Google Latitude not dead despite Buzz Google is pushing ahead with Latitude - the mobile service that tells your friends where you are - despite its high-profile introduction of somewhat similar mobile services that hook into its new Google Buzz social networking setup. During a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Google man Steve Lee - who …
"Chase offering a discount to connect their location history into the bank, saving their customers some money and providing a better mechanism for anti-fraud."
There are two sides to the coin though, aren't there? First of all there's nothing to say that connecting location history into the bank will save money or help prevent fraud. That depends entirely on the development and implementation of suitable applications and business protocols to use the data. In fact the entire comment is too general to mean anything but still conveys the lovely picture he wants us to see in our mind. This is classic Google ideology - "go on, drink up, if it looks like it'll taste good, it'll be good for you".
The flip side of this coin is where the fraud uses or abuses the history and the defrauded customer is powerless. The bank will have offloaded a lot of process onto the customer base, of which a minority will bear the brunt as they encounter fraud and have to deal with the banks and their well marketed systems. I've no objection to progress and innovation but people like Lee bear a responsibility and should be scrutinised and challenged when they make these kind of statements.
The banks use verified by Visa et al to pass responsibility for fraud from the bank to the consumer. They'll just use the location stuff to do the same.
All google want is the ability to serve you adverts on your phone based upon your location.
Get rid of google, use Duck Duck Go - http://duckduckgo.com
and only two of my friends use lattitude as well, unless you are looking at the map (blackberry) the location is cell tower only +- 500m for finding where your friends are at the picnic is it's great, both look at the screen and it's within meters to find the location.
The moment that any enterprise uses my location for targeting spam / fraud detection, will be the day I turn it off. It's a social tool not a means to stop corruption / add targeting.
Sharing your location can have some unseen benefits & problems which u can discover only when you try it... With this idea in mind I created service similar to latitude.. and I am testing it on myself first...iam just displaying/streaming realtime where I am at exooc.com/live.html Iam passing it to my friends as I need and real life is dictating whats needed as next feature... so far i had fun with it... for example when I thought friends wouldnt call me when they see me driving car... i was wrong.. they dont care.. they will call anyway... as its SEP(sombody's else problem) for them :)
Anyhow with W3C draft made on 10th feb.2010 and support in Chrome 5 beta firefox etc..(Android phones and Iphone..) for geolocation ... we surely will see some new creative ways how to use spatialy aware data.
do you want to test if your browser can disclose your position ? test at following page i created yday:
exooc.com/pos.thml
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