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Life360 alternatives that don't sell your data

Find My is the right answer if every phone in the group is an iPhone. If one of them is not, Google Maps shares your position with one named person, on a timer you set, and nobody else in your life appears on that map. For a one-off "I'm fifteen minutes away", send a Glympse link or a WhatsApp live location. Both expire on their own. All four are free in September 2026. None of them has been caught selling precise location data on 33 million people to about a dozen brokers. Life360 has.

What Life360 was caught doing

On 6 December 2021, The Markup reported that Life360 was selling precise location data on roughly 33 million users to about a dozen data brokers, among them X-Mode, Cuebiq, SafeGraph, and Arity, a division of Allstate. The company never hid the logic. CEO Chris Hulls told the reporters: "We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users." Those sales brought in $16 million in 2020, close to a fifth of revenue, plus $6 million from the Arity deal on its own. In 2016 that line was $693,000.

On 27 January 2022 the company said it would phase out all of its location data deals. It kept two. Arity stayed. Placer.ai stayed as well, with the arrangement reframed as aggregated data analytics. Quote the pledge without those two names attached and you have made Life360's promise bigger than it was.

In January 2023 a Florida teenager and his family filed a proposed class action in the Northern District of California over those sales. The complaint argued that the data "can be used to identify users and their visits to sensitive locations, including places of religious worship, places that may be used to infer an LGBTQ+ identification, domestic abuse shelters, medical facilities, and welfare and homeless shelters." I do not know how that case ended. The reporting I could verify stops at a mediation date in August 2023, and the pages promising a settlement, or an FTC order against Life360, all trace back to law-firm marketing. The FTC has brought cases against InMarket, X-Mode, Mobilewalla and Gravy Analytics, and none against Life360.

The data line did not go away either. In the Q2 2026 results published on 10 August 2026, total revenue was $159.0 million and "other revenue increased 25% YoY to $11.6 million due to higher data revenue, primarily attributable to increased data volumes resulting from user growth." Around 102.4 million monthly active users produce that volume. In June 2025 The Capitol Forum reported that since August 2024 Life360 appears to build thousands of audience "segments" out of where users go and sell them through LiveRamp's Data Marketplace, keyed to persistent pseudonymous IDs.

Then there is the ad business, which is newer than most of the comparison pages admit. Life360 launched its own advertising platform in September 2024 and added "Place Ads" in June 2025, described in its own press release as delivering "timely brand messages triggered by real-world behavior" alongside "deterministic footfall measurement that connects ad exposure to store visit uplift." Footfall measurement means the phones tell the advertiser whether the ad worked, because the phones went to the shop.

On 6 September 2026 the Google Play data safety panel says the app "may share these data types with third parties: Location and Health and fitness", and the listing carries "Contains ads · In-app purchases". Apple's privacy label for version 26.33.0 lists "Data Used to Track You: Identifiers" and files precise and coarse location under third-party advertising. If you would rather read the policy yourself, be warned: Tom's Guide measured it in April 2026 at 9,949 words and a Hemingway grade of 14, which their reviewer glossed as needing a college degree to fully understand.

The battery half of the complaint

Google offers ten autocomplete endings for "life360 alternative". Two of them are complaints: "that don't drain battery" and "that don't sell data". The battery one has receipts. A Play review from 19 November 2024, marked helpful by 146 people, reads: "It's a great idea but it absolutely hammers your battery use... Will have to limit it because it makes my phone unusable (because it's always on low battery!)" Another from 27 April 2025, helpful to 287 people: "the app requires the battery saver to be turned off on all phones in order to accurately track positions... That is a HORRIBLE design feature."

Switching the optimiser off is the only way to keep the dot accurate, which is why the app asks for it. Any app holding a live position has to keep the GPS radio and a network connection awake in the background, which is the exact behaviour Android's battery optimiser exists to kill. So Life360 asks. Every phone in the circle gets an exemption, and the reviewer from the year before ends up describing a phone that is always on low battery.

The alternatives that do not sell your location

Find My is the best of these if the wall does not apply to you, and for a lot of people it does. From an r/apps thread in November 2025: "My entire friend group uses Find My and I'm just... not there." Apple's own support page for sharing your location runs through an hour, the end of the day and indefinitely as the duration options, and never mentions Android once.

