
Build Your Own Weasley Location Clock - randomstring
https://github.com/randomstring/WeasleyClock
======
ChuckMcM
This is a fun project. It aligns with one of the truisms that I find
overlooked by many which is that there is a lot of currently useful
information available on the network that isn't visible.

I have always thought it would be fun to build something like this but send it
package tracking numbers and have the hands indicate where the packages I had
sent or had been shipped to me were in the system. Just with a glance up at
the wall!

~~~
randomstring
Project creator here.. AMA.

The hands don't just show the person's state. When "In Transit" the hand
position in the sector shows their distance from home. At a glance you can
tell if they are close to home, in town, or across the country. Using a
logarithmic scale to give more resolution for points closer to home.

Depending on where your hand is in the "Home" sector indicates what part of
the house you're in.

This provides location information on people, without feeling like a violation
of their privacy.

~~~
crhulls
Hi, CEO of Life360 here - great stuff. If you want to chat more I'm at
chris@life360.com

------
thisispete
100% expected this to just be a jpg of all the hands pointing to home for
corona virus lockdown.

built something similar back in '06:
[http://thisispete.com/weatherclock](http://thisispete.com/weatherclock)

~~~
randomstring
Cool!

I have a collection of related projects here:
[https://github.com/randomstring/WeasleyClock#related-
project...](https://github.com/randomstring/WeasleyClock#related-projects-and-
inspiration)

I hadn't seen yours, I'll add it to the list.

------
chickenpotpie
Cool project, but please don’t install Life360 on your child’s phone. IMO it
really destroys trust with your child. Having Life360 on your phone is a
signal among children that your parents are very strict and some consider it a
vector for emotional abuse.

~~~
randomstring
I understand where you're coming from on this. I do not think the the service
itself is a source of emotional abuse, it's how it's used. Can it be used to
abuse privacy? Absolutely. I've seen other parents who have harassed their kid
about where they are or how fast they are driving. I don't want to use it that
way, I'm not going to use it that way.

Modeling appropriate use of technology and privileges is an important lesson
that needs be taught (and practiced). Lessons that translate to being an admin
on a minecraft server or having root access on a system.

When I first installed Life360 my son was using it to track me. He made some
comment one day about how he saw where I'd gone for lunch. He'd been checking
up on me. Since then, he's become bored stalking his family. With shelter-in-
place in effect no one goes anywhere anyway.

~~~
chickenpotpie
I don’t know. To me it’s the same as removing the lock from your child’s door.
It’s safer, more convenient, and if you respect your child’s boundaries it’s
functionally the same. But what message does that send? Installing this app
might just be for convenience and safety and you’ve given me no reason to
believe you would use abusively, but this is still an app that has a
reputation of abuse and mistrust. Look it up on /r/teenagers or TikTok. Kids
know this is a tool of abuse and installing it on their phone sends the
message that a parent doesn’t trust their child to be safe. Especially as the
child nears adulthood, when they’re about to be extremely independent.

~~~
grawprog
I'm against the idea of tracking my kids, but on the other hand, i also look
at it as kind of a challenge for them. I'd be pretty disappointed if my kid
couldn't figure out how to get it off their phone or at least work around it
or something. That's how I learned when my parents tried to install a
keylogger on my computer when I was young.

Plus, it'll help make them tracking savvy and teach them young they need to be
aware of this and learn how to deal with them. It has become one of those
constant things in today's society.

~~~
chickenpotpie
Challenging your child to learn tech so they can more effectively lie to you
seems extremely unhealthy.

~~~
tetris11
What? No... this is clearly a system where an honest child is rewarded just as
much as a dishonest one, and... Ah wait, no its not.

------
nrs26
This is very cool. I've been considering doing something similar for my
family. Is there a hardware solution (like an open-source GPS-enabled Tile)
that you found that could track people's location without installing Life360?
I did some cursory research a few months back and couldn't find anything.

~~~
randomstring
As mentioned in other comments here and I discuss in my build log. There's
Apple's Find My Phone service, but this is iOS only. The authentication API
for Find My Phone changed while I was working on the project and Life360 has
really good support in Home Assistant.

There's OwnTracks ([https://owntracks.org/](https://owntracks.org/)) and
Google location services. I didn't try those.

I opted for Life360 because it's supported on iPhone and Android and I just
wanted the location data to "just work." I had enough technical hurdles, I
didn't want to add debugging why someone's phone stopped sending location
updates.

~~~
oh_sigh
Owntracks works with ios and android, is open source, and you can have it
directly connect to a server of your choosing and nothing else. owntracks +
mqtt bridge + homeassistant is what i use and it works great(I haven't touched
it since I set it up)

~~~
randomstring
Owntracks is my backup plan. Integration with Home Assistant is a must.

There's a little backstory to choosing Life360. The clock was a surprise for
my wife and I needed to get her to willingly install and _run_ a tracking app
on her phone. A "Family Safety" app was an easier sell than a more abstract
home automation integration. :)

------
crhulls
Life360 cofounder & CEO here. Great integration!

To address some other comments on the thread: 1) We don't sell your data to
insurance companies

2) We are ultra-transparent on how we handle your data and give far more
control than almost any other app out there. More here:
[https://www.life360.com/blog/understanding-how-
life360-uses-...](https://www.life360.com/blog/understanding-how-life360-uses-
and-protects-your-data/)

