You are late for curfew and you are anxiously tapping your foot, hoping that your friend will reach your house soon. Looking down at your phone, you see tons of text messages piling in from your parents. You tell them to check your location on the Life360 app, so they will know exactly where you are.

Life360 is a friend and family communication, location and alert app for smartphones that allows users to share their locations with each other.

Junior Mirelyz Flores uses the Life360 app to keep track of where her friends are.

“I find it fun to use it [Life360] with my friends,” Flores said. “It is funny to text your friends, ‘hey charge your phone’ or ‘why are you at that place’.”

With Life360 having a comedic aspect, the app also ensures a security aspect. Users get notified when a friend or family member is leaving or arriving at a designated location, with satellite images showing you the exact environment a user is in.

“It’s all about safety,” Flores said. “Even if you think it’s lame to share your location with your parents, what is most important is knowing that someone can find you if there was ever an emergency.”

There can be drawbacks to the location app.

Parents feel the need to track a young person, pointing out that they should instead be talking about any concerns with their child and discussing what a child might do if something went wrong while they were out.

The app also raises questions about privacy and children’s autonomy.

“I was at the movie theater once and the service connection wasn’t too good in the area,” junior Dylan Irvin said. “My mom said I was pinged somewhere out in the woods and she texted and called me multiple times, but my phone was on silent, it definitely gave her a scare.”

With the small scare, Irvin instills the app as beneficial for all to use. A location-sharing app is essentially aimed at families, the service allows parents to track their kids’ whereabouts in real-time, among other features, is very important.

Apps like Life360 can give kids and parents a sense of security.

“Even with its restrictions, members of the app don’t necessarily have to freak out if they don’t know where I am, they can open the app and see where I am quite quickly,” Irvin said. “I feel safe knowing that, if anything happened to me, my mom or my family would be able to find me.”