Location History, Alerts - New Features on Google Latitude

Google has added two new features called Location History and Alerts to its location-aware friend finder, Latitude. The company reported that these features were added to make the service more engaging and interesting to its users.

Once the Location History is enabled, Location Alerts will be able to tell you when your friends are in the particular area. The best thing about this system is that it is smart enough to understand common places like home and office, so you will only get alerts when your friends are in any unusual place.

According to the news posted on Google blog, Location Alerts has the capacity to recognize when you are at usual places like home or work based on the past location history. You or nearby friends will receive alerts only if you are at any unusual location or at a routine place at an unusual time.

Location History can track your movements and places you have been to once it is enabled; this is how it creates a record of sorts of your travels and activities. Using this feature, your friends can track you moving from place to place in real time if you allow them to and you can also edit places that you do not want to be included in your Location History. Though this could have a lot of practical use, privacy issues have become a concern and many people are voicing the displeasure of having one’s movements tracked down.

This new feature could be exciting to you if you belong to the ‘no privacy issues’ generation but most people are not really enthusiastic of being tracked down constantly. It is not necessary to enable Location History if you do not want to but then you do not get the advantage of receiving Location Alerts.

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