Google Latitude — enough already!

I love my android phone.  Yes, I use many features religiously.  But, yesterday, I got an email informing me that Latitude was tracking my whereabouts via my Android.  That’s when I said “enough already”.  I admit that I am scaling back my level of transparency in social media.

For a while, I thought it was intriguing that people weren’t afraid to use Foursquare to inform the rest of us where they are.  But, then … as I see that John is going to lunch at Long John Silver yet again in his effort to become the Mayor, I just became annoyed!  And, it caused me to wonder how many people are just as miffed about this kind of stuff as I am.  That’s when I abandoned FourSquare.

Last week, I was in London for the week.  Deliberately, I didn’t post it to a “status update”.  I admit I am fearful about people tracking my every move.  You read these crazy stories about the guy finding out via Facebook that you are out of town and robbing your house.  Not wanting to be that guy, I didn’t say a word.  And, then, when Latitude told me that they are tracking my every move, I said, this is just going too far.  So, I disabled that.  I think in the next few years, we are going to be seeing a lot more people