This gives parents a moment to pause and reconsider whether it’s really enough of an emergency to break their teen’s trust and privacy.
Before the bubble is burst, the app will ask the user if they’re sure they want to do so, reminding them also that the member will be notified about the bubble being burst. This could encourage a teen to increase their direct communication with a parent in order to reassure them that they are safe, rather than risk their parent turning tracking back on.īut parents are actively discouraged in the app from popping the bubbles out of fear. A parent can also choose to override the setting and pop the bubble for any reason - like if they don’t hear from the teen for a long period of time or suspect the teen may be unsafe. The bubble will burst if a car crash or other emergency is detected, the company says.
Plus, parents need to respect that teens deserve to have more freedom to make choices, even if they will sometimes break the rules and then have to suffer the consequences.Ī location bubble isn’t un-poppable, however. The expectation is that parents and teens should communicate with one another, not rely on cyberstalking. But without popping that bubble, the parents wouldn’t know if their teenager was at a friend’s house, out driving around, at a park, out shopping, and so on. But parents won’t be able to see precisely where their teen is located, other than somewhere in the bubble.įor example, a teen could tell their parents they were hanging out with some friends in a given part of town after school, then set a bubble accordingly. After this temporary bubble is created, Life360’s other existing safety and messaging features will remain enabled. To set a bubble, the user can adjust the radius on the map anywhere from 1 to 25 miles in diameter, for a given period of time of 1 to 6 hours. As a result of these conversations, the company has now launched a new privacy-respecting feature: “Bubbles.”īubbles work by allowing any Life360 Circle member to share a circle representing their generalized location instead of their exact whereabouts. He created a TikTok account and started a dialogue with the app’s younger users. But Life360 CEO Chris Hulls took a different approach. Life360 could have ignored the criticism - after all, teens aren’t the app’s paying subscribers it’s the parents. While the app can alleviate parental fears when setting younger kids loose in the neighborhood, Life360’s teenage users have hated the app’s location-tracking features so much that avoiding and dissing the app quickly became a TikTok meme. Helicopter parenting turned into surveillance with the debut of family-tracking apps like Life360.
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