Shadow looms over Life360 tracking app success

“We estimate Life360 is exposed to a $US12 billion global TAM [total addressable market] with a large opportunity to expand its product suite, grow average revenue per paying circle, increase payer conversion, and lift penetration rates outside of the US.”

Royal Bank of Canada sees even bigger horizons for growth thanks to the app’s treasure trove of data on user driving habits.

In the future, it expects Life360 will use its driver data to provide sales leads for car insurance companies, allowing insurance offers to be tailored and brokered to users based on their unique driving information. Car insurance was a $US790 billion ($1.2 trillion) market last year.

But there is always a dark side when it comes to tracking technology, and it was captured, aptly enough, in an episode of British science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror that was apparently inspired by Life360.

The episode, “Arkangel”, deals with a single mother, worried about her daughter’s safety, signing up for a device that monitors the girl’s location and more.

“I heard the writers used us as inspiration, but Black Mirror as a whole is all about tech taken to the extreme in its bad uses,” Hulls told The Australian Financial Review before the company’s listing on the ASX in 2019.

“We all know the phrase ‘that’s like playing with fire’, but the point is that we wouldn’t have evolved from caveman times if we didn’t have fire, so I think that is a good analogy that there are many nefarious uses for what we do, as there is for almost every type of tech out there.”

You don’t need fictional TV series to see what can go wrong with the technology through nefarious use.

Forbes magazine published a story in April on how Life360, “America’s favourite safety app”, is being used by sex traffickers to control victims.

“The use of GPS technology to track trafficking victims has increased substantially as technology evolves,” Joe Scaramucci, a human trafficking investigator from Waco in Texas, told Forbes.

‘In a user base of this magnitude, there will inevitably be outlier cases of technology misuse.’

Chris Hulls, Life360 chief executive

“Traffickers often use built-in GPS tracking, as well as secondary apps such as Life360, or even social media apps like Snapchat, to be their eyes and know where their victims are.”

In response to the story, Hulls told this masthead that Life360 served more than 50 million active users and had been directly instrumental in saving thousands of lives.

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“In a user base of this magnitude, there will inevitably be outlier cases of technology misuse,” he said.

“We will actively work with law enforcement agencies to help bring perpetrators to justice and help secure convictions.”

But some of the controversy is in greyer areas, such as parents who keep monitoring their children at college, as the Washington Post reported in 2019.

It led to TikTok memes of life under the rule of Life360 and short videos on how to circumvent it. “I feel that this is really unhealthy for both my parents and me,” one person wrote on Reddit.

Hulls also commented on the TikTok phenomenon and the unhealthy relationships it conveys.

“TikTok woke me up to the fact that there are these 10 per cent of parents who use the app in borderline unhealthy ways and I think we can meaningfully improve our features to encourage better family communication both ways and that would be a win for our business and also society,” he said.

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