The company that just acquired Tile will still share aggregated data with two partners
Life360, a safety and tracking service that helps its users to keep tabs on the whereabouts of family and friends who also use the app, is scaling back its user data sales business to just two partners: Allstate Arity and Placer.ai (via The Markup). This news comes after the company announced a deal to acquire the item tracker Tile in November and a December report from The Markup said Life360 was the source of precise location data to as many as a dozen data brokers. That report cited sources within the industry who called Life360 one of the largest sources of data.
Life360 says Tile data will “never” be monetized or sold
At the time, CEO Chris Hulls pushed back on that assertion, saying that “with approximately 30 million active users, we account for a very small portion of the overall market,” while acknowledging that its data sales brought in about $16 million in 2020. The Markup reported that represented about 20 percent of its overall revenue for the year, even before including $6 million made from its partnership with Allstate Arity. For 2021, the company reported 42 percent revenue growth year-on-year, which included the previous data collection business contracts.
Life360 has a new data collection deal with Placer.ai, which the company says is the start of its exit from the “traditional” data broker business, which will only include “aggregated analytics” that it says will help retail businesses understand customers better. From Life360’s quarterly activity report released yesterday:
We asked Life360 CEO Chris Hulls in December what his company would do if its (soon to be ex-) partners, like X-mode or Cuebiq, did sell identifiable data to the government — and Hulls responded saying partners would be sued for breaching their contract.
Allstate Arity is the second of the two exceptions in Life360’s scaling back of location tracking. Functionally, Allstate would need to know how fast the device in a car is traveling, calculate the G-forces of an accident, and ultimately signal back the location of the crash to authorities for the safety features to work. How it will use the trip information for data insights other than driver safety remains to be seen.
User participation in sharing their aggregated data to Placer.ai is optional, however, it will remain as an opt-out action in the app’s settings.
