Google has announced that on Wednesday it will expand its current service on Google Maps to track individual user's locations. The feature will allow SmartPhone users to share their locations with others to track user's last location, and help locate each other.With such a feature, privacy concerns are at risk of helping predators or unwanted people finding out a users location. To combat such issues, Google has implemented a feature where users need to manually turn the tracking feature on, while making it easy to limit access, or disable the service. Google promises not to retain any user's movements, but the store the last location by the user on Google's computers.
The service is available in the United States, and 26 other countries. Each location is marked with a personal picture that only selected users that the owner wishes to share with can see. The service requires users to have a SmartPhone and use either a cell phone tower, GPS, or Wi-Fi to locate their location. Users who wish to limit access can set their privacy to show their location within a few yards, up to the city they are in, depending on the cell phone towers.
Parents can also keep a track on their children right from their PC or laptop, by tracking SmartPhones such as Blackberry's, Windows Mobile devices, Google's Android, and the iPhone with the service enabled.
Link: Google Latitude
(images courtesy of: gizmodo.com)
(images courtesy of: google.com)
Whats kids have smartphones these days? :s
It's setup as a google account, but this is the one google service I can;t sign into
"Dude, I'll meet you near X place ok?!"
10 mins later..
"WTF are you?!"
Enter the locate button.
10 mins later..
"WTF are you?!"
Enter the locate button.
Uhh, http://www.loopt.com/ ?
The only thing I hate about Google Maps is that you have to have some kind of data connection to download the maps (which in turn, costs money)
Home - work - ATM - bar - strip club - home (arguement) - hotel
*actually they had this for Helio Ocean Phone for a few years now... Buddy Beacon
You can go to a store or club or where ever and activate the buddy beacon. Whoever else is on your Buddy list can see you. So you need to subscribe to each other. Then you can unsubscribe each other if you end up having a friend as a stalker (or a stalker as a friend)
This is just another quality privacy-invasion technology from the "do-no-evil" Google.
i'd hate to have those parents
What happens if your child gets kidnapped? You'd want to track their location. But most children don't have smartphones, but it is a good piece of technology to have, might come standard one a phone one day
http://www.naturalnews.com/025522.html
Domestic stalking, here we come? Will every husband/wife always check that he is transmitting the location, if let's say a partner turns it on for you while you are taking a shower?
That just shows you how moronic the guy is that wrote this. Do you folks believe everything the internet tells you? How hard do you really think it is for a company like google to acquire GPS coordinates of cell towers and using the providers data showing what towers your phone picks up, turn that into an application? I've been using google maps on my NON-GPS Blackberry since they released it and the app has always been able to come close to judging your whereabouts and now that you can share this with friends that you MUTS allow access they are now supporting stalkers and other idiots?
This data would be stored by your cellular provider not Google. If law enforcement wanted to supeona your provider they could do it today whether or not you've used Latitude or not...
You aren't broadcasting your location to every Tom Dick and Harry so get over it.....
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