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Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?
This is an old feature from the mid to late 2000s that was removed bit by bit because people worried about privacy complained. We went from being able to share our location 24 hours a day to it being on demand for a limited time, to having a lifetime history of locations to it being removed from new users.
I am grandfathered in to the original Google Latitude so I have location history spanning back to 2007-2008 or so. I love this, because it allows me to see when I travelled, and how fast I travelled. If I see that I got from Spain to Switzerland in an hour I know I went by plane. If I see that I went from Geneva to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Romania or Poland then I know that was another flight. I can see where I was and when.
I can also see how much I cycled and walked, and how much I drove or took trains in a month. With iCloud you have live location sharing too, but it’s restricted to the people you want to share with, for example when you’re driving from A to B, or when you have family sharing enabled.
Years ago I said that I don’t mind Google or Apple, or other companies knowing where I am, because telecom providers have that information anyway, so if they have it, so should I. My fvourite use was to check “The car got a fine at this location on that day but at that time on that day I was at the gym so I wasn’t the one driving the car.
By sharing your location with Google latitude it gives you information about whether an event could have been you or not. I wasn’t worried about the fine, or paying it. I wanted to confirm that my drivers were not slipping back into the habit of getting fines again. At one time I drove so much that fines were no longer rare. I eventually saw phantom flashes and switched to always setting the limiter to the speed limit.
And Finally
It boils down to one phrase. Live location sharing with Google is not new. It was removed because people worried about Google knowing too much about where they had been and where, and they wanted to remove location history. Now we are finally seeing the reverse coming back into being. Live location sharing, as well as location history is useful. I am happy to see that it is coming back.
https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/whats-old-is-new-again-live-google-location-sharing/
