Mountain View, California — Google is watching you… In what initially appears like some hair-raising “big brother” style innovation, search engine giant Google on Wednesday said that it has unveiled a new feature which allows users to view their “entire life’s travels” based on users’ cell phone, Wi-Fi usage and GPS data, and analyzes patterns from that data.
Location-based services are very rapidly becoming popular these days, and, even as all the target is on Foursquare and its competitors like Gowalla, Google’s Latitude service is in fact a serious contender. Google described that the new “Google Location History” taps information from Google Latitude, the firm’s service which lets users see their friends on a map.
The company explained that its new dashboard view of location history will emphasize information for users, such as trips they took, places they have visited, time they have spent at work versus at home, and more.
“Today we are introducing an experimental new view in Beta for Google Location History to ideate your location history in a different — and hopefully more interesting — way than just a string of locations,” Andrew Kirmse and Kenny Leftin, software engineers in the Google Mobile Team, wrote.
Google mentioned that the Google Location History is an opt-in service, and necessitates that users enable Google Latitude to run in the background on their cell phone.
“If you have already opted to enable Location History, the new dashboard view will attempt to emphasize interesting trends from your existing location history, such as trips you have taken, places places you have visited, time spent at home vs. out, and more. Ever wonder how much time you have spent at work recently compared to six months ago, or where it was that you stopped on your last road trip? Just check out Location History for some of the answers,” the team added.
The dashboard can be accessed here and it will also track the mileage you have traveled if you want it to. Of course, privacy is always a prime concern with services like this and Google said users will have to intermittently re-enter their passwords to view their history. The firm also underlined that the information is only available privately to a user. Interestingly enough, the release of the feature comes just a few days after a scandal–and a slew of lawsuits–involving Google’s collection of private Wi-Fi data, which it disclosed as part of its Street View program.
This is a significant contribution from the search engine giant and it shows it is taking the location-based service space seriously. With three million users, it is the most popular location-based service available and those users are now getting an interesting new attribute.
The move comes on account of Google unveiling an application-programming interfaces dedicated for its location service and this could promote a variety of cool, new apps because developers do not have to create their own location database. Check-in services like Yelp or Foursquare are just the tip of the spear, as credit card companies could use this as an extra layer of verification, or there could be an app that automatically turns off your home lights when it realizes you’re nowhere near your house.
Check out the History Dashboard over on Google’s website.