I’ve been playing with Google maps on my new phone this evening and although I played with Google Latitude on our 5800s, it didn’t really work very well; However on the Android OS it seems to work really well. Latitude, for those that don’t know, obtains your location using the handset’s GPS reciever and A-GPS using network transmitter triangulation; it then uploads this information at regular intervals so that people on your friends list can find where you are and if they wish can even generate a route to get to you from their location.

The technology is absolutely fantasic but it does make me start to think more and more about all the data Google hold on us all.  We already know that Google hold an index of the contents of millions of web sites but just look at all this additional data they gather:
– Search History : Google log IP addresses against a full history of every search you make using their engine
– YouTube : People’s Videos, comments made on them and your viewing history, even matches patterns in the videos to look for songs to target adverts
– Blogger : People’s blog posts covering all sorts including comments made on those posts and the IP address all those posts were made from
– Calendar : People’s events
– Picassa : People’s photos
– Google Docs : People’s documents and their contents
– Google Groups : Forums posts and conversations between users and their IP Address
– Google Mail : Contents of every e-mail you send and recieve including e-mail and IP Addresses, again looking for keyword content to target ads to you
– Google Street View : Pictures of your house
– Google Latitude : Full tracking history of your phyiscal movements

… and lots, lots more.  Every one of these data sets is very rich on it’s own but put together and Google are surely indexing not just the internet, but the whole world and the people in it!

Please don’t get me wrong, I think this technology is simply amazing and I feel privileged to live in this digital age where technology continues to go from strength to strength, but I can understand why there are so many nervous people out there.  Google have immense knowledge of the world and the people in it and of course knowledge is power ergo Google are a very, very powerful single entity.