People Begging Google To Be Their Stalker

Google said it can now keep a detailed list of everywhere you go, play your trips back like movies and generate “alerts” for unusual movements. Who wants this? The CIA? Nope: ordinary modern humans are asking to be tracked. Insane.

Google said in a blog post that it has been inundated with requests to add a “history” function to its Google Latitude, a mobile phone app that shows where your (authorised) friends on the service are located at any given moment. This would be the exact “feature” that Google intentionally disabled at launch to allay concerns about privacy, to much praise from civil libertarians. Google will add logs to your Latitude service now if you flip a switch, and it can also send you “Location Alerts” if you’re especially enthusiastic about Orwellian internet services.

Why do we need this? Google’s Chris Lambert explained:

I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn’t remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps.

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who once said, “They who would trade liberty for BBQ soon have none, deserve neither, and end up eating Prison Loaf thanks to small-town CSI wannabes with subpoena power.”

[via Gizmodo]

(Top pic by gerlos on Flickr)