Life360’s Surveillance as Care

“Helicopter parenting” is a pejorative term that has been commonly used since the 1980s to describe a parenting style that is overbearing and excessively involved in a child’s life. It denotes parents that wake their kids up for class, complain to teachers about their child’s bad grades, and generally shoulder responsibilities that should likely be independently managed by children themselves. More importantly, the hyper-presence that characterizes helicopter parenting comes with a kind of psychological absence. Author Katie Roiphe describes it as a “…confusion of overinvolvement with stability.”

The intentions of helicopter parents are almost always good, but their actions can be a misaligned response to societal fears about the safety and wellbeing of their children. Fears about safety come with the parenting territory, of course, and historically these fears have occasionally been stoked by the media; consider the famous decades-old late-night TV public service admonition, “It’s 10PM. Do you know where your children are?” But today, with the advent of the digital era and ubiquitous access to the Internet and mobile devices, these cultural fears are even more widespread.

Parenting fears have been embedded in the milieu for a long time, but it was only recently that these fears were paired with a sophisticated technology that enabled them. Life360 is an application that allows parents to track the location of their children in the name of child safety. A widely adopted app, it has helped create a market for “surveillance as care”; the use of tracking technologies as a method of expressing care and protection towards others. Life360 has effectively extended the purview of perceived parental responsibility via its tracking capabilities and branding as a method to keep children safe. But the way this new definition of parental care frames the power of location data is dubious. Life360 is a technological approach that, as Roiphe suggested of helicopter-parenting, conflates mere location data with security. The app also degrades the autonomy of those it monitors and comes with a host of privacy concerns.

There are some ways that Life360 could be altered and managed to be less harmful, but this will require careful analysis of the ethical and social harms it reinforces.

Released in 2008, Life360 is a location-based tracking service that is designed for friends and family. Its most relevant application that we’ll focus on is for parents to monitor their children. The app’s marketing emphasizes this purpose, highlighting that “Life360 gives parents a break.” This “break” is ostensibly rooted in parent’s 24/7 ability to access the location of their children and be notified of their movements. Life360’s features include multiple methods of location monitoring, which are worth briefly mentioning:

• The “Location History” feature tracks the location of users at all times. Location history is derived using GPS, Bluetooth, wi-fi, and standard location tracking technology to update the app. Notably, the app uses “precise location data” instead of “approximate location data,” which allows the app to determine someone’s location within 3 meters.

• The ability to determine location is packaged with other features of the app, such as “Place Alerts.” Place Alerts are a concept also referred to as “geofencing” that trigger a notification in the app when a device enters or leaves a particular geographic area. Life360 place alerts thus allow parents to be proactively and automatically notified when their children move to different areas.

• Similarly, Life360 has what they call “Drive Detection,” which uses the same automatic and proactive notification structure for information on a tracked driver. Speed, acceleration, breaking, and phone usage can all be tracked by parents. It also markets an extension of these services that pair this capability with more traditional crash protection services, roadside towing, etc. The ability to track both location and speed suggests that Life360’s definition of child safety includes both the knowledge of a child’s location as well as the child’s behavior and interactions with vehicles. Vehicles represent another vector of danger that the app purports to alleviate.

This logic of Life360’s role in addressing persistent dangers is extended through other features of the app. If a child’s phone has low battery, the app can prompt parents to let their child know to charge their phone so that tracking can continue. The ceaselessness of Life360’s tracking is framed as instrumental for its ideal operation. Anything that prevents the app’s use is considered problematic.

One feature that is notably different from the other continuous streams of location information is Life360’s SOS feature. By pressing a big red SOS button, a child’s location is sent to pre-identified users such as friends and family (called their “circle”), emergency contacts, and, depending on one’s membership subscription, a 24/7 emergency dispatcher. This SOS feature is both initiated by the user rather than by the parent or surveillant and gives the user a chance to change their mind after sending out the notification. For children, this user-driven control of the feature is a markedly more autonomous use of the Life360 platform. The contact and information provided is a choice and is not the result of constant monitoring.

