Google is Watching You

I’ve been playing with Google’s latest mobile innovation today called Google Latitude. This new location broadcasting software is built atop the Google Maps application and is available for your computer as well as several mobile devices including the G1 and Blackberries.  Latitude is a simple yet impressive solution for sharing your location with friends without compromising your control over privacy. In short, Latitude uses your phone’s GPS to update your physical location stored on your Google account (e.g. your gmail.com address). You can easily setup sharing with others and customize the rules for what they see.

It took me just a couple minutes to update Google Maps on my phone, and it took even less time to add the Latitude gadget to iGoogle. In very short order I was set up, broadcasting my location, and admiring my little floating head on the map (my gmail.com profile pic). I decided I better start slow and add just a few close friends to get a handle on this very personal application. Location aware services will continue to grow in coming years and this app seems to only scratch the surface. But let’s face it, even this simple concept of location blasting is a really big deal and a bit creepy as well. You are essentially implanting a GPS tracker on your person just like in the movies--and in this case, you are doing it willingly.

Fortunately, the whole system is opt-in and is configurable on a per friend basis. In this way, you can broadcast only a city to your mother while your spouse or better friends might track you by the yard and even get directions to your approximate location. Parents might find this tool handy for locating thier teenagers. Perhaps Google will eventually add tracing features so those same parents can see where they went and for how long. Location tracking is not new, but with Latitude, Google has made it mainstream and very easy to setup using existing consumer hardware.

In the near future, we should expect Google to leverage location awareness to serve up location based advertisements. Perhaps we’ll also receive suggested venues for dinning, shopping, and entertainment based on our location, the time of day, who we are with, and various other profiling information the system may glean from our many touch points with Google services. This is just the beginning.