The recent announcement of Google Latitude doesn’t really come as much if a surprise. It’s a fairly obvious if not slightly scary development for them to make.
Yesterday when I was downloading some new applications for my iPhone I came across a GPS tracker app. I’ve yet to test it out but it sounds like a really interesting application if you want to track a journey and then display the route later on.
In the top review, below the application on the iTunes App Store, this was left.
I sent this tweet about it at the time. Here’s a grab of the full screen.
Although it is amusing and quite possibly a joke, it does bring home the level to which tracking our location can limit our freedoms, even if those freedoms are not completely ethical sometimes.
A couple of weeks ago when Stephen Fry was on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross he mentioned that he had recently sent a tweet detailing which flight he was on and as a result was met by pap photographers when he landed. Some celebs might seek that sort of attention, for them letting everybody know where they are might he a good thing, for the vast majority it isn’t. However Google’s Latitude system is strictly an opt in service which doesn’t have an open API so you just share your location on a closed network with close friends and family you select.
Individually tracking where everybody is, is not the objective of this system. It is to allow there to be a more accessible interface between the physical and digital worlds we live in; one that will aid the sense that the digital social networks we build are grounded in reality.
