Once, Life360’s only pop culture cachet was as the dystopian inspiration for an episode of sci-fi series Black Mirror, so its executives must have watched with satisfaction when its “I think of you (dying)” promo went viral in May.

In a world dominated by Trumpian uncertainty, its creepy core function – being able to track someone around the clock – has become a selling point that the public is embracing.

The animated marketing video – which played upon the theme of parental anxiety with a mum singing a catchy jingle to her daughter about the potential catastrophes that could befall the child – quickly logged 20 million views.

It became a cultural reference point and sent the group’s brand awareness spiking.

“We’ve taken another step up in the cultural zeitgeist,” was how Life360 founder and executive chairman Chris Hull put it at the group’s recent quarterly results.

What Life360’s newly appointed chief executive Lauren Antonoff calls  the “anxiety economy” is driving a noticeable shift to what families consider an essential service that won’t be sacrificed to a cost-of-living crisis.

She cited the company’s latest research showing 80 per cent of respondents are more likely to invest in safety during “times of uncertainty” and “40 per cent of parents consider safety and emergency alert apps non-negotiable”.

The research was conducted in its home market of the US, but is also likely to be highly applicable in Australia where the business listed on the ASX in 2019.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride for local investors, though a lucrative one for those who invested in June 2022 at $2.41 a share. With users now flocking to its paid subscription business, Life 360 is on the cusp of reporting its first profit and shares hit a record high of $46.48 last week – pushing the group’s valuation towards $11 billion.

The recent massive stock price gains have also been driven by the monetisation of Life360’s entire 88 million monthly active users – the vast majority of whom don’t pay for a basic form of its service. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley described this base as “highly engaged, affluent” and “underappreciated”.

Life360 is gaining financial traction from selling location-specific advertising, which targets these customers as well as selling their anonymised aggregated location data to interested parties.

The potential is enormous, according to investors.

“Life360 remains in the early stages of monetising its huge global audience, and one of our favourable takeaways from the recent results was a doubling of advertising revenues for the quarter” Sydney firm LHC Capital said in a newsletter to investors last month.

“That Life360 is now installed on 14 per cent of all mobile phones in the US speaks to the potential in front of the business on a global scale and relevance as the cross-platform leader.”

The future includes tracking for both elderly parents and pets, and a nascent deal with global satellite group Hubble that means Life360’s Bluetooth tracking devices will no longer be limited to places with mobile coverage.

And the company has some high-profile investors and board members like Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The hope is that Life360 has finally put to rest any controversy over the dark side of tracking services.

In 2022, the company had to cull many of its contracts to sell customer data to third-party data vendors when it became evident that some vendors were able to identify individual customers and track them.

Life360 does not currently face any legal action, but recent court documents spelt out the potential for serious issue, for example if a customer could be tracked to an abortion clinic or drug abuse centre.

Life360 has been mentioned in US court action against US data broker Arity, a subsidiary of an insurer – Allstate Insurance – that allegedly embedded tracking software into apps like Life360 and used the data to raise insurance premiums or deny coverage.

“Our investigation revealed that Allstate and Arity paid mobile apps millions of dollars to install Allstate’s tracking software,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when initiating legal action this year.

It doesn’t take a fictional TV series to see what else can go wrong with this technology through nefarious use.

Forbes magazine published a story on how Life360, “America’s favourite safety app”, is being used by sex traffickers to control victims.

In response to the story, Life360 founder Chris Hulls told this masthead that in a user base of the magnitude Life360 serves “there will inevitably be outlier cases of technology misuse”.

Before Life360 listed on the ASX, he told the Australian Financial Review: “We all know the phrase, ‘That’s like playing with fire’, but the point is that we wouldn’t have evolved from caveman times if we didn’t have fire, so I think that is a good analogy that there are many nefarious uses for what we do, as there is for almost every type of tech out there.”

Last year, the NSW Crime Commission highlighted how prevalent its use was in both domestic violence and organised crime settings.

Analysis of records of 5500 tracking devices sold over the previous 18 months showed that 37 per cent of customers were “adversely known to police”, while 25 per cent had a history of domestic and family violence and 15 per cent had criminal history.

Morningstar analyst Roy Van Keulen says regulation is a real risk given location tracking services are “inherently fraught” with privacy considerations.

Such considerations may also protect Life360 from predators such as Apple and Google, which are very mindful of privacy concerns. However, these larger companies also offer services for family tracking, helping to normalise this behaviour.

“We believe Apple is … therefore creating the market for Life360, rather than taking it from them,” Van Keulen says.

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