Private by Default

Does BuddySOS sell my location or keep a history of where I've been?

BuddySOS never sells your location, and it never stores a history of where you have been. Your position is visible only to the people inside a group you have explicitly joined, for as long as you are sharing, and nothing is logged for later.

Some location-sharing apps make money two ways: a subscription, and selling anonymized or aggregated location data to third parties. Life360 was reported by The Markup in December 2021 to have sold precise user location data to data brokers, including Arity, X-Mode, Cuebiq, and SafeGraph. The company said in January 2022 it would wind those deals down, though it kept the one with Allstate's Arity. BuddySOS only makes money from an optional ad-free subscription. There is no data-broker business model to fund with your location, because your location is not for sale in the first place.

What an app stores matters more than what it promises. Competitors keep a location timeline, often 30 days or longer, so a parent or partner can scroll back through everywhere you went last month. BuddySOS never built that. The map shows where a group member is standing right now. Stop sharing, leave the group, or let tracking lapse, and that position is gone with nothing left behind for anyone to read.

Sharing stays scoped to the group you joined. Other BuddySOS users cannot see you, and neither can the public. Leave a group, remove a member, or delete the group outright, and access ends the same second. Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest on our servers, the baseline any competent app should meet. To be precise about what that is not: it is not end-to-end encryption. The live map and SOS texts need our server to read your position, or they cannot work.