of integrations that you can use to replace live 360 including the native home assistant app which can easily track your location using gps without compromising your privacy in fact i've done a previous video detailing four different methods that you can use for presence detection in home assistant all of which can be used in automations to replace life 360. a replacement for tile is a little more difficult there doesn't seem to be quite as many options out there but the obvious one would be apple air tags which could potentially be an even better option than tile now we should mention that just because life 360 has bought tile or is going to buy tile doesn't necessarily mean that they will start selling tiles data in fact they tile a ceo claims that there is no plans to do so but the whole life 360 thing doesn't exactly inspire confidence and i would personally recommend airing on the side of caution so that's it for me a little reminder and psa on why it's so important to keep your data private and some things to watch out for when using many of these free integrations and services out there and this is certainly not limited to the life 360 thing that we saw earlier in the week but something to be wary of when you use any bit of software or indeed product that is free but as we're going to do it for me from this video from me for me from this video if you would like to support the channel then you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is very much appreciated make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video you

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 10,671

Keywords: life360, home assistant life360, home assistant tile, tile, tile life360, smart home life360, smart home tile, tile tracker, tile bluetooth tracker, home assistant presence

Id: pMV3RFdu9is

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021