Life360 is an app that allows family and friends to share their locations with one another. It offers live-location tracking, roadside assistance, and crash detection. It is an application of the dreams of mothers past. A mother today can feel much more secure knowing she will be alerted if her child is in a car crash or if they were picked up on their walk home from school. She doesn't hesitate to install it on her middle schooler's phone. She considers it a small invasion of her child's privacy, but the benefits are well worth it to her. What she doesn't know is that by tracking her child through Life360, she has unwittingly given permission for dozens of companies to as well.
In 2002 Mark Monomier published a book titled Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy. One book review excerpt reads "Monmonier explores thermal mapping, traffic cameras, credit-card databases, and other new tools that may make our lives uncomfortably transparent.” Companies and the government have been looking for ways to track our locations and gain from out data for decades now. The rise of the internet and mobile apps has just made it exponentially easier for them. The Markup suggests "The location data industry is worth an estimated $12 billion dollars," and that Life360 alone sells the location data of families and children to approximately 12 big data companies who then sell it to anyone interested.
Mobillewalla is one of these big data brokers. Mobillewalla boasts how it collects data from over 1.9 billion devices across 40+ countries, tracking 50 billion mobile signals daily. It's website sells features like "High-Value Customer Identification" and "Churn Analysis." Mobilewalla can connect online and offline behavior to create a persistent user identity and profile. The mother could ban her child from using social media platforms like Instagram, but Mobilewalla can create a shadow profile of her child just by attaching this location data they're tracking to family photos on the mother's private Facebook account before the child has even interacted with any online content.
Surveillance apathy is a real thing. It is an acceptance that everything about us as individuals is constantly monitored, and there’s nothing we can do about it. According to a 2017 privacy survey, around 70% of people were more concerned about their privacy than they were five years prior, yet for many, that concern doesn’t translate to action. Especially when the ways our data is being used is so mysterious. Theis helpless feeling so many people experience is how Cambridge Analytica was able to collect data through Facebook quizzes and use it illegally. Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from Facebook profiles without telling users, this information was then used to impact the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This event shows that our data can be used against us in the most extreme ways.
For the mother using Life360, her focus is on her child’s safety. Life360’s focus is on selling her child’s data. She may feel apathetic to this data tracking, but she should strive to be conscious of this in order to protect her and her child. This apathy toward surveillance can allow data brokers and tech companies to continue collecting and using our data in ways we’d never expect.
Life360 recently stopped selling data to the dozen companies it had been. It now only sells individual location data to an AI learner. It still sells aggregate location data to a major data broker. Life360 is also not the only location tracking app selling location data.
It is up to us to fight against data tracking, as Mobillewalla’s identity mission statement states it will do anything to maintain the “data-ecosystem.”
"11 Ways You Are Being Watched." University of Chicago Press, 2002, https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/534278.html.
Credits:
Created with images by • Kittiphat - Aerial view from above of traffic on the elevated expressway with futuristic autonomous, driverless cars using artificial intelligence computer network and satellite gps for navigation • SHOTPRIME STUDIO - portrait of a man • Kaspars Grinvalds - Happy woman excited about notifications on social media