Never one to mince words, Jackson Shaw asks, “To the Google privacy core – Is it rotten?” He writes,
“I read Kim’s post and immediately decided to turn off Google’s Latitude service on my phone but, as Kim illustrates, it probably won’t make any difference…
“I took a few minutes to check out Google’s privacy policy around Latitude and found out this much:
“If you choose to ‘Hide your location’, you can hide from your Latitude friends all at once, so they won't be able to see your location. If you hide in Latitude, we don't store your location.
“I’m not worried about hiding in Latitude. I wish I could hide from Google!”
The funny thing here is that Google already stores our residential locations through association with our devices, as indicated by its Gstumbler report, contradicting the Latitude privacy policy.
Jackson then directs us to a Wired article that is tremendously germane to this discussion – partly because of what it says about the current legal environment in the US, and partly because it reflects the very real problem that, in general, neither technologists nor policy makers understand that tapping of device identifiers is as serious as theft of content.
See: “Former Prosecutor: Google Wi-Fi Snafu ‘Likely’ Illegal ” – I'll discuss it next.