Google Maps is what you want if you searched for how to share location with only one person, which is a query people really type. You tap that person's profile, pick a number of hours or leave it running until you turn it off, and nobody else in your life is on the map. The share link is the blunter version and lasts up to 24 hours. Whoever opens it also sees your battery percentage, so send it to a person rather than a group chat.

Glympse has been sending expiring links since 2008. Its App Store listing says your data is never sold and shows 4.8 stars across 49,000 ratings, and the Android build shipped an update on 25 August 2026. Two caveats. The Android listing carries ads and in-app purchases, and an App Store reviewer reports that it no longer sends your location unless the app is open in the foreground, which kills it for anything longer than a drive across town.

Bump comes from the team that built Zenly, now working at Amo, and its Android listing was updated on 3 September 2026, so somebody is still maintaining it. I have not installed it. If Zenly is the thing you actually miss, I went through what replaced it for people who never wanted the live map separately.

What the comparison pages leave out

The listicle on impulsec.com, updated on 24 March 2026, opens with FamiSafe and GeoZilla, then works down through Bark, Family Link and Microsoft Family Safety. Five monitoring products. Its other two picks are Google Maps and Find My, which is to say the two things already on the phone. Tom's Guide does the best reporting of the lot, reads both privacy policies and counts the words, and still sets two trackers side by side before sending the reader to a $3.59-a-month VPN. Both answer the same question: which tracker do you install instead.

The threads I read carry a second complaint underneath the privacy one, and it always has the same shape: a friend was in your city and you heard about it from an Instagram story. Days late. Someone on r/apps wrote in October 2019 that "Some of the 'Find a Friend' mobile phone apps seem to be data mining in disguise..." Three years on, in r/androidapps, the objection had moved to whether the dot is even true: "What's the point of a location sharing app if you can hide or fake your location anytime you want". A map tells you where a friend is standing right now. It cannot tell you they are booked into Lisbon in October, because that trip has not happened yet and their phone has nothing to report about it.

What I built instead, and what it cannot do

I built Will U Be There for the October-in-Lisbon question, which needs no coordinate from anybody. You type a city and two dates. Your friends do the same. When two trips land within 100 km of each other and the dates touch, both phones get a push notification, and your friend sees that city and those dates and nothing else. The rest of your trip list stays invisible to everyone, including the friend you just matched with, permanently.

The app has no live location, and that is architecture. There is no version 1.1 where I flip a switch and start collecting coordinates. It never asks for background GPS and never receives a coordinate from your phone, so it cannot show anyone where you are standing: the database has no column for it. The battery question goes with it, since nothing has to stay awake between your trips.

For friends who will not install anything, a group has a single link. Anyone who opens it and adds a trip shows up in your matches with no friend request at all, up to 200 people per group. That is the fix for the problem I hear most, which is friends who refuse to download another app. It runs on iPhone and Android, which is the whole reason the Find My wall is in the table above.

It will not replace a tracker. If what you want is your fifteen-year-old's dot on a map on the way home from school, Find My or Life360 is the honest recommendation. This app is useless to you. It is also not a trip planner: there are no bookings, no route maps and no split-the-bill screen.

The privacy claims are checkable. Data sits in Supabase's eu-west-1 region in Ireland, crash diagnostics go to Sentry's Frankfurt region, and there is no ad SDK in the build because there are no ads. "Download my data" hands you a JSON file with your trips, friends, groups and events in it. Deleting your account is a screen inside the app with a 30-day grace period, and the full list of what gets collected and where it goes sits on the privacy page.

For each trip the app also pulls concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying and inside your dates, drawn from over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries and more than 360 sources: tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses, a few ticketing platforms. Coverage is uneven. Berlin and Amsterdam are dense, and a mid-size city in Portugal might give you a handful of listings with half of them markets.

It is free on the App Store and Google Play, in 17 languages, with nothing to buy inside it. If you miss a friend by a few days, up to about a week, it flags the near miss too, which is how you find out that moving a Thursday flight to Saturday would have put the two of you in Lisbon on the same weekend.