In recent years, reliable family tracking apps have drawn the attention of business owners seeking employee GPS tracking. Life360 — a popular family safety app with over 42 million users — is a good case in point. If you’re considering using this app for your business tracking needs, this detailed Life360 review is for you.
Business owners should invest in GPS tracking apps designed exclusively for tracking employees. In this guide, we’ll explain why you shouldn’t integrate Life360 into your business’ technology stack and offer reliable employee GPS app recommendations instead.
Note: This guide was written in June 2024. We recognize that changes may have been made within the Life360 app since this article was published.
Looking for the best tracking app for business?
Timeero streamlines location, mileage, and time tracking for business.
You can download Life360 from the Google Play store and Apple App Store.
Life360 is a location-sharing and family safety app that helps you keep tabs on your family members’ whereabouts as well as monitor their driving habits. The app works flawlessly on Android and iOS (iPhone and iPad) devices and is easy to use, thanks to the intuitive and neatly organized user interface.
Life360 notifies you when a family member arrives at or leaves a location. The app can be customized to notify you when your children arrive at school or when the housekeeper gets to the grocery store. With Life360, your family members can request roadside assistance in the event they have a dead car battery, flat tire, or run out of gas mid-trip.
In addition to locating family and monitoring driving behaviors, Life360 offers digital safety tools. For example, the app can actively scour the dark web for data associated with your email address and alert you when it finds a hit.
Pros and Cons of Life360
Pros
Cons
Accurate real-time tracking
Failed security tests
Driving habit monitoring
Data privacy concerns
Effective place alerts
Doesn’t detect all crashes
Crash detection
No offline mode
Digital safety features
24/7 tracking
What does Life360 show?
Before writing this review, I spent several days using Life360 so I could understand how its features work. The information in this section is based on Life360’s performance during testing.
Let's take a look at the app's capabilities.
Ease of Use
Life360 is easy to set up and use. Every step — from creating circles and assigning roles, to setting up geofences and adding emergency contacts — was easy to complete.
The best part about using Life360 is that kids and non-tech-savvy users don’t really have to do a lot on their end for the app to work. As long as Life360 is properly configured, it tracks location in the background without the user needing to lift a finger.
It’s easy to create a circle of family members or friends on Life360.
Creating a circle and inviting members is a breeze for the head of the family. A circle is a private group of people with whom you share location data and communicate with through the Life360 app. Once you invite a member to your circle, they will need to accept the invitation and set up their phone for location tracking.
For optimal performance and location accuracy, every circle member must:
Turn on the Life360 drive detection feature
Activate crash detection
Disable power saving mode on their smartphone
Enable smartphone location (“always on”), motion activity, and push notifications
The circle administrator (admin) must also add ‘places’ to enhance Life360’s tracking efficiency. Places can be any address the family frequently visits, such as a school, church, grocery store, park, or shopping mall.
With a Life360 geofence, members are notified when someone checks in or out of a place.
Life360 allows you to create geofences, or virtual boundaries, around these places. The geofence can be as small as 250 feet or as long as 2 miles in radius. The app uses geofences to trigger place alerts and notifications.
Lastly, add emergency contacts or specify people who will be notified in case of a crash or if a circle member triggers an alert. These contacts can be anyone, including people outside your circle.
Location Tracking
Life360 uses a global positioning system (GPS), Wi-Fi, and cellular networks to track members’ locations. When circle members are located in areas with multiple Wi-Fi access points, Life360 uses Wi-Fi to pinpoint their location. When members move away from urban areas, Life360 uses GPS or cellular signals to pinpoint users’ locations.
Life360’s location services help track the precise location of each member.
During my testing, Life360 pinpointed each member's location accurately. The app also updated their location every few seconds, giving us real-time updates about an individual’s whereabouts.
Keep in mind, location accuracy depends heavily on signal strengths. When the signal is weak, such as when members are in regions located outside their cellular range, you might not get real-time location updates.
Life360 gives you peace of mind when family members are out and about. When you open the home user interface, you can see each member's location on a map. You can tap on the avatar to zoom in on the member’s precise location and gather details, such as when they arrived at the address and how long they have been there.
Place alerts notify you when a member arrives at and leaves a designated place. This removes the need to constantly open the Life360 app to monitor a member's location. For example, you will be notified when the kids get home from school or when your partner leaves the office.
Life360 provides much-needed privacy without sacrificing your safety.
Life360 recently added the Bubble feature, which adds a little bit of privacy to location tracking without sacrificing safety. Bubble temporarily shows your general location without giving away the exact address. For instance, circle members can see you’re downtown but can’t pinpoint your exact location.
