John,

BREAKING: Life360, a “family safety” app used by over 33 million people worldwide, is one of the largest suppliers of user data, including that of children, to the data brokering industry. Data brokers are notorious for selling intimate private information on everyday people to literally anyone who wants to buy it—including government agencies. Tell lawmakers to pass a federal data privacy law and ban data brokering.

Parents think they’re using Life360 to keep their kids safe, but by doing so they’re compromising sensitive information like precise location data.¹ The company has been identified as one of the largest suppliers of precise location data to 12 of the largest data brokering companies.

Data brokering is an insidious shadow market of surveillance capitalism. The $159 billion industry buys data from internet service providers, companies that own websites, devices, apps, and more, and also scrapes data from public databases. They then sell access to the data to anyone with the money to buy it, including government agencies which would have needed a warrant to collect data on their own.

Data brokers also sell data to companies that use algorithms to make judgments that impact employment,² education,³ healthcare,⁴ legal cases,⁵ insurance,⁶ loans,⁷ housing,⁸ and more. Research has consistently demonstrated that these judgements discriminate against marginalized groups, especially Black and brown people.

Selling intimate personal data is invasive, immoral, and dangerous, especially when it comes to children. Kids have a right to grow up without being tracked everywhere they go, and parents shouldn’t have to worry about a so-called safety app selling every bit of data it collects. Tell Congress to step up and pass a federal data privacy law.

For the right to privacy,

Erica & the Team at ❤️Fight

1. The Markup: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user

2. Thomson Reuters: https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/ai-enabled-anti-black-bias

3. GovTech: https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/enrollment-algorithms-raise-equity-concerns-in-higher-ed

4. Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6

5. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/26/algorithms-racial-bias-offenders-florida

6. Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-joi-ito-insurance-algorithms/

7. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/digital-mortgages.html

8. Consumer Reports: https://www.consumerreports.org/algorithmic-bias/tenant-screening-reports-make-it-hard-to-bounce-back-from-tough-times/

Fight for the Future works to protect your rights in the digital age.