Google's Latitude: Stalk Your Friends
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: Latitude, Google, Location, Track, Friends | Themes: The Internet
Google today announced the launch of Latitude, a tool that lets you keep track of your friends’ locations as well as share your whereabouts with your loved ones.
“How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to?” is the question Google asks with the introduction of Latitude.
“It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives,” explains Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering at the Google mobile team. What about that other question? How often do you want your friends to know where you are and what you are up to? We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not up to something shady but even then, you might just really dig your privacy.
That said, it seems as though Google has it all figured out: EVERYTHING is opt in. First off, you have to switch it on before anyone can see you. Second, when you receive a Latitude request from a friend, you can choose to accept and only see their location, or accept as well as share your location. You can, of course, also deny requests all together.
Second, you can control which friend sees what. You might only want some friends to see exactly where you are while others are only allowed to see what city you’re in. Latitude also lets you control the location that your friends see. Say you’re in Vegas but you don’t want your boss to know you called in sick to gamble, you can manually set your location to elsewhere. Lastly, you can hide and disappear off of everyone’s radar completely.
We can tell already that this application is going to receive a lot of mixed reviews. Sure it’s going to be handy for keeping track of friends if you’re all at Six Flags and you need to find out where everyone is but wouldn’t it be just as easy to call or text? One thing we definitely like is that on a city-level, it makes for a cool way to keep track of your travelling friends. It'll also be handy for parents who want to keep on an eye on kids but then again, what's to stop the kids from changing their location to show they're somewhere they're not?
Useful implementations aside, we’re not too crazy about Latitude. There’s a lot of layers privacy-wise and adding people would involve adjusting the settings connected to that friend accordingly. We’re all for social networking and staying connected in every possible way but we draw the line at stuff that takes more time and effort than it’s worth. Sure it’d be nice to share locations, but for the most part, I’d like to be able to tell people I’m not answering the phone because I’m at the movies when I’m actually at home playing Peggle for three hours straight.
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Of course, you could just set your location as being at the movies for that night so people would just see for themselves... but at the same time, then there's the hassle of having to set it manually, then set it back a few hours later.
And for those who perpetually monitor the thing, then there could be the explanation on how you instantly teleported from the theatre to the Ultimate Peggle Extreme Gaming Rig. Hmm, sounds like trouble now.
People scan the obituaries to know when to plan house-clearing robberies.
That will be like misplacing your keys, once this new 'feature' gets abused.
My only question is what will come first? The lawsuit, the abuse, or the murder/kidnapping/rape trial?
Peggle? Typical woman.
Wasnt there already a service like this that hit off of cellphone gps?
I freakin love PEGGLE and yeah i don't want people knowing thats what i am into haha!! No but I agree that when it is a hassle I am not really a fan.
It´s so obvious. They just want to send location based ads to people!!! Why the hell should I tell google where I am right now?! I maybe join latitude as says that I am always on my toilette... Imagine my inbox... "are you suffering from constipation" "IBS - It can be cured" "Order now - Herbal pills for upset stomach"
Maybe CIA is interested... If they could just lure Bin laden to log on!
So this does 100% exactly what loopt has been doing for the past 6 months except minus some chat and messaging features. Loopt Lite from google is it?
Peggle? Typical woman. Wasnt there already a service like this that hit off of cellphone gps?
Haha, that line was a jibe at a friend of mine who's currently addicted to Peggle. She regularly plays for hours at a time. I'm actually too afraid to jump on the Peggle-wagon in case I find myself in one of those "I can quite anytime I want" situations. Truth be told, I don't do much gaming anymore, but when I did, I was seriously into Starcraft. Starcraft and Red Alert. A wasted youth.
The Gov't/Google needs to implant chips in everybody so that we don't have to carry cellular devices or computers.
I feel that my privacy has already taken a hike with cell phones, let alone this service... An accusation could be already "Why have you turned off your cellphone..."
I fear the day when this gets mainstream that for example our parents, boss, friends and wife ask us politely to enable the service out of concern. As bf2gameplaya has said if this gets exploited things could get pretty rough...
I think that services like these should be boycotted by users before they even get mainstream. We are talking about our freedom here...
Just like GTA IV where you know where your friends are at any time.
lol...thank you serdna, I was thinking the exact same thing.
humans think, but you don't.
What an utter moron. This is an optional service turd. Alexander Graham Bell could easily have said, well this phone device thingy is going to allow the gov't to contact me and serve an injunction so I'm going to destroy this phone with a hammer.
I swear, the privacy nuts out there are the same one that post on Facebook about their latest bowel movement.
How often have I wandered the city knowing full well that my friends could be on the next block walking past me. With this service on mobiles, I can meet up with them if we happen to be in the area. No one made this a MANDATORY feature. You can turn it off fool.
This is technology that's just like the marauder's map in Harry Potter. It's just entirely a cool concept and will allow people to have less missed connections with their friends.
Face it, if everyone in America had an embedded chip in their heads, kidnapped children and crime in general would be wiped out. Activate the emergency transponder and the cops come to save your privacy-loving hide. And crimes would be solved with zero failure rate. Dude in the area right next to the body the instant he was killed? It's him.
How much simpler would life be with this system? Unlike some of the morons on this board, I trust the US gov't. And there's nothing that they can do to you with this system that they can't do to you today anyway. The only people who don't like this system are criminals.