~~~
bhhaskin
But do you sell the data at all? Just because you do not sell the data to
insurance companies directly doesn't the data is safe. could easily sell the
data to data aggregators who sell to insurance companies.

~~~
chickenpotpie
"We share your personal information, driving event data and other information
to Arity 875, LLC (“Arity”), which provides driving analytics behaviour
services to enable us to provide certain functionalities of the Service, such
as driving event history. Arity may also use this information to calculate
discounts, rewards or pricing offers by third parties such as insurance
companies, and to perform various profiling activities in order to produce a
score which may predict the level of driver riskiness, and to develop its risk
predictive models for its own analytics purposes. You hereby acknowledge and
consent to the collection and use of your data and information by Arity as set
out in this policy and in Arity’s privacy policy, which is located at
[https://www.arity.com/privacy."](https://www.arity.com/privacy.")

[https://life360.helpshift.com/a/life360-family-
locator/?s=pr...](https://life360.helpshift.com/a/life360-family-
locator/?s=privacy-policy-tos&f=full-privacy-policy&l=en&p=web)

~~~
bhhaskin
Got it.

EDIT: my tone wasn't good here. Assuming good intentions. I am leaving the
original below just so people can see what the replies where to.

Original: Got It. So the above is a flat out lie.

~~~
crhulls
No, it is not a lie. I'm happy to answer questions openly but please give me a
chance before calling me a liar.

Arity (an Allstate subsidiary) provides us tech that powers our crash
detection service (think Onstar for your phone - we dispatched 10k ambulances
last year) and other driving features. Arity also scores our drivers, like a
credit score for your driving. But, this is extremely different than selling
your data.

Arity does not know who these people are - they get a set of limited
information which is not tied to an indvidual. They then take that information
and match it with insurance offers based on a number of factors, but who that
person is, or there forward looking behavior is never connected back. They
don't have the legal right (or even the reasonable technical ability based on
the data we give them) and the offers are not tied to an individual.

The insurance offers are similar to what Credit Karma does with your credit
score. You go to Credit Karma, you give them your social and some seriously
sensitive info, and then they match you with offers. They are NOT selling your
info to credit card companies in the same way we are not selling your info to
insurance companies. There is very little difference.

To the technical piece, I guess they could theoretically reverse engineer
people from our data, but that is like say anyone who uses say Amplitude or
some metrics provider could be selling your data to insurance companies. All
of us developers use a number of 3rd party services that we are trusting to be
shepherds of private information. In this case one of our third party
providers is an insurer. So you could argue they have more incentive to breach
to contract, but they would really get no benefit from that because a) we
would sue the to oblivion and b) do you really think they could get insurance
commissioners to allow them to price on stolen data?

As mentioned above we are extremely transparent about all this. It is
explained at sign up. We push the information to our users. We give them a
privacy center which goes through all of this in non-legalese. User can opt
out of anything they want and we don't degrade the service intentionally (e.g.
if you opt out of the connection to Arity we literally can't power the
features). We even let free users opt out of the targeted promotions.

Some people may still not like this but we do not do corporate speak and we do
not try to hide anything.

~~~
chickenpotpie
I appreciate the time you have take to talk about this, especially with how
critical we've been of your work. If I may add one more piece of criticism: I
really want to believe you about your policy and I would be much more
comfortable with your app if the privacy policy explicitly said some of the
things you claim.

~~~
crhulls
Thanks and noted.. Have you seen the Privacy Center in our app? This was meant
as the area to get plain English explanations on how things work along with
various opt-outs. It is still a bit more legalese-ish than I would like but
the intent was very much to be open and let users make informed decisions.

------
xwdv
A stalking-free version of this where you could push your state manually to
the clock and have it automatically reset to home when your device is detected
on the home wifi network would be more fun, and removes a dependency. You
could also support more specific states this way that you cannot detect
through simple movements. States can also decay to an unknown state if not
updated in a while and you never come home.

And it would be better for building any kind of trust in a child, as they
would know you are trusting them to tell you where they might be, and gives a
character-building opportunity to choose between lying or telling the truth.
Without those opportunities, you never learn the satisfaction of telling the
truth, only the satisfaction of lying to get your way when you are not
trusted. Inevitably, you become a vicious liar with no limit, and you will lie
to everyone: Your parents, your spouse, your mistress, your children, and
worst of all _yourself_.

State can be pushed to an SMS number powered by Twilio.

------
osswid
Well done! This must have been a massive project. 1000 hours?

Don't miss the project photo album:
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/7yxiuzpsFReUh5Yy5](https://photos.app.goo.gl/7yxiuzpsFReUh5Yy5)

~~~
randomstring
It was a year from idea to finished, installed clock. 1000 hours? Maybe. Yes,
if you include time spent worrying about how to make the clock hands look good
and stay on.

------
autumnhope
This is absolutely incredible. Totally made my day. SO well done.

------
yummypaint
I like this alot. However, you should make sure it isn't visible through a
window or it's basically an "all clear" indicator for burglars.

~~~
jedieaston
They'd have to look through the window for quite a while to realize that it
wasn't simply a decoration from Harry Potter.

------
damenleeturks
Very cool. I'm curious — why didn't you photoshop out the Weasleys locations
from the background of your clock face?

~~~
randomstring
I purchased the artwork from Minalima, [https://minalima.com/product/the-
weasley-family-clock/](https://minalima.com/product/the-weasley-family-clock/)
and used that. It's officially licensed artwork.

I consider the background a feature as it is intended to also be a Harry
Potter "artifact."

Others have done custom artwork or made copies of official images (there are
two variants that appear in the Harry Potter movies). I really liked this
artwork, so that's what I did.

