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Sex Traffickers Used America’s Favorite Family Safety App To Control Victims

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Life360’s CEO says he’s never heard of his parenting app being used by sex traffickers to monitor the location of their victims. But Forbes obtained evidence that the app and others like it have been used as digital “leashes.”


Earlier this year, an 18-year-old Amazon employee brought a tip to the San Diego Police Department: prior to working for the tech giant, she had been forced into sex work when she was 17. Her alleged trafficker told her that she had to work six days a week and earn at least $1,000 a day, according to a search warrant obtained by Forbes. Text messages also showed her alleged trafficker forced her to do something else: install an app called Life360 on her phone.

The app, which claims over 50 million active users across 195 countries, is among the most popular family safety apps in America. It lets parents and kids know where each family member is located at all times, displaying their live coordinates on a map. But, according to nine federal cases dating back to at least 2018, it has also been used by sexual predators to monitor and control their victims. And privacy and trafficking experts say such misuse is hardly an anomaly; it’s becoming an issue with other apps like it including Apple’s “Find My Friends” and Google’s “Find My Phone” tools.

“The use of GPS technology to track trafficking victims has increased substantially as technology evolves,” Joe Scaramucci, a human trafficking investigator from Waco, Texas, told Forbes. “Traffickers often use built-in GPS tracking, as well as secondary apps such as Life360, or even social media apps like Snapchat to be their eyes and know where their victims are.”


“It has never once come up at an exec level.”

Chris Hulls, CEO of Life360

Though Life360 has provided data to U.S. attorneys prosecuting sex trafficking, company CEO Chris Hulls initially told Forbes he wasn’t aware of the app being used in that context. “It has never once come up at an exec level,” he said. He later confirmed, however, that in the last eight months, Life360 has had four law enforcement requests for data related to sex trafficking investigations. He said, however, that the company receives between three and five police requests for information every day, meaning sex trafficking-related cases were “a fraction of one percent of our total requests.”

While his legal team handled law enforcement requests, “this specific concern has not been escalated to our board or leadership team, likely due to its rarity,” Hulls said. He added that the company had a “proactive stance on collaborating with law enforcement in cases where our platform is used illegally, actively working to bring perpetrators to justice.”

Not every case requires police to get data from Life360, though. Justin Herdman, a former DOJ attorney who last year prosecuted a trafficking case where the app was used in Ohio, said “information as to use of apps can come from a variety of sources – seized mobile phones that are then searched pursuant to a warrant; victim or witness statements about the use of apps; admissions by the defendant; and records available from the service provider.

“Speaking generally of Life360 or other monitoring applications, like we see with any other technology, there is no obstacle to enterprising criminals using that technology for illicit means.”


How a family app is turned into a tool for abuse

Founded in 2007 by Hulls and Alex Haro, who is currently the cofounder and chief technology officer at a personal loans startup, Life360 has become one of the biggest parenting apps on the market, worth $600 million. It grew even larger in 2021 when it spent $200 million to acquire Tile, producer of an AirTag-like device for tracking items and individuals. In March, the company posted record annual growth in active users in 2022 with 13 million added that year. Traded on the Australian Stock Exchange, the California-based company recently announced a $90 million loss, though boasted revenues of $230 million for the full year 2022.

Most of Life360’s revenue is largely driven by subscriptions from parents who want to be able to locate their children. “Best way ever to reduce anxiety and the constant stress from worrying about loved ones’ safety and whereabouts,” reads one recent review for the Android app.


“Life360 turned the victim’s cell phone into an electronic leash.”

U.S. attorney Samuel Stefanki

As one of the biggest family safety apps in the world, it’s long drawn scrutiny from those concerned about its location tracking tools being used by domestic and child abusers. Few examples of abuse have been made public before, but federal case records obtained by Forbes show that Life360 has been used in the trafficking and grooming of both adults and children, where victims were told to download the app and forced to rejoin if they tried to leave their circle.

