Opinion: Life360 allows parents to keep an eye on their children
January 17, 2020
Life360, which is an app where family members can track each other, has acquired a lot of positive and negative opinions from children and parents. Some believe it allows parents to be overprotective or just plain creepy. Yet, considering how often kids leave their houses, the bad results are endless. They could get in a car accident, or even be kidnapped; parents need a way to keep an eye on them and the tracking app Life360 allows them to do this.
In order to ensure safety, the Life360 app sends notifications to everyone in the “circle”. There are many safety services that can be used; such as roadside assistance, help alert, car crash detection and the app can even make the user aware of any crime that has occurred near him or her in the past 30 days. The app also keeps track of the top speed of the car and a driving report of total miles, amount of drives, phone usage while driving and more throughout the week. These notifications can help inform parents on general safety and driving habits.
Constantly following a student by their GPS location, Life360 has many ways to inform the student and parent on what each are respectively doing and or where they are when a person arrives or leaves a destination. A push notification is sent to all devices except the person leaving or arriving. Users can easily customize the names of places arrived at by simply clicking “Add Place” on the Life360 app. Sending notifications can make it easier for the user to know the time the student or parent arrived. Life360 can be used as a tool to keep families in touch with each other when a phone call may not be available, according to Shaping youth, an organization that “uses the power of media for positive change.” Parents will know that their child has gotten to their destination safely and an estimated time of how long it took them.
Though some students may find Life360 too overprotective, or stalker-like, many high school students still have Snapchat with the “Snap Map” feature turned on, which can also show the locations of where everyone is and what they are doing. The only difference is one that Life360 is used for safety, and the other is used socially.Life360 is useful for parents or students who want to keep an eye on their family and loved ones. In order to do this, they are tracked and sent notifications for certain things, but this is a necessity for safety. Life360 is available for download on Apple’s IOS, Google’s Android or Blackberry operating systems.
