What Does "Protect This Drive" Mean on Life360, and How Do You Use It?

Safety app Life360 is immensely popular for people who want to keep track of their loved ones' well-being. With features that allow you to know your family's, pets', and friends' whereabouts, the app serves as a way to give people peace of mind.

Life360's users are certainly familiar with the app's offerings, such as real-time location tracking, item tracking, geofencing, and SOS alerts. However, they've recently noticed a newer option within the app, called "Protect This Drive." Now, people are wondering what that means and how they can utilize it.

Protect This Drive serves as a feature that makes driving safer. It has automatic crash detection, so the app will know if you've been in an accident. Once a crash is detected, Life360 will alert your Circle members, emergency contacts, and dispatch emergency services to your tracked location.

The feature also offers to review your driving habits, to let you know if you need to make changes to the way you're operating the vehicle. It will report to you your top speeds, any rapid acceleration or hard braking, and distracted driving (which the app describes as using your phone while driving).

Users can also take advantage of the Extended Roadside Assistance feature, which offers 24/7 support for issues such as a need for towing, having flat tires, dead batteries, or running out of gas.

As for how it works, according to Life360's website, the app "detects drives by analyzing phone location and activity to determine when someone is driving. Drives must be at least 1/2 mile in duration with a speed of over 15 mph."

Different elements of Protect This Drive are available within different Life360 plans. Crash Detection is included in all plans, while Roadside Assistance is provided to Gold members up to five miles, and Platinum members up to 50 miles. Similarly, Family Driving Summaries are only available to Gold and Platinum members.

Life360 also warns that Protect This Drive's accuracy is dependent on the app's signal and data connection. Therefore, the website recommends "always keeping Wifi turned on to increase accuracy, even when a connection to Wifi is not available."

While people acknowledge the safety benefits of Protect This Drive, a lot of users have noted the obvious drawbacks of the feature. Of course, there are serious privacy concerns that come with all of Life360's offerings. However, the issue many people are facing with Protect This Drive, specifically, is its oversensitiveness to "Risky Driving" triggers.

Many users report that the alert was triggered by them mounting their phone, using their phone to play music, or even having a passenger utilize the device. As this Reddit user lamented, "I listen to podcasts on Spotify on my commute, and it thinks I am using my phone the whole time. Makes me look like the world's worst driver." As with anything else, it's up to the user to decide if the notable drawbacks are worth the app's obvious benefits.