Life360 markets itself as family safety but functions as comprehensive location surveillance. The app provides real-time location tracking, historical location data, driving behavior analysis, and crash detection. While positioned as mutual family sharing, power dynamics mean it's often used for parent-to-child surveillance without meaningful consent.
Life360 tracks precise GPS location continuously, creating comprehensive movement profiles. Every trip, stop, and location is logged and retained, building complete records of children's physical movements.
Premium features include extensive location history. Parents can review weeks or months of movement data, seeing everywhere a child has been, how long they stayed, and what routes they took.
The app monitors speed, hard braking, phone usage while driving, and crash detection. Teen drivers face comprehensive surveillance that tracks every aspect of their driving behavior for parental review.
Life360 has faced scrutiny for selling location data to data brokers. While practices may have changed, the terms reserve broad rights to use aggregated location data for various purposes.
Terms frame usage as "voluntary" but don't address the power imbalance in parent-child relationships. Children often can't meaningfully refuse installation or accurately understand what they're consenting to.
Crash detection and emergency SOS features provide genuine safety value, automatically alerting family members to potential emergencies.
The app can be configured for mutual family location sharing rather than one-way surveillance, though usage patterns often differ from this ideal.