Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.
Started in 2013 as Drunk Mode, a novelty app that “prevents users from drunk dialing,” X-Mode was reportedly banned from the big app stores after Vice’s Motherboard reported that the company was selling location data from Muslim prayer apps like Muslim Pro to U.S. government contractors associated with national security, raising concerns about unconstitutional government surveillance.
Public records show that X-Mode received at least $423,000 from the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Intelligence Agency for location data between 2019 and 2020. The
— source themarkup.org | Jon Keegan, Alfred Ng | Dec 6, 2021