Ever since it's launch a earlier this year, Google Lattitude, which lets your friends know
exactly where you are, has been one of those mobile apps in the "could be useful.. but its a bit creepy" category.
Today it got even creepier with location history and friend notifications.
To be fair there are a whole bunch of people (including those with a
GPS enabled phone and Twitter) who will happily call out their location
at any given moment and don't worry about silly things like privacy.
For these people, Google's updates might just be a godsend. Google's location history will now give you a full
location history
of all your latitude locations. It's like leaving digital breadcrumbs,
except it would take a lot more than a few birds to delete these from
Google data fortress.
Now at first glance you might think, who the hell would use that? Well apart from Leonard Shelby in
Momento. But wait, Google has an answer posted on their
Lat Long Blog:
"For example, I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake
Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was
asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for
that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the
restaurant name showed up in Google Maps: Drooling Dog BarBQ"
Fair
enough. although the potential for crazy ex boyfriends/girlfriends
stalking your every move seems a little bit too real for me.
Now
here is where it gets uber creepy. Google then uses this location
history when deciding whether or not to send location alerts. That is
whether to notify you if your friends are nearby.
From the blog:
"Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your
regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places
like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby
friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at
an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn
your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts."
That's
just too much. I know Google promises to 'not be evil' but I don't
agree that they cant be hacked. Google learning my 'usual places' is
some kind of weird automated stalking.
Again, for those who
have no worries about people knowing where they are and have friends of
a similar bent, this should be really useful. Although just because
someone is nearby doesn't necessarily mean you actually want to talk to
them.
Personally I can't really see it happening, but then again, who could foresee more than 3 million people actually caring what
Ashton Kutcher thinks?
