George Orwell Would be Proud

We certainly live in interesting times where what you’re doing and where you’re located are becoming increasingly public and transparent.

With services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, you can provide people with updates on your daily activities, while you can tell people you’re location using services such as Brightkite.

Now, Google – the Big Brother of the Web – is getting into the market with a new service called Latitude that you download onto a mobile device, and then displays your location at all times to friends and family.

The service is opt-in so no one can your location unless you give them permission. Even so, all this location broadcasting makes me somewhat uneasy for some reason. Every time something like this is introduced, our privacy and anonymity – even if it does sound cool and it comes from Google.

To be honest, I’m not keen about the idea of anyone knowing exactly where I’m located at all times, and I’m really not that interested in knowing where anyone else is located, although I can see some situations where you’d want to know (e.g. tracking your children).

That said, we live in a world where much of movements are tracked when you think about cell phone calls, credit card and debit purchases and closed-circuit security cameras.

With new services such as Google Latitiude, which many people will happily embrace, the cloak of privacy continues to disappear.

George Orwell would be proud that his vision of “1984″ is gaining more momentum.

While the blogosphere seems to be downright bubbly (see Walter Mossberg’s review) about Latitude, Alexander Van Elsas has some good perspective on whether services such as Latitude are really needed.

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