Monitoring driving habits
Life360 monitors driving behaviors and encourages driver safety.
Life360 monitors the driving behaviors of circle members by using drive detection technology and phone movements. The app tracks behaviors that put the lives of circle members at risk while on the road.
Behaviors tracked include:
Phone usage: Know when a circle member texts or uses their phone while driving.
Speeding: If a member exceeds 80 Mph for at least 30 seconds, Life360 records that as overspeeding.
Hard braking: The app shows how many hard braking instances a member had while driving during a specific period of time.
Rapid acceleration: Life360 shows you when and where your circle members are hitting the gas too fast.
Life360 monitors phone orientation changes and activities like locking and unlocking the screen only if the vehicle is moving over 15 mph. Establishing a minimum driving speed prevents Life360 from recording phone usage when the vehicle is stationary or a member uses a hands-free device.
To detect driving, the vehicle must move more than half a mile at speeds exceeding 15 mph. The Life360 drive detection feature must also be on, and the phone’s battery must have more than 10% charge.
Safety Features
Drive-time safety features
Life360 also offers an array of safety features. The standout safety feature is the SOS button, which provides members with assistance during emergencies or dangerous situations. Members can utilize the SOS feature if they were to get lost in the woods, find themselves on an unfamiliar street, or have a tire burst on the freeway.
The app alerts circle members, “Samson needs help,” prompting them to take action. Life360 also has an emergency dispatcher on standby to send police to your location. Once you are out of danger, enter your PIN code to cancel the SOS.
Another helpful feature is crash detection, which relies on phone sensors to detect any significant impact when the vehicle is moving over 25 mph. If the sensors pick up a collision, Life360 will contact the driver or person involved. If the member fails to respond or needs help, Life360 alerts the emergency contacts. Circle members can tap “get direction” to find the shortest route to get to the members that need help. Life360’s live agent will also dispatch emergency services and medical assistance to the collision site.
The only downside is that Life360 may fail to pick up on some rear-end collisions, fender-benders, and other minor accidents, due to algorithm errors, phone sensor errors, network outages, and crash locations being outside cellular range.
Safety while traveling
Life360’s offers travel support which gives family members peace of mind while traveling. The agents help with emergency travel arrangements, such as car rentals, airline booking, and hotel reservations. If you lose luggage, Life360 agents will track it for you, and if you lose travel documents, they help replace them.
Beyond family safety, Life360 provides essential digital safety features such as:
Identity theft protection
Stolen phone protection
Data breach alerts
Credit monitoring
Reporting
Life360 shows a family driving summary and individual driver reports.
Life360 offers users two reports: a family driving summary and an individual driver report. The family driving report shows a weekly summary of your circle’s driving habits which include speeding, hard braking, rapid acceleration, and phone usage. The report also shows the circle's total miles driven, trips, and top speeds.
You can tap on a circle member’s profile to view information about their driving behavior. The individual report allows you to examine specific details such as when and where a hard braking event occurred.
Life360 also shows a daily summary of members’ trips. When you tap on the trip card, you can see the driving route that was taken and when the trip began and ended. You can also view the member’s driving behavior during the trip.
Life360 Privacy Concerns For Business
According to Life360’s privacy policy, the vendor collects personally identifiable information, such as device information, IP address, and device identification. It also gathers your location and personal data when you use the in-app messaging feature.
Life360 claims it may disclose the information “to select third parties and subsidiaries,” as the privacy policy outlines. While the privacy policy doesn’t state whether Life360 sells personal information, we have reason to believe the entity sells user data.
You can turn off the personal information sales button and contact customer support to prevent Life360 from selling your data.
A clause in the policy claims that Life360 doesn’t “sell personal information of members they know to be children”, meaning if you are an adult, the vendor may sell your personal information.
While you can opt out of Life360’s personal information sales by turning off the ‘personal information sales’ button, you can’t be sure the vendor will keep its word. In June 2023, the Markup revealed that the company had been selling data regarding users’ (including kids’) whereabouts.
According to the report, Life360 has been a firehose of data for renowned companies such as X-Mode, Cuebiq, Safegraph, and Allstate’s Arity. Some employees from these companies have admitted that without Life360 data, their employer's operation wouldn't run smoothly.
Life360 Pricing
Life360 has a free version and two paid plans: Gold and Platinum.
The free plan gives you a two-day location history and allows you to define two places with unlimited alerts. You also get SOS help alerts and crash detection with the free plan, but other features are restricted.
The paid version offers a seven-day free trial, which allows you to get a first-hand feel for the premium features. After the trial, you can opt for monthly or annual billing.
Below is a table of Life360’s pricing.
