How do you feel about your friends being able to track your every move?
Most of us squirm. The idea that our friends can see our location on a map to the nearest 10 meters or so seems kind of creepy.
We like it even less, I sense, if we know the service that does this tracking is Google. Aren't they the guys who already read through our emails, mine our searches and sift our documents so they can bombard us with alarmingly specific ads?
Well, yes. But I'm here to tell you that this is actually a good thing. Not the targeted advertising necessarily, but even that is better than getting alarmingly inappropriate or irrelevant ads.
I want to tell you about this service, but first let's get out of the way our visceral hostility to these things. There are a few things going on here.
From an online community of innocents we have quickly turned into a community of suspicious, cynical curtain-twitchers.
Where once we would help old ladies across the information superhighway (to mix some metaphors), we now suspect they're not really an old lady but a Nigerian scammer or a big corporation with bad things in mind for us.
I blame myself for this. I've written - endlessly, it might seem - about the need to be smarter online. If the lesson has gotten through, that's good. But maybe it's gotten through too well.
Or there's another possible explanation. We never understand scams very well, because they're scams. Scams by definition are crafty devils and out to fool us.
Privacy, on the other hand, is trickier. We're surprisingly ready to give away private information when we think it's a) official or b) in return for something (a goody bag, a prize draw, an evening with Jose Mourinho).
Just the other day my bank asked me to fill in a form giving details of my family right down to my children's shoe size, as if it was a necessary part of setting up a bank account. But I already have the bank account, I pointed out. Why do I need to give this information? Er, good point, they said, and backed off.
They should back off. But while we usually don't balk at these invasions of privacy, we do squirm at things that are more superficially obvious invasions of privacy. Someone able to track our every move? No thanks!
This is wrong. We need to get past this kind of knee-jerk response and be more savvy about good and bad compromises of our privacy. For a couple of reasons.
First off, the nature of privacy has changed. It's true, we should resist commercial efforts and anyone else's to grab our personal data in order to sell us stuff. But online has changed many of the rules.
We can find out everything we need to know about someone else online, so the idea of total privacy has disappeared.
Now there is certain information about ourselves we can release in exchange for access to a collective body of information that helps us, individually and as a group. Facebook is an example of that.
Secondly, these services are interesting, and useful. They are limited only by our imagination. We shouldn't be running away from these things; we should be embracing them, testing them, complaining about things we don't like and trying to improve bits that don't work.
So let's take a gander at the Google service. It's called Latitude. You install the software on your phone and it will use different methods - GPS, WiFi, your cellphone signal - to try to figure out where you are and show you on a map inside your phone. Cute, but not novel.
What's novel is that you can then hook up with friends and, if they're using Latitude, you can share your position and see where they are. All on your phone (or on your computer, though that doesn't do such a good job of figuring out where you are.)
Now the first question is: Why would I want this? Well, last week I used it twice.
I was waiting for a friend at Starbucks, one who is notoriously late and notoriously disoriented. So I fired up Latitude, shared my details with him and let him find me.
Another day I was taking a hike and invited a friend to join me. Instead of complicated directions about where to meet, we just shared our Latitude profiles and figured out where the other was that way.
(The additional benefit of this is to get around the time-worn "I'm nearly there" routine, which always drives me nuts. I'd rather be told "I'm at least 20 minutes away. Grab another coffee" than be sitting there, not wanting to start anything new because my meeting partner is about to sashay through the doorway. Latitude tells me they're a good ways away and I can finish another email off before they come.)
So there are a couple of obvious uses. I'm sure there are lots more. But we're never going to get the best out of these things until we stop freaking out and talking about 1984, Minority Report and Mary Poppins (that last one doesn't sound right. But you know what I mean.)
I've read lots of privacy objections to Latitude. None of them stands up to close scrutiny. The truth is we're already happy to broadcast all sorts of information about ourselves, on Facebook, LinkedIn, instant messaging and Skype, so this is hardly a huge step.
And if you thought the government didn't already know where you were, then you're sadly mistaken.
So, my advice: Try Latitude. Explore the service's options, including the ones in place to protect your privacy. And then thank your lucky stars you were born in the exciting early years of the Internet age where these things are there for the taking.
@Copyright
This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com
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