Google Latitude: Mobile stalking tool

By Stephen Shankland on 04 February 2009, 10:32am

Google is today launching software called Latitude that lets mobile phone users share their location with close contacts. The search behemoth hopes it will help people find each other while they're out and about and, more creepily, keep track of loved ones.

"What Google Latitude does is allow you to share that location with friends and family members, and likewise be able to see their locations," said Steve Lee, product manager for Latitude. For example, a girlfriend could use it to see if her boyfriend has arrived at a restaurant for their date and, if not, which of their mutual friends he was cheating on her with.

To protect privacy, Google specifically requires people to sign up for the service. People can share their precise location, the city they're in, or nothing at all.

"What we found in testing is that the most common scenario is a symmetrical arrangement, where both people are sharing with each other," Lee said.

The software spotlights Google's fixation with mapping and location technology. The company sees its geographic services as a way to establish a more personal connection with customers who today use Google chiefly for search. And of course money is involved, too: Google hopes its mapping technology will lead to location-based advertising revenue.

Google's power is firmly lodged in search and search advertising, but the company is trying to expand to broader online services. That includes online documents and various aspects of social networking, which are much more personal services and ones that put Google into more direct competition with rivals such as Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo. Like using Google profiles to contact information with select contacts, using Google Latitude tells Google who's who in your social graph.

How it works
Latitude is part of Google Maps for Mobile, the company's mapping software for mobile phones, but also can be used through a gadget loaded on to its iGoogle customised home page. It'll work in 27 countries at launch, Google said.

Initially, it will work on most colour-screen BlackBerry phones, most phones with Windows Mobile 5.0 or later, and most Symbian-based devices such as Nokia smartphones. An update to the Google Android operating system now being distributed to the T-Mobile G1 phone also enables it, and iPhone and iPod touch users will get the option "very soon", Lee said.

Latitude uses Google's technology to judge a user's location not just by GPS satellite, but also by proximity to phone towers and Wi-Fi networks.

That's a much more automated approach than the manual 'check-in' process used by Dodgeball, a service that Google decided in January to shut down.

Other competitors exist, though. BrightKite and Loopt offer mechanisms for people to find each other by mobile phone, for example.

Google's clearest competitor, Yahoo, offers some competition with Fire Eagle. That service doesn't provide location information, but it does provide a mechanism to centralise people's geographic privacy choices, in effect taking care of some of the social-graph management when it comes to location information.

To use the service, you need a Google account to record who has permission to see your location. For choosing who gets to see your location, you can use contacts stored with Gmail or Picasa, Google said.

The white lie
With the service, you can hide from specific people or disappear altogether. And you can manually set a specific location if, for example, your phone can't show it with sufficient precision or if you wish to tell someone a white lie -- or, to return to our previous example, not get caught having a little extra-curricular activity.

Google envisions two broad classes of people with whom you might want to share location information. First is a small, close-knit circle of friends and family with whom you're willing to share your exact spot. Second is a larger group with whom you're happy to share city-level detail, convenient for finding out when somebody's in town but not much more.

When somebody is close, the software lets you contact the person in various ways -- by calling or sending an email or a text message, for example. It also lets you hide from that specific person.

Privacy is of course a significant concern when it comes to sharing this sort of information. If you want to use Latitude, you must specifically enable the service.

Meeting your buddies at a bar is an obvious example of the software's possibilities, but there are softer cases we can see being useful, too.

Lee pointed to a case where a friend's girlfriend, though far away in Seattle, will "virtually place herself next to him". That sounds a little sappy, but there are plenty of occasions where technology is better for maintaining relationships than it is for establishing them, and this looks like one to us.