Don’t you sometimes wish you had a map of every place you’ve ever been? Well, if the concept of such detailed self-tracking doesn’t creep you out, you can now do that with Google Latitude, the mobile app that lets you broadcast your location to your friends.
Google Latitude just turned on Location History as a new feature in Google Latitude. Whenever Google Latitude is on, it records your location, and you can go back to see where you’ve been. To mitigate some of the obvious privacy issues this brings up, only you can see your location history, not your friends. And you can delete any location from your history, like that Dunkin Donuts you tried to stick up last night when you had the munchies.
Another new feature is location alerts. You can now get an alert anytime a friend of yours who allows you to see their location on Google Latitude is nearby. To cut down on constant alerts every time you go to the office or home, it tries to learn where you go every day, and only gives you an alert when you are in a place it deems to be “unusual.” In order for the alerts to work, your location history needs to be enabled, so the two features go hand in hand.
Geo streams such as the ones produced by Google Latitude are becoming increasingly common. In fact, we are devoting an entire panel to Geo Stream sat eour Realtime CrunchUp on November 20. Steve Lee, the group product manager for Google Latitude, will be on that panel.
Really cool service that’s been doing this for sometime now, check it out http://mapme.at
this type of service should be called My Location. makes more sense. why does G seem to be so geriatric when it comes to common sense integration? think they do it on purpose sometimes to not seem too powerful too quick? with that 175m market cap they can own the net whenever they want too.
All of these types of streams have potentially huge implication for local advertising, especially for retail locations that want foot traffic.
And for a while I am working on one such thing.
People, Mobile, Web as well as real local stores.
Hope the code gets completed soon and I can launch….
Thanks for the insight.
Hey Erick,
I think this is a neat update to highlight, but I think it’d be a good idea to clarify that both location history and alerts are OPT IN. Even if you already have Latitude or if you install Latitude, neither aspect will operate unless you specifically turn either or both on.
Disclaimer: I work for Google. But I have nothing to do with Maps/Latitude except as a happy user, and don’t speak officially for the team.
Why is it that privacy issues are always “countered” by saying others won’t be able to see the tracking in question? Is it not enough that Google knows everything you do these days (as if Google were a machine and not made up of a bunch of people)?
Fitting that I can see Sling Blade to my right, right now. He’s the type to overlook the bigger picture.
The privacy issues are countered because it’s an opt-in service. You choose to use it, or choose not to.
You’re assuming that everyone is smart enough to know they’re opting in for total privacy invasion. Google knows way too much about us as it is and, personally, I equate all of this to my Orwellian neurosis’. Oh well. Call me crazy…
I won’t call you crazy because I agree!
Me too, the whole recent evolution in this field is sick.
Nobody seems to care about the bigger picture and the longterm issues. Everything new is just “really cool”.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one alive and thinking, surrounded by millions of mindless zombies.
Just went to http://www.goog...e.com/dashboard and turned off as much as I can to prevent Google from collecting even more information about me. Its really scary how much they find out about you, maybe even more scary than the location is the profile they are building which touches so many parts of your internet habits. Given all that who would be so careless and creates a _public_ profile about himself using Google Profile so advertisers can tap into that information, too and Google can make money with that data.
Great news!
Lot’s of interesting applications. Where did I park the car? Literally spent hours looking for a car in a town in spain during honeymoon.
Also, would be nice to allow parents to keep track of kids/teens (fair trade- you get the phone, parents get to keep track).
What does this do to all the other location based startups?
What does this do to all the other location based startups?
Destroys them. I think most people will rather have a service track them rather than constantly check in all the time(like Foursquare). We’ll see though. Every startup these days probably worries about Google more than anyone else. They will continue to dominate the entire web at the rate they’re going.
great? they killed the gps market in one swipe. nuvi, garmin and all the others better add handheld internet phone function or they will die. Google fired the first missile over the bow of mobile advertising with the purchase of ad mob. location based startups will be slaughtered.
The Google killer will be an arsenal of niche natural language location based weapons (channels). Weapons of Mass Construction that when used together make Google easy prey. Context will be king.
this is the perfect stalking toold for psychopaths.
aside from that i love how google has gone into maps. yeah!!!!
I know I’ve said it before on this blog but this type of stuff REALLY creeps me out. I don’t use fourspace because of my paranoia but this is much worse. Doesn’t this scare anyone else?
Now I can stop using Instamapper.
I cant get it to download, says the market place cant find it
It is part of the Google Maps application. You go there to turn it on or off.
It seems everyday google is advancing into each and everyone’s lives more and more. I visit a forum where one of the fellows is extremely paranoid about “g” More so than most people. He even thinks they watch him thru his laptop’s camera …
I love my paper mappe.
I thought Google killed the location history at the beginning due to privacy concerns raised by the EFF?
A Spanish company was doing this now for more than two years for any GPS mobile phone (well, nearly any Java, BB, WM and Symbian) http://www.navento.com, perhaps too early for the market …
We are researchers studying people’s attitudes towards Google Latitude. If you have heard of Google Latitude (whether you have used it or not) and are at least 18 years old, we would like to talk with you. Please email us back at ucistudy@ics.uci.edu
We are conducting this research under the Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine.