Google released their location tracking service Latitude last week to a mixed reception. If you’ve been living in a cave and missed the launch, Latitude is an application that sits on your phone (Android, Windows mobile, Nokia and Blackberry, iPhone coming soon) and tells Google where you are. Google then publishes your location on Google maps so all your friends can track you.

To see the location of other people you either need to run the mobile maps application or use an iGoogle widget. (hint – before you install it on your phone, first uninstall any previous version of maps and power-cycle the phone otherwise the “locate” menu might not appear)

It has some pretty comprehensive privacy controls built in (including the option to set your location manually to anywhere you feel like) but the reality is, as always, that the technology itself is no more evil than the people using it and the praise / criticism heaped upon the service after the launch largely depended on who was pursuing which agenda. For example:

Privacy international are concerned that phones could be gifted to people with Latitude enabled, creating a stalking scenario. (because you’d accept a new phone out of the blue from somebody you don’t trust, wouldn’t you?)

JR Raphael from PC World doesn’t see the need to have everybody know where he is.

Chris Brogan on the other hand thinks it could change the way we view the world!

And my take? The key is that it’s completely opt-in. Don’t want to be tracked? Don’t install it. Don’t want to have it covertly enabled on your phone? Don’t leave the thing unattended in a bar…

It’s a neat piece of technology and it’ll doubtless open the door for location based adverts in a few years (which is a whole other argument waiting to happen). I can see some situations where it could be useful and the rest of the time I’ll leave it disabled.