Life360’s Acquisition Of Tile Is Upsetting The Owners Of The Geolocation Tags: Here’s What’s Happening
When it comes to personal data, including those acquired through tools and devices equipped with localization systems, storage and treatment are essential factors. Companies’ use and sale of this information can be a potentially infinite source of income, which is one more reason for those who use Tile trackers to raise their antennas and pay attention to what is happening.
Last month, the US-based tracking company was acquired by Life360, another American company specializing in providing location-based services to users worldwide. The flagship product of the latter is the app of the same name: born in 2008; it shares its coordinates, notifications, emergency messages, and more with family members, friends in their circles, and third parties who offer specific services—based on where the person is. Although, at least at first glance, everything may seem perfectly normal, what worries users and experts is a report recently released by ” The Markup,” which allegedly exposed some unscrupulous behavior on the part of society.
Tile And Life360, What Happens?
According to what is reported in the document, Life360 would be ready to sell the data recorded by the trackers of Tile’s 33 million users. An incredibly vast amount of data and users, because Tile was the first to produce the well-known tags to be applied to key rings, backpacks, and other valuables always to have traces of them and avoid any possibility of losing them forever.
Already in 2020, as pointed out by ” The Markup, “the company would have brought into its coffers 16 million dollars with the location’s sale to the users of its services. At one point the finger at Life360, there would be some workers in the sector, such as a former employee of the partner company Cuebiq. They would have confirmed that in the past, the same information would have been widely exploited for the realization of marketing campaigns, also carried out by third-party companies. Which data had been sold.
Life360, The Company’s Denial
The direct denial came from Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls. For the number 1 company, the subscribers’ data to the application are a fundamental resource for the company, indispensable for providing the free services that usually fall within the package of its best-known product.
Similarly, however, Hulls stressed that Life360 had implemented stringent policies on user privacy; the information, he explained, would not allow the identification of the person connected to them in any way. A necessary reassurance, even if it happens in these cases, may not be enough to let users sleep peacefully.
