Apps you sign up for to find the best price for gas, or keep track of your family’s safety, could be tracking something else and selling location and motion data to insurance companies.
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“The quotes I was getting just didn’t make sense to me,” Larry Johnson told Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray about his hunt for car insurance.
With a rising credit score and no accidents, Johnson expected to find a lower rate, not higher quotes.
“He told me that I had a low insurance score, and I didn’t know what that meant,” Johnson said.
For six years now, Johnson and his family have been big fans of the Life360 app.
“My whole family uses it. We have kids that are driving, that go to school, so we want to keep up where everybody is,” he said.
But he has now learned the app was also keeping track of his family’s driving.
“It’s shocking. And it feels like a violation almost. I don’t mind signing up for something when I know what I’m getting myself into,” Johnson said.
A lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges a data broker called Arity embedded tracking technology in popular apps including Life360 and GasBuddy without telling consumers what was happening.
The lawsuit alleges “when a consumer downloaded the third-party app onto their phone, they also unwittingly downloaded defendants’ software ... Defendants could monitor the consumer’s location and movement in real-time.”
“The personal data of millions of Americans was sold to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent in violation of the law,” Paxton said.
“We have no way of knowing how this is going to be used against us,” said online privacy expert Sarah Geoghegan.
Geoghegan is an attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center and says confusing and lengthy terms of service notifications don’t give companies free reign with your data.
“You’re opting into an app that is supposed to be about family safety. You don’t understand that that means through many, like down the ecosystem, down the data chain, that that actually is your car insurance company,” Geoghegan said.
While you likely have never heard of Arity, you probably have heard of its owner, Allstate insurance.
Allstate doesn’t just use the data itself, but Arity sells to other insurance companies too.
“You’re getting similar quotes from similar insurance companies because they’re pulling from the database,” Johnson said.
And how good even is that data?
Tina Marie Johnson opted in to the safe driving app through her insurer until seeing it in action.
“Last year, alone, my rates went up three times. And I have no accidents, no speeding tickets, no nothing,” Johnson said,
Johnson says the app regularly dings her for unsafe driving for her car’s automatic breaking. It’s a safety feature on the vehicle she cannot control.
Then there was the time she said she was using a handicapped scooter to get around inside the grocery store. The app thought she was erratically driving a vehicle on the road.
“It was reading me drive. And I’m like, wait a minute. What’s going on here?” Johnson said.
When we reached out to Arity, they pointed us to an exhibit in their legal filing in the Texas lawsuit.
It is a graphic showing that consumers allow location data and motion data to be shared, when they sign up for Life360.
Larry Johnson does not think that is enough.
“It’s saying they’re sharing your information, but it’s not really telling you that the information that they share is going to affect you down the line and cost you more money,” Johnson said.
In a statement, an Arity spokesperson told us “Consumers who choose to share driving data through Arity-powered apps can access emergency assistance, track fuel efficiency and unlock personalized insurance rates after a clear notice and explicit opt-in process.”
But Geoghegan says users on these other apps do not understand where their data is going.
“A user would fully expect that this app would use some of their information for the purposes of the app, but you would not expect that a data broker is going to be processing this information then sharing it with an insurance company to ultimately charge you a higher price,” Geoghegan said.
In its legal response to the Texas lawsuit Arity claimed, “The Arity Companies are separate and distinct legal entities from The Allstate Corporation and its insurance company affiliates.”
But when Channel 2 Action News reached out to Arity for a comment, it was an Allstate representative with an Allstate email address who responded.
Larry Johnson ended up deleting Life360 from his phone and several other apps after looking closer at their terms of service.
“I look for location, I look for tracking data, and I look to see what they do with that data and if I can opt out or not. And if I can’t, then I don’t use the app,” he said.
Privacy experts say current law does not do enough.
Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and a Louisiana Republican just introduced a bill, “The DELETE Act,” that would allow consumers to request data brokers delete this information and even allow you to join a “do not track” list.
“Data brokers are buying, collecting and reselling vast amounts of personal information about all of us without our consent. This bipartisan bill is about returning control of our personal data to us, the American people,” Ossoff said.
We also reached out to GasBuddy and Life360. Neither responded to requests for comment.
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