google latitude

I'd like to introduce Google Latitude to you.

Google Latitude is a late Google product that gets your friends know the geolocation of you. That is it tells you where somebody physically is. It provides 2 ways as media to get the geolocation - mobile & iGoogle. On mobile, it is added to the Google Maps and located by cell ID or wireless connection (WiFi), whereas on iGoogle, it is entirely located by wireless connection.

How it works

According to the help articles, Google's WiFi location database is developed by getting use of the MAC address of the nearby WiFi access points. That is, it learns from the MAC address of the wireless access point that you have connected to and locates where you are. As what I have tried, the accuracy of the location is up to few hundred meters of the access point. And what Latitude claims is, similar to the access range of a WiFi router.

Applications

By inviting and confirmed by your friends, you can share your geolocation with your friends and see where they are. (Just give it a try!) And, Google has issued 2 more applications - Google Public Location Badge and Google Talk Location Status. The former one lets you publish your location on your blog or website, like what you see from the side bar of my site. The latter just shows your city-level location in text on Google Talk, as well as Gmail chat.

Privacy

The first idea that comes into my mind is that how can Google get my geolocation so accurately with which I just connect to the Internet and open the webpage. It can just locate my country with my unique IP address. Also, how is the information handled? Who else can see where I am when I am moving from here to there? I wonder if somebody else could use the same means to locate me and trace me...

I hope Google really carries out what it has promised in its strict privacy policy and handles it well as long as it always tries to store personal and private information of every single user in its database.

Add me if you've enabled it.

Learn more from these sites

Google Latitude
Apps of Google Latitude
Google Mobile Help - Latitude
geolocation
WiFi
MAC address