Given all these features that Life360 packages in its app, it has become increasingly used by parents and normalized as a technology embedded in family social relationships. According to the company, over 33 million people use its app worldwide, including at least a third of American households. The app’s increasing ubiquity is built on its reputation for increasing users’ safety. Life360 claims that most surveyed adults and children feel safer when their location is monitored. It is then easy to view Life360 as a market response to natural concerns that parents have for their children’s safety.

But what that view misses are the ways Life360 purposefully constructs a cultural definition of safety to justify its own capabilities. It also misses the steep tradeoffs that are made when parents choose to use Life360 as a part of their relationships with their children.

There, There

Life360 reinforces its branding as a safety app through the way that it self-defines and markets a concept of safety to parents. In the logic of Life360, knowing someone’s location is equated to ensuring their security. The app paints stability and control of a child’s well-being as something that can be computed, visualized, and continuously reevaluated. In reality, knowing someone’s location does not necessarily confirm safety. Threats are posed to children when they are still within parents’ definition of safe locations. For example, 93% of child victims of sexual assault knew their offender. In a similar vein, friends and relatives are responsible for facilitating over half of prescription pain killer misuse. People that are familiar and that reside in familiar locations can pose even greater degrees of risk to children than unfamiliar people and places. Risks to children’s safety are not the comfortable binary that Life360 asserts.

By tracking things like the location of crime reports (which includes unconfirmed reports), the app gives the illusion that it plays a role in managing risk. Namely, Life360 wants parents to conceive of risk as a phenomenon located in specific places and people. These examples show that this is not only incorrect, but that it could actually distort a responsible psychological framing of what safety is. In a study of environmental security measures on a college campus, one scholar found that trying to manage the spaces around individuals can enable one form of safety consciousness (specifically that “strangers” are dangerous) by disabling another (that university members are dangerous). Heuristics around what is considered safe and what is not may be rooted in psychological tradeoffs that Life360 asserts for the user according to the logic of its platform.

Life360 might be more sensibly thought of as an app that continuously creates and resolves anxiety over risks. Tracking loved ones may primarily be to reduce one’s own anxieties rather than increasing the safety of the person being tracked. The capability of the app to collect location as a datapoint necessarily defines “danger” as being when a child is in an unplanned or unexpected place. Life360 then exploits this conception of danger to encourage parents to play an active role in monitoring and mitigating it. Parents are left constantly chasing phantoms of risk that are only resolved through changes in their children’s behavior.

This surveillance relationship degrades the autonomy of children on multiple fronts. Life360 inhibits freedom of moral action and the ability to conduct independent ethical reasoning, which is a notable issue with surveillance technologies. This is particularly problematic for children that are going through developmental periods characterized by “…self-exploration, increasing self-reliance, and establishing a relationship with their parents in which they are viewed as an equal adult.” As such, apps like Life360 have potentially harmful chilling effects on children’s behavior.

Life360 brands its tool as providing independence to children; the company implies that their app quells helicopter parenting that usually involves active calls and communications by instead having the app run in the background. The thought is that asynchronous surveillance updates, that are constantly streaming and accessible, are less invasive. On the contrary, Life360 enables proactive intervention because the surveillance app adds additional data points to monitor and instigate interactions over data points that do not exist without it. The app removes the autonomy of a child to freely decide whether to respond to requests for their location or to respond with additional context. This attitude towards children’s autonomy fits seamlessly with the notion of helicopter parenting, which has been shown to have negative consequences for young adults.

There are of course no guidelines or bounds to the use of Life360 past younger phases of a child’s life into early adulthood, which is why so many college students remain tracked by their parents. This continued surveillance leads to college students often objecting to use of the app, creating a culture of children (or in this case, young adults) trying to protest and circumvent the app. What results from all this is a decay of trust between children and parents, another side effect of outsourcing parent-child communication, expectation setting, and social negotiation to a phone app.

