Tile buyer Life360 reportedly sells precise user location data to nearly anyone

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/12/06/tile-buyer-life360-reportedly-sells-precise-user-location-data-to-nearly-anyone

by dmitrygr • 5 years ago

106 34 5 years ago

appleinsider.com

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

Ooohhh ... That's gonna leave a mark ...

renzo882• 5 years ago

I got rid of all of my tile devices a while ago due to privacy concerns. Airtags are a vast improvement, and it's sad that google hasn't shipped an equivalent.

sixothree2• 5 years ago

You mention privacy concerns and wanting to use Google in the same paragraph.

notRobot• 5 years ago

Google is definitely no champion of privacy. But at least they don't sell your precise location data.

renzo882• 5 years ago

I didn't mention wanting to use google. I do think it's unfortunate that android users don't have a privacy protecting item tracking solution. Airtags are a wonderful product.

tyingq2• 5 years ago

The tiles do have that audible ding feature that's nice for keys, like stuck in the couch, for example.

hazebooth• 5 years ago

AirTags also have an audible sound that can be played, I use this feature for when I lose my keys

NelsonMinar• 5 years ago

The marketplace for selling personal location data to third parties should be outlawed.

nly• 5 years ago

Why would the government do that? They're probably one of their best customers

bun_at_work• 5 years ago

Why would they buy the data when they can subpoena it?

tiahura• 5 years ago

“CEO Chris Hulls said the company has "no means to confirm or deny the accuracy" of whether Life360 is a large source of location data for the industry.”

Buh-bye.

AirTag it is then. To bad they don’t have a product to compete with the tile sticker.

throwaway4220• 5 years ago

Y'know if he just said yes, I think more people will use the product knowing what they are trading for a free product

anm89• 5 years ago

This is such an insane quote. The CEO is claiming he just has no idea how a core part of the business functions and that he wouldn't be able to figure out the answer even if he wanted to meaning literally not a single person in the entire organization understands the core business.

That's a worse admission than saying you track your users in my mind. Also clearly a lie but just an insane response either way.

msla• 5 years ago

Some interesting information:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201201220754/https://www.reddi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191225060351/https://www.reddi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210609133523/https://www.washi...

HPsquared2• 5 years ago

For anyone confused by the title: Tile is a company that makes Bluetooth tracking devices.

munchler• 5 years ago

And which was acquired by Life360 last month.

Tempest19812• 5 years ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29460074 (93 comments, 3 days ago)

monkeybutton• 5 years ago

The market for personal data in the US is grotesque. Go see what Acxiom and their partners will sell you.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

Don’t worry, it’s completely anonymized. The data could be from literally ANY of the people who spend the night at your home and work where you work!

qwertyuiop12• 5 years ago

I though that I was the only guy who think this

cameldrv• 5 years ago

Yep, and then they buy your anonymized credit card history. Then they notice that a certain location trace includes a particular Starbucks that corresponds to a purchase on the anonymous credit card. You get 3-4 of these coincidences, and you can be sure that they're the same person.

Then they notice that when you open someone's app, you report a particular location, and you're also coming from a particular residential IP address. Around the same time, you access a website with a particular tracking cookie from the same IP.

Voila, they've got location history, a good portion of your web browsing history, and purchase history. It's fairly easy to pin this down to a name at that point.

This is not a theoretical thing, it's a multi billion dollar business.

ryantgtg• 5 years ago

Somehow I hadn’t heard of either Tile or Airtags until right now. Just so I understand, Tile was _not_ selling location data, but then last month they were bought by a company with a history of selling location data?

newaccount74• 5 years ago

Yes. Tile was a somewhat popular trakcking app that used a crowd-sourced network to find their tags. In recent iOS versions Apple crippled the Tile app by adding a lot of privacy settings related to location and bluetooth tracking.

Tile complained loudly when Apple released Airtags. Airtags are basically the same as the Tile trackers, except that the privacy settings that crippled the Tile app don't apply to Apple's app.

It seems that Tile realised that they have no growth potential any more since they have no chance to compete against Apple's first party solution, so all they could do is try to sell out before all their users were gone.

Tile buyer Life360 reportedly sells precise user location data to nearly anyone

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