Barking mad about ruff, ruff, ruff housing exclusion.
App's earning power
Life360 is an app that lets parents track their teenager in realtime detail with options to set alert for things such as, "is this person exceeding the speed limit?" and 18 millions of families around the world are using it as a remote leash for their kids.
Fifty-eight per cent of US parents say they sometimes or often look at their teenager's messages and the websites they visit, but experts have urged parents to consider the impact it could have on their teen's trust or their ability to practise independence. "[My parents] sometimes don't let me do the simplest things, such as stopping to get ice cream on my own or stopping by friends' houses to stay hello," said an 18-year-old girl from Florida. One 17-year-old in Iowa claims she installed the app on her mother's phone without her knowledge so that she could sneak out and ensure she returned home before her mum. Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck, a professor at the University of Michigan, is more concerned with the app's business model, which she says is driven by capitalism, not family wellbeing. Life360 generates a quarter of its revenue selling data for things such as advertising. Wired.com explains that Life360's privacy policy states it shares "personal information, driving event data, and other information", with the risk-assessment firm Arity, which uses it to calculate insurance pricing and "develop risk-predictive models for its own analytics purposes". Arity is a subsidiary of the insurance giant Allstate, which is also an investor in Life360. In its prospectus this year, Life360 said it hoped to soon offer US customers Allstate insurance plans that would be customised based on how customers drove, Wired.com reported.
Confidence to a fault
A poll in the UK has revealed that one in eight men think they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23-time grand slam winner Serena Williams. "Unless only eight men were surveyed and one of them was Nadal, these men are what's known in tennis terms as [expletive] deluded," replied one Tweeter. Another wanted the concept to be turned into a TV sitcom. And another summed up the 8 per cent: "Every single one of these men also thinks we can solve Brexit if we stop being defeatist."
Countdown notice board gets political
