Google knows where you really are!

By Joanne Pontee, Marketing Manager, PDMS

A new piece of software launched by Google in February has created a storm of controversy with MPs, industry analysts, bloggers and observers alike, all grappling with its implications for privacy. Google and controversy – surely not! Google’s Latitude is an application that provides the ability to track friends, family and colleagues via Google Maps on a mobile device or PC. It’s currently available on BlackBerry, S60 and Windows mobile devices, and will shortly be available on the Apple iPhone.

Google aren’t pitching Latitude as a tracking device but as a social networking tool and they are borrowing from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, with the ability to update status messages and to get in touch directly via SMS, Google Talk and Gmail. The ability to track people by phone certainly isn’t particularly new or innovative and the “social” mapping approach has already been taken on by Loopt Inc., a service that is compatible with more than 100 types of mobile phones. But, because Latitude has been created by the unstoppable giant that is Google, its launch has generated thousands of inches of column space both on and off line.

George Orwell would have had a field day with Latitude – I can hear him now “today your mobile phone, tomorrow the implant chip!” Indeed, a quick search of the Internet reveals many people who are seriously disconcerted about Google’s latest “apparent” assault on our privacy. Scaremongering stories abound about how it’s going to be used by stalkers to track people down, and about how many relationships it’s going to destroy if people aren’t completely honest about their whereabouts. Latitude has even caused the Liberal Democrat party to have a collective nervous breakdown, with the party filing a motion asking the government to investigate the “privacy implications of Google Latitude and to take action to ensure Latitude does not represent a threat to privacy.”

To try and avert and stave off the backlash, Google have been stressing Latitude’s “fine-grained privacy controls” and the fact that everything about Latitude is opt-in. The user has complete control over who gets to see your location and also the precise location information that they see. For example, if you are in the UK you can choose to reveal your exact location e.g. Oxford Circus, London or just the city or country. Bizarrely, you can even manually set your location to somewhere completely different, so instead of being in Douglas, I could now show myself as being in Honolulu (how much trouble could this feature cause!). To allay fears over the covert use of Latitude (e.g. installing it on somebody’s phone without their consent), Google have ensured that users are alerted whenever the program is running and there is also the option to disable the service whenever you want.

Detractors aside, Google Latitude does have its fans and apparently over 4 million people have signed up already. These are predominantly the younger generation, who’ve grown up with Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, and who are so used to sharing information with their friends that they don’t care two hoots about privacy. Others are highlighting the benefits of being able to locate people quickly and easily, for example the missing child or mountain biker who has an accident in a remote spot. Parents of teenagers who think it’s a sure fire way to track their wayward offspring, needn’t get too excited. Teenagers don’t even have to spend time finding ingenious ways of spoofing their Latitude scanning parents, as Google has kindly done it for them. Remember, the manual override feature? So when your studious teenager’s location shows as the library, they are probably at McDonalds. Latitude is also being considered by some organisations as a cheap and cheerful corporate tracking application. As long as employees give their consent to being tracked, it could be a useful way of pinpointing delivery people, mobile technicians or finding out just exactly where the taxi that should have picked someone up 10 minutes ago really is.

So, why has Latitude caused such a stir? Maybe Google are just a little bit ahead of the game and although generation Y will love using Latitude, the general masses just aren’t ready for that much transparency in their daily lives. It may take us a while to catch up – remember the initial resistance to giving over credit card details online? Now it’s something that the majority of us do without a second thought.

Personally, I can’t say that I’ve spent much time wondering about the precise geographical location of my friends at any given time. Nor in all honesty would it probably be that interesting. At the time of writing this, most of them are probably sat on their sofas at home watching Eastenders! If I cast my mind back some considerable distance to my teens and University days, then I can see how an application like Latitude would have caught on and could have been extremely useful for tracking down friends from pub to pub, not that we had mobile phones back then!

From a professional perspective I can also see how knowing a person’s location could unleash an awful lot of new marketing opportunities and revenue streams. How long will it be before you’re walking down the high street and you receive a message from your favourite shop which you are just about to walk past, telling you about their latest offer? Latitude will provide Google with a useful addition to the valuable information they already hold on us. In the future they will not only know where we go online, what we buy and how and who we communicate with, but also precisely where we are we when we are performing any of these tasks. Slightly scary or a great opportunity to provide us with contextually relevant content, you decide? I can hear George Orwell again!