Why only journalists seem to have privacy concerns about Google

Another week and there is another furor building for Google.  This time it surrounds their latest product launch, Google Latitude, which enables users to connect to each other and track each other’s movements.

Innocent enough, you might think… Sure, people being able to tell where you are at any given time may not be everyone’s cup of tea but hey, it’s a free country, right?  Well according to some it shouldn’t be - the trade-press never could resist a scandal and before most people had even heard of the service it had already been denounced again and again and again.

Following some rather silly criticisms - the fact that your employer could track your movement for example, only actually true if you chose to give them access (and even if you for some reason did, you can still lie about your location by setting it manually) - The Guardian’s Paul Lewis managed to note one legitimate concern: that your phone could be setup without your knowledge if someone ‘borrowed it’. 

As valid as this concern might be it still seems to miss the point - if my partner is borrowing my mobile phone to track my movements then we clearly have bigger problems anyway. And in any case, you cannot apply pressure to have a product withdrawn simply because it could be misused by a small minority.  Huge numbers of normal high street products - glue, deodorant, cars - could be misused yet we still have the freedom to use them.  It is the act of misuse itself that needs to be controlled, not the product.

Even if you have concerns over Google’s ability to keep private data private (they seem to be better at it than the government anyway) then it should be the user’s choice whether they entrust a third party with personal information.  Let the journalists carry on with their paranoid concerns about privacy, I’ll do the sensible thing and just make sure my phone has a PIN.  After all, if someone has taken my phone they already have access to a huge amount of personal information.