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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5 Comments
Hey Mark, I appreciate your post but for reasons probably other than your intentions. Watch my blog today for a post in response; please don’t take offense, I just feel the need to defend Big Brother / 1984 as a result of this post.
Trust me it’ll make sense
On a side note, I enjoy reading your blog! Very insightful.
Stephen,
Looking forward to seeing your post and your thoughts!
Mark
The key difference between 1984 and now, is that it isn’t the government that is keeping track or making you do something like this, it is entirely voluntary. I don’t have to buy into this, and I think most people won’t. If an individual wants people to know where they are, then they have that right also. it only becomes a big brother situation when the powers that be mandate that we as citizens must allow ourselves to be tracked. They haven’t, at least not yet.
Well it’s up. Sorry to keep you waiting!
Just to keep the comment on-topic, I won’t be using Latitude, but only because I really don’t want to get charged extra for downloading and using a third party program on my cell phone.
Hi Mark,
I didn’t want to touch too much on the privacy issue in my own post, but it is definitely something to think about. We are giving away our privacy to get access to services, but there isn’t a good way for us to be really in control.
Unless location is integrated into value adding services I think this will not take off immediately. There is a certain “coolness” factor to it, but that wears off quickly until someone figures out how to enrich this to make it worthwhile using.
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