When Life360 pitches its app as a way to “give parents a break”, it directly suggests a deferral of responsibility from parents to its tracking technology. It affords parents two troubling things; an expectation that they can always know the location of children and family members and a consequent responsibility to know this information, because the app enables this knowledge. This is a responsibility which, of course, did not exist before the app created it.

This is one of the clearest distinctions between Life360 and other continual surveillance applications such as Apple’s FindMyFriends. Products like FindMyFriends are a part of Apple’s larger technological architecture that emphasizes privacy and user consent. Apple also frames FindMyFriends as just one of many utilities that a user can choose. Meanwhile, Life360’s very existence is predicated on its ability to sell memberships, which means that the company is always incentivized to keep its product relevant. The app maintains relevance by generating new anxieties that it classifies under the definition of safety, constantly finding new angles of potential harm to market to users. This is a perverse incentive that FindMyFriends does not evoke. Second, Life360 then ironically affords parents psychological distance from these responsibilities by providing a constantly engaged app that does the legwork. The app bolsters both the psychological absence characteristic of helicopter parenting and the faux-stability Roiphe described.

Perhaps worse than these intangible tradeoffs parents make for constant streams of their children’s information are the privacy misuses of the data being collected. Life360 sold the precise location data of people being tracked by its app to over a dozen data brokers that could use and resell the data to any buyer. Accordingly, parents who purchased Life360 to provide safety and security for their children actually compromised that security by choosing an app that made their children’s location information commercially available on the open market. After The Markup’s investigative reporters revealed Life 360’s practices, Life360 has since stopped selling user data to some data brokers but continues to sell aggregated data on users to two data brokers, a number that may increase in the future. The fact that the data is ostensibly aggregated does not mean that the data cannot be used to identify individuals. Aggregated datasets can simply be combined with other available data sets to re-identify users. The app also tracks anyone that is physically with a user by proxy, which is particularly consequential given the amount of data that can be combined and used by third parties to identify people and infer their locations.

This general unconsciousness of privacy is a theme of the app’s Faustian bargain for locational information. This is perhaps best exemplified by Life360’s feature called “Bubbles.” The feature shows the person being tracked as a bubble overlaid on top of a map to draw a geographic boundary where the user wants to share only his or her “general” location (as opposed to the precise location that is normally shown). How long and extensive a user’s location can be only approximately identified is preset by parents and surveillants. Life360 markets this feature as a way to “set a period of time for a little privacy,” with the tag line that “Safety + space = win-win.” Yet the app, by definition, restricts digital privacy and space. In the same way the app generates a definition of safety and then negotiates the role of its app within that definition, it does the same with the definition of privacy.

Digging Out

Improvements that could be made to Life360’s features and its uses range from technical capabilities to cultural changes that determine how it is used. First, changes can be made to the way Life360 functions that preserve children’s autonomy to remain preserved. The app could move away from constant tracking and expand the SOS features that it already has available (which are currently not emphasized as the core capability of the app). The model of SOS emergency-only alerts that are consciously activated by the sender, rather than constantly monitored by the surveillant, could be used to retain the same benefits of location information in a way that is less intrusive.

Juxtaposing children with another vulnerable group like the elderly helps demonstrate the way in which a technology like Life360 could better balance autonomy with care for those in need. There are many similarities between the autonomy of children and the autonomy of elderly adults. The extent to which autonomy should be granted to children is an understandably controversial area, but most agree that children must be allowed some autonomy to have a good upbringing. Similarly, enabling the autonomy of the elderly is a longstanding challenge in contexts of medical care, primarily when physical or mental disabilities inhibit them from exercising independent behavior or judgments. A core difference between the two is that children are born into an asymmetric parent-child power dynamic in which they slowly develop the physical abilities and cognitive faculties to become an equal with their parents. Conversely, elderly adults have already been granted this status by their families and by society, while having only in later years begun to lose this independent status. Paternalism and restrictions lead to elderly adults losing autonomy they once had, while children are newly negotiating their autonomy for the first time. This changes what kinds of surveillance would be considered appropriate as the surveillance methods are situated in different power dynamics.

