In December, The Markup revealed that Life360 was one of the largest sources of raw location data for the industry. Its customers included X-Mode, a location data broker that sold data to U.S. military contractors; SafeGraph, a company that Sen. Ron Wyden has flagged as a “data broker of concern”; and Cuebiq, one of the largest location data brokers in the industry. It needed for them to be publicly shamed before this change was made. No-one pays this amount of money for data without having some really good use for it.
In 2020, location data sales made up nearly 20 percent of Life360’s revenue, netting the company $16 million, according to its financial records. It made an additional $6 million through its deal with Arity, a “mobility data and analytics” firm owned by Allstate, which is disclosed as a data partner in Life360’s privacy policy.
I’ll bet that many large-scale free services fund their services through some or other sale of their user data.
See https://themarkup.org/privacy/2022/01/27/life360-says-it-will-stop-selling-precise-location-data
#technology #privacy #location