Google Latitude Broadcasts Your Location

May 5, 2009 - 5:21 am | 13 views

Technology.am (May 5, 2009) — Google has launched the new Latitude service for mobile devices. Google Latitude broadcasts your location from your mobile phone, and let your friends know where you are and allow you to keep tabs on them.

google-latitude Latitude shares your current location with your friends by using Google Maps’ My Location feature. My Location uses the signals from nearby cellphone towers to plot your whereabouts.

To give Latitude a try, just download the latest version of Google Maps for mobile with Latitude. Google is reportedly working on a version of Latitude for the company’s Google Mobile App for the iPhone, but for now anyway, iPhone users are out of luck.

As with any sane location-aware service, Latitude is entirely opt-in and offers privacy controls similar to those found in other services like BrightKite or Loopt.

Once Latitude is enabled, you can choose who gets to see your location on a person-by-person basis. When a contact requests your location data you can reciprocate or deny each individual request.

If you want to temporarily drop off the grid, Latitude allows you to manually set your location or hide it entirely.

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