There are noted parallels to the philosophy behind technologies like Life360 and those that are designed for monitoring the elderly, such as Amazon’s elder care platform Alexa Together. Alexa Together can be instituted and implemented by consenting elderly adults and can be used in case of an emergency. It has many of the same features as Life360 but emphasizes its emergency response and notification systems. This idea of self-initiated outreach for assistance is a standard and accepted definition of safety and security. Products like Alexa Together mostly function under the same understanding of safety that emergency phone lines and older panic-button technologies fall under. Life360 is a product that is parent-initiated and self-defined but could be modified to reflect this more autonomy-preserving relationship of care for children.

Moreover, Life360 could make more age-conscious features that allow for a continual renegotiation of the role of the app in the parent-child relationship, downgrading the degree of surveillance over time as children get older and more independent. It could do this across a spectrum of app-driven interventions with varying levels of invasiveness. Since Life360 retains the age of the children it monitors, the app could regularly prompt parents or even outright disable specific features as the child gets older such as the use of precise location. Aside from removing features at these age thresholds entirely, Life360 could change the default settings of the app that could then force parents to opt-in to specific features that were once enabled thereby allowing parents to reconsider their use. As children get older, the data that is retained by the app should also be reconsidered. For example, if the app collected age and location data on a child, it could be deleted when the child turns 18. In this way both the capabilities of Life360 and the information derived from those capabilities could be tempered to the increasing independence of children.

It is crucial to acknowledge that Life360 has taken advantage of the clearly precarious perception of public safety. After all, Life360’s study claims that many people do feel safer when they are having their location monitored. A lot of people clearly feel insecure enough in their environments to warrant this degree of constant surveillance. This is a legitimate sentiment and public safety concerns are a clear area where policy changes are needed to create safer environments. 24/7 monitoring of location is just one response to anxieties over children’s safety that could plausibly be replaced with other community features (such as emergency blue light boxes like those on many American college campuses) or indirectly through methods of crime prevention. Raising children today carries far fewer risks to safety than decades ago, but a strong perception of danger to children still exists. The problem is thus not only about actually increasing child safety, but more so increasing the perception of child safety for parents. Life360’s anxiety-generating notifications and the new standards they have self-interestedly set for safety have undoubtedly contributed to parental fears. So, modifications to the app along with prudent supplements to the technology can chart an appealing and more judicious way forward.

Life360 markets surveillance as care but redefines “care” in its own terms and by the logic of its own tracking capabilities. It then places itself as a key instrument in fulfilling that duty of care and renders itself useful by offering a plethora of events and interactive features that suggest danger, which it then compels surveillants to participate in and resolve. This dynamic plays out amid (and is primarily marketed among) an asymmetrical power relation between parents and children where meaningful consent is often not prioritized. Parents using Life360 in this powerful way resembles the use of surveillance by the state in the name of safety, which infringes on the autonomy and privacy of the surveilled without individual negotiation of the terms. In the case of state surveillance though, no social or familial relationships need to be negotiated or tended to, whereas Life360 can both bring those into jeopardy or leverage them to create overbearing standards of surveillance and monitoring. Life360 sells surveillance as care in the domain of locational safety but erodes meaningful care across many other domains. It is a steep tradeoff. The key to surveillance yielding care is meaningful consent from all parties involved. This means that the prospect of Life360’s 24/7 surveillance should not be taken lightly or be justified as a parental intervention that is analogous to other less invasive methods of watching over children. Technologies like Life360 ought to be considered for what they are: a new standard of privacy invasion justified under a new and distinct definition of care.

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