Google Latitude and the Information Ecosystem

The Behavioral Targeting space had a huge rock dropped in the middle of its pond with the announcement of Google Latitude. This is a new service that allows users to identify their location (or more precisely, their cell phone’s location), and have the results displayed on a Google map. As is typical of anything Google does, it potentially affects a large number of people, so it’s a service worth closer scrutiny.

Predictably, the Privacy Advocates are already panicking: “People will know where I am!” (right, that’s the point –if you don’t want people to know where you are, don’t sign up). “The system could be subject to abuse!” (any system is subject to abuse – should we shut down the credit system because of the threat of identity theft?). “Employers could use the system to track phones given to their employees!” (and your point is?), etc.

This is not that different from Twitter, where people broadcast every little transactional detail of their lives, or it’s corollary application, Facebook, where people pretty much put their entire lives on display. Millions of people have chosen to step into a real-time information ecosystem, this is just another incremental step in the same direction.

The folks at Google, with their big brains and deep pockets, are putting a lot of thought into systems security (presumably to avoid liability, since they’re a great target for lawsuits). Will there be abuse of the system? Of course there will be, but if it’s like any other service in this ecosystem, abuses will be a statistical anomaly, and for the most part people who want to play in this space will, and those who don’t, won’t. The panicky hand-wringing of the privacy advocates is unavoidable; if it wasn’t this, it would be something else.