In 2022, the Justice Department convicted Sacramento resident Robert Pierre Duncan for trafficking a 17-year-old girl in Oakland and San Francisco. In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors wrote that he used Life360 to follow “her every move” and “track how long [the victim] was in a car and where she was moving in search of sex buyers.” In statements to the court, U.S. attorney Samuel Stefanki claimed “Life360 turned [the victim’s] cell phone into an electronic leash. Life360 allowed Mr. Duncan to keep constant surveillance on her.”


“Locked away in a box”

In 2019, the Justice Department provided a Florida court with statements from victims of Alston Williams, who allegedly used Life360 to monitor the minors and adults he was accused of trafficking between 2008 and 2018. (He later received a life sentence for his trafficking crimes.) “I’ve spent the majority of my adolescence and much of my adult life locked away in a box with Mr. Williams holding the key,” one victim wrote. Another added, “Williams controlled everything from what I wore to how I spoke, even when I could go outside and make me sleep with men. If I didn’t follow everything, he would tell me I would suffer the consequences.”

Though CEO Hulls is also one of three board members who sit on Life360’s risk management committee — alongside board member Randi Zuckerberg, founder of Zuckerberg Media and sister to Facebook founder Mark — he maintained the issue had never been raised to senior leadership in his 16 years at the company. Others inside Life360 were aware, however, at least as far back as 2019. In the Williams case, the government obtained records directly from Life360. When law enforcement approaches a tech company to ask for information, they typically have to provide information on the relevant case to the company’s counsel. Hulls didn’t respond to a question about how much the company knew about Williams’ use of the app. Zuckerberg did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

A 2019 email, meanwhile, showed one former Life360 employee reaching out to an external party, Kim Mehlman-Orozco, who exclusively consults and provides legal testimony on issues of sex trafficking for various tech companies. The email, provided by Mehlman-Orozco, didn’t spell out any specific concerns about traffickers’ use of Life360, though they indicated she was to be brought in for initial discussions about potential work. No work went ahead, however, according to Mehlman-Orozco, who otherwise declined to comment on her discussions with the company due to a non-disclosure agreement.

She told Forbes, however, that it appeared Life360 was little different from any other tech company that has to deal with illegal use of their product. “It doesn’t matter what business it is, any app, any platform can be used by a trafficker and in a way that is unwitting to the proprietor,” Mehlman-Orozco said. In the Williams case, for instance, he also used a less popular GPS tracking app, Glympse, to monitor his victims, according to court documents. (Glympse hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. Snap said that live locations were only updated if the app was open.)

Mehlman-Orozco said preventing traffickers was complex and fraught with risk. In some cases, she had seen sex workers using Life360 to stay safe by sharing their location with friends. “What happens if you are reporting somebody who’s not engaging in trafficking but they’re engaged in consenting adult commercial sex? What if they’re engaged in survival sex, and you just criminalized a mother who came out of an abusive situation?” she added.“You just want to make sure that any intervention you put in place doesn’t do more harm than good.”

Mehlman-Orozco said that tech companies should do a “root cause analysis,” which would involve looking at the empirical evidence from individual trafficking instances to make informed policy changes. Hulls didn’t respond to questions about what interventions, if any, he would make now he was aware of traffickers using Life360.

Yet the company has acted on other potential abuses of its technology that it claims haven’t manifested in reality. Last year, Life360 said it would fine users $1 million if they were convicted of stalking others with a Tile device without the victim’s knowledge or consent.

That was despite Hulls previously saying on Hacker News in 2022 that “actual reports of stalking via our devices … is essentially zero.”

At the same time, Hulls is aware of the risks his business faces, writing on the same forum, “I know our very existence is controversial.”

The same could be said for any app that collects vast amounts of location information from smartphones. “Our privacy and safety are menaced by the widespread collection and sale of precise location information generated by our phone apps,” said EFF senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz. “It is easy for bad actors to get it and use it against us. We need new legal protections.”

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