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Do you want Google tracking your every move?

When The Police wrote the stalker-classic song “Every Move you Make” they probably weren’t thinking that a Google application for your cellphone would make their promise “I’ll be watching you” so easy.

But for many young people and technophiles, there’s no worry about Big Brother or other nosy eyes — they want you to know exactly where they are.

Called Latitude, a new Google application allows users to track the physical location of friends and family from their mobile phone or computer. Already, frightened parents and privacy groups are thinking about the safety implications.

The basic technology, called geomapping, has been available for years in other products like Loopz and there’s been nary a worry. But once Google touches something, it instantly becomes part of the mainstream.

The way Google promotes Latitude, the new tool certainly has some significant upsides. Already, a number of enthusiasts lay out a multiplicity of benefits for the application.

“I do like the idea of seeing where my friends are: I live in a medium sized town that’s (45 kilometres) away from a city … (so) if I’m killing time in there I’d like to know if any of my friends are around so we could hook up,” Alex Martindale, a member of the Facebook group “I am using Google Latitude” told CTV.ca in an email.

“However, I think the most exciting part of Google Latitude is providing location-based services to people’s mobile phones: imagine if you looked up train or bus times from your phone, the website could know where you are and instantly provide you with the relevant information.”

Latitude can track a person’s location down to a few metres by GPS, or to a few kilometres using a cell tower. The person’s location can then be broadcasted using the uber-popular Google Maps.

Parents are already thinking, “I can use this to track my kids. Maybe their cellphone bills are worth it.”

An addition to ‘hyper-connectedness’

Google is not promoting the product as a tracking device, but rather as another way for a person to communicate what they are doing — a GPS-enabled upgrade to social networking tools like Twitter or Facebook.

But privacy advocates have been having a field day with Latitude, saying it will be used for ill.

Fazila Nurani, a lawyer and founder of privacy and security information firm Priva-tech Consulting, spoke to CTV Newsnet Thursday and immediately waved the Big Brother flag. What about companies following every move of their employees?

Even users of products similar to Latitude say that many consumers may not be ready to let everyone know where they are.

“I fear a lot of people consider this too intrusive and so it will take a while for them to get used to the idea of publishing their location,” Levi Wallach, a computer programmer based out of Vienna, Virginia told CTV.ca.

Wallach sees it as a generational thing.

“I’m 40 and while most of my peers are pretty computer-savvy, we didn’t have cellphones, Twitter, Facebook, etc. when we were in elementary school like today’s generation. So I figure younger people may use this a lot sooner than us,” he said.

Dan Trottier, 27, agrees. The Queen’s University PhD candidate in Sociology is writing his dissertation on the connection between surveillance and social networking websites such as Myspace and Facebook.

Trottier says applications like Latitude are increasingly blurring the distinctions between “offline” and “online.”

“You can no longer speak of the Internet or Google as uniquely ‘online,’” he told CTV.ca.

Trottier says particularly for the younger generation there is a new concept of both privacy and community.

“It almost seems like the idea of privacy has given way to the idea of publicity,” he said. “Even details you would consider to be rather intimate, (people) will put them out there because there’s some sort of status or capital associated with that.”

Trottier says that he sees Latitude being yet another step in technological progress that actually is a step back towards pre-modern society.

“In many ways this brings us back to a pre-modern, little village dynamic,” he said. “That idea that you are surrounded by people that know what you are up to and care to stay in touch with you, even if those people are now spread across the planet.”

Latitude, and other products like it, does seem like the inevitable next step in the hyper-connectedness of the global village.

So, Google Latitude: Good or evil?

Trottier says he sees Latitude as “generally positive” but sees problems if users forget about the privacy controls and unknowingly broadcast their location when they say they are somewhere else (think philandering husbands or “sick” employees.)

Those negative consequences are hardly Google’s fault. It’s not their job to protect forgetful users who have a questionable moral compass. But Mike Seymour, a Briton and member the Facebook group “Google Latitude: A good or bad thing?” says that Latitude might have more subtle — but still problematic — consequences.

“Imagine coming home to your girlfriend and she asks why you came home a different way as usual? What if the answer was quite simply, I fancied a change of scenery? Totally innocent but you’ve had to have the conversation just to keep the peace,” he told CTV.ca in an email.

Still, the former military man says: “I figure that I am not doing anything illegal or wrong, therefore I have nothing to hide.”

Regardless, Google highlights the privacy and security options of Latitude, a prerequisite for any social-networking tools these days.

“I think its interesting one of the first thing (Google) mentions (in their press kit) is having robust privacy settings,” Trottier said. “It’s not at all surprising that that’s the kind of language being formed even as they are trying to sell it.”

Users must accept a request from a contact in order to share their location and can hide their location, or turn off the program at anytime. Also, Google does not keep a history of a person’s locations.

A person can also remove a “friend” at any time, surely an important option for users just coming out of a break-up.

A user can also chose between giving their location away at a neighbourhood or city level. For example, you can set Latitude to limit your location to Toronto, instead of it broadcasting that you are at Yonge and Dundas Streets.

But will it catch on?

It’s hard to predict technological trends with social networking tools (anyone remember Friend Finder?) but Google has an incredibly strong track record.

That name, and not necessarily the product, should drive many people to try it, even if it’s initially out of novelty. Whether they stick around, may depend on how many friends they can convince to use the product.

Google has built the product with mash-ups in mind, and all it might take is the inevitable Facebook or Twitter collaboration to give Latitude the critical mass needed to take that step into being a must-have mainstream application.

And if there’s one thing the last five years has taught us, there seems to be no limit to the public’s desire to overshare.

Google Latitude is available on most mobile phone that support Google Maps. Google promises that a version for the iPhone will be available soon.

[Thanks: http://www.ctv.ca]

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