Recently Google has launched its new service named “Latitude”. The service pictures residence and street views can be an effective spying tool, is basically a location tracking facility.
The residential and street views photographic mapping service feature has been widely criticized. Anyone can see the residence by giving an address. It also provides you the option to have a clearer view of an open window by zooming in.
People are pretty disturbed with the launch of this service regarding security and privacy concerns. For that matter, Google has assured that a user can limitate the number of people who can view the residence.
Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, said, “Since you may not want to share the same information with everyone, Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis.”
Assuring the privacy of residents, he said, “Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we’ve built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application.”
Lately, it has also been speculated that the mapping pictures can be used by companies related to repair and maintenance arousing certain types of concerns. Google however is crystal about the policies.
Google’s spoke woman said, “Google does not share your location with advertisers.”She also said, “Google Maps for mobile or Google Latitude might display ads based on the map you are viewing, which may or may not be your location.”
Google has once again become ahead of others with this new launch. It has also said to launch software for BlackBerry users which will inform the user about his mobile location sharing.