Should You Use Life360 For Business?
The answer is a big NO. From what I can find, the only reason a business owner would consider Life360 would be to utilize its location-tracking capabilities. While Life360 tracks location with great precision, the risks of using the app for business use outweigh the benefits.
First and foremost, the app is meant for personal use, so it lacks some essential features for businesses.
The app doesn’t offer:
team management
business reporting
mileage tracking
time tracking tools
a web dashboard
If Life360’s limited offerings aren’t a turn off, its privacy and security issues will. In 2022, the Markup put Life360 through a series of security tests by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), which advocates app security standards. While the app passed 11 tests, it failed six critical tests.
Using Life360 for business leaves your company’s and employees’ data at risk. Remember, employees can sue you for failing to protect their data — the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) lawsuit is a good case in point.
If you'd rather not risk hefty fines or face lawsuits, look into a location-tracking app that prioritizes employee privacy, such as Timeero.
Is there a better app for location tracking than Life360?
Yes, there are better Life360 alternatives for businesses. Timeero is a reliable GPS tracking app designed exclusively for business use. The app delivers accurate location, time, and mileage tracking without violating employee privacy, labor, or GPS tracking laws.
Let’s take a look at Timeero’s features and how they can benefit your business.
Real-Time location tracking
Timeero uses GPS tracking technology to verify each employee's location. The app refreshes location data every few minutes, giving you real-time updates on employees’ whereabouts. The app compiles the location details and displays them on the “Who’s Working" dashboard, giving managers a bird's-eye view of the locations of all employees that are on the clock.
Timeero lets you track the locations of your employees in real time.
Even when employees are in remote areas or out of cellular range, Timeero’s offline tracking feature continues to record their location and stores data locally. Once the employee’s device is reconnected to the internet, Timeero syncs the data to the cloud almost immediately.
Data security & privacy
As far as protecting employee privacy goes, Timeero is already ahead of the curve. The app tracks employees only when they're on the clock, protecting worker privacy. In the event an employee forgets to clock out, Timeero sends them a reminder prompting them to end their shift.
Timeero’s Segmented Tracking helps you compute the time employees spend at each address.
Segmented Tracking is a unique feature for businesses that want to get more insights into field employees’ trips. The feature tracks employees' trips and segments them based on their stops.
Timeero’s Segmented Tracking is the perfect solution for sales reps that make multiple stops along their route. Users will only need to clock in at the start of their shift, and out at the end of the day when using Segmented Tracking.
With Segmented Tracking you can see:
When a rep arrived/departed a location
How long an agent spent at a stop
Miles traveled between stops
The exact route an agent drove
IRS-compliant mileage logs
If your mobile workforce uses their personal vehicles for business related travel, you must reimburse them for the business miles they drive. Timeero uses motion-detection technology and a minimum speed threshold to record miles accurately so you can reimburse employees fairly and on time.
If you plan to use your mileage logs to claim tax write-offs, there are specific trip details that must be recorded. Timeero’s mileage logs are IRS-compliant, capturing all of the details you need come tax season.
Accurate time tracking
Features like geofencing and facial recognition eliminate off-site clock-ins, buddy punching, and other time-theft tactics. Timeero’s overtime calculator and California break tracker, help businesses enforce labor laws in their respective states and countries.
Life360 app review: Best for personal, not business use
Life360 is one of the most reliable family safety and tracking apps. In addition to location tracking, the app offers features geared towards driving and digital safety, including features such as SOS, disaster response, breakdown assistance, and crash detection.
While the app enhances family security, it does raise some serious privacy concerns for businesses. The app's failed security test and the vendor's constant habit of auctioning user data prove that Life360 isn’t ideal for business use.
Timeero will help you accurately track field employees without violating any privacy or labor laws. The app tracks employee location in real time, offers straightforward timekeeping, and accurately tracks mileage effortlessly.
Yes, Life360 accurately tracks the location of your loved ones.
Does Life360 track driving speed?
Yes, Life360 has a driving monitoring system that tracks driving speeds during each trip.
What does Life360 show?
Life360 shows each member's location and allows you to pinpoint details like a circle member’s top speed and instances of rapid acceleration, hard braking, and phone usage.
What does Life360 track?
Life360 tracks a user’s location and driving habits.
How does Life360 handle user privacy and data security?
Life360 collects sensitive personal information and may sell user data to third parties.
Samson is a mathematician turned content marketer specializing in SaaS and Tech content. He focuses on the practical aspects of software systems while keeping abreast of the industry’s cutting-edge principles to create informative and engaging content. When he’s not writing, Samson spends time playing or watching soccer.
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