Google Knows Where You Are

If you let it. The search company has announced a new feature for mobile smartphones that lets you tell your friends where you are at any given time of day. Dubbed Latitude, the feature is integrated with Google Maps and works as follows: you sign up your phone with the new service and invite your friends to see wherever your phone is on Google Maps. That way, if you need to know where your spouse is, you can log onto Google Maps, and a little spouse icon will beep away at you on the city grid. Or you can search for all friends within a certain area, in case you're feeling lonely and want to see if anyone's close by for a drink.

Sure, it's nifty, but that may be all it is. As the New York Times' Vindu Goel points out, the service only works with smartphones, unlike its predecessor Dodgeball, which used text messages to convey the same information; this obviously limits the number of people who can use the service. And Goel's not sure if anyone really wants to obsessively track their friends and family anyway. "It's still unclear how much people need or want to send this kind of location information to friends and acquaintances," he writes. "Dodgeball was never more than a tiny niche application."

PC World reporter Ian Paul has a few more worries. Although Google claims it only holds onto your most recent location, and will scrub the information as soon as you opt out of the service, Paul frets about privacy issues nonetheless. "For example, will federal officials or the police ever try to force Google to relay your location information?" he writes, adding that Google could use realtime information on where people are to create more advanced demographic profiles for ad targeting.

Still, if you think this is just what you've been missing, watch the tutorial below, and fall in love.