A Houston father was able to rescue his daughter after using her phone to track her location. Over the weekend, the 15-year-old took the dog for a walk and never came home. The father then used the parental control features to find her location, about 2 miles away. When we arrived, he found a pickup truck containing his daughter, their dog, and the kidnapper. The daughter was able to escape with help from her father. Police arrested the kidnapper "without incident."
Definitely something that should be talked about more, because it kind of plays into this whole idea that privacy doesn’t have to mean privacy from everybody.
There are countless legitimate use-cases where you might want to share your live location with someone else, but if we were blanket against any sort of GPS sharing in any form, we’d end up ignoring the ways you can share your live location with only the person you intend to share it with, instead of using some crappy app like Life360 that doesn’t adequately protect your data from the service provider.
I’m not sure if there are any cross-platform E2EE location sharing apps though
I think the entire idea behind privacy is having control over exactly who you share data with. So anything can be private as long as you’re fully aware and consent to it.
The problem comes when, say, a parent forces their kid against their will to turn on location tracking, which I think is a privacy invasion. They might also not realize what data they’re actually sending to who, like I think most people using these services might only think they’re sharing with their family members but not realize it could be accessible to their service itself.
Ding ding ding! This is what big tech uses as logic/excuse for their terrible practices and remain technically in the right of sound logic even though it doesn’t seem like it ought to be the case. People often don’t see it this way so thanks for saying it like this and bringing it up.
While this full statement is true, the important thing to remember is that there are many (especially big tech) services where it is impossible for you to ever be fully aware and consent to how your data is used.
So there are inherently non-private services out there, not just anything can be made private. I think sometimes people forget the informed consent required caveat when we talk about privacy being about control.
Yeah definitely, if you can’t fully grasp where your data is going then you can’t ever really consent. Even Google having access to your files in Google Drive for example, there are so many employees at Google and so many systems and procedures that we can’t possibly know who exactly has access to it at any given time, which is why it’s really frustrating that they don’t offer E2EE for it.
The other reason is that it’s not in their their business model. It’s simply not what they are about. Google/Alphabet is an ad company with products where revenue and profit is made from advertisers. But you know this.. I’m just saying.
This seems like a good place to revisit privacy-respecting replacements for Life360. Find My seems adequate on iOS if it is truly E2EE, but there are open source replacements if that doesn’t suit your threat model.
The only one I’ve used is Home Assistant, but in my (limited) experience it doesn’t update location very frequently. Some searching on these forums pointed me to some threads:
Not at all. Maybe when they’re a teenager and can actually understand this kind of thing but no it is perfectly appropriate to force your kid to use this kind of thing. It is your kid after all and you should do what you think is best. That’s assuming they have a smartphone though, which they shouldn’t.
Edit: To add to this if you make your kid use Life360 or anything else that isn’t actually private or safe you are a bad parent though.
Although getting kidnapped by strangers has become an extremely common phobia in America due to the media, it is, and always has been exceedingly rare; approximately 1/720,000 , or 0.00013% of children ever get abducted like this. For comparison, this is more than three times more rare than being born as a conjoined twin.
Deaths by lightning strikes and elevators are also far more common than such abductions. The vast, vast majority of reported kidnappings are from custody disputes or forgetting their child somewhere.
-
When building threat models, it is important to focus on realistic and common threats. Not ones that you see on the news the most, but ones that are most likely to happen. The news features the most rare and frightening stories and portrays them as common or growing trends, not because they’re common, but because that’s what sells views.
There are unfortunately no truly private location methods; GPS, cell tower providers can track you. In fact some cell companies sell location information to data brokers just as sharing apps do. This is a problem governments face - a military would love to have a way to accurately guide its missiles and drones without the possibility of hostile detection and jamming, for example.
In the rare kidnapping case OP described, the police would of been able to quickly locate her phone via cell tower data anyways, as has been done in previous criminal cases. There are organizational mechanisms for this.
I do understand ordinary location sharing apps make matters worse by making it a point to sell your data. Maybe there is a market for an open-source, basic and reliable location sharing app.
I think the issue is that with most types of surveillance, there’s at least one party that’s not consenting to it. I wouldn’t count location tracking where everyone has agreed to it as surveillance either, but even if you don’t agree with my definition, I think we can probably agree that most types of surveillance on the public are non-consensual. Probably surveillance on your own home where you warn people ahead of time that there’s a camera watching them before they come over is the most ethical type.
