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Life360: What parents need to know

Life360 is a monitoring app that uses location sharing to give parents the ability to track their children’s whereabouts and ensure they are staying safe.

Life360 logo

What is Life360?

Life360 is a location-sharing app which allows parents to stay aware of their child’s whereabouts at all times. The app also includes social features, with a group chat being included for all members on the app, meaning Life360 can serve as a central point of contact for the whole family.

Life360 is available on Android, iOS and Windows. The app can be used for free with adverts, but paid versions do exist which give far more features. These subscriptions are tiered, with a Silver plan costing £6.99/month or £59.99/year, a Gold plan costing £9.99/month or £99.99/year and a Platinum plan costing £19.99/month or £166.99/yr.

How it works

To begin using Life360, you must first create a ‘Circle’, which is a private group that will share their locations and communicate with each other. In order to add your child to the Circle, they must have Life360 downloaded on their phone. They must also have a messaging app on their phone so that you can send them a code that they will use to join the Circle.

Once your child has joined the Circle, you will be able to see their location at all times, send messages to them in the Circle chat and begin setting up a geofence. They will also be able to see your location.

Life360 parental controls

Life360 provides many features to ensure you can monitor your child’s location and activity as closely as possible. These include:

  • Live location: Members of the Circle can view each other’s live locations on a map in the app. Members can turn off their own live tracking at any time or create a temporary bubble which obscures your exact location. The app can also provide directions to get to other group members. Location history is available, with premium subscriptions getting a longer history record than the free version.
  • Group chat: Members of the family group will be given access to a group chat, where they can message each other within the app. This could be useful if you have younger children that you do not think are ready for social media yet, as it gives a secure and safe way to stay in contact.
  • Geofencing: Boundaries can be set on the map, and if your child leaves the boundary, you will receive an alert on your phone. You can have multiple boundaries set for different areas e.g. a home boundary and a school boundary.
  • SOS button: An SOS button is available on the Life360 app, for people who are going through dangerous areas. To use this function, members hold down the button while walking through a dangerous area, and then when they release the button, they have 10 seconds to enter a PIN. If they do not enter the PIN, the other members of the group and emergency services will be alerted and sent the location of the member who used the button. Entering the PIN at any point afterwards will end the SOS call.
  • Driving reports: Life360 creates driving reports for members of the Circle. These reports include stats such as speed and routes taken. It also flags dangerous behaviour like texting and opening apps while driving. This feature is useful if you have older children who have begun driving themselves. As the feature is based on phone GPS, you can also use it to see how your kid’s friends drive.

Premium versions of the app also include features such as breakdown assistance, stolen phone protection and ID theft protection.

Benefits of Life360

  • Strong location tracking services including geofencing
  • Group chat gives safe messaging option
  • Effective SOS button
  • Free version is still useful
  • Driving report makes it effective for older kids

What to watch out for

Life360 is a fantastic tool for tracking your family member’s locations, but other apps exist that allow you to view children’s locations and also keep them safe online through web filtering and app blocking. These could be better options, giving parents the ability to keep children safe both off and online.

Children can switch off their live location by turning location sharing off in their device settings. This is a concern for parents as this would invalidate the entire point of the app. Having a discussion about why you want to track your child, putting a focus on safety rather than lack of trust, will make it less likely that they turn off their location sharing.

Your location will also be visible to your children on the map. It may be tempting to turn this off, as you might not want your location being seen at all times but keeping it on will be a show of trust to your children. They will be happier for their location to be tracked if they know you are also happy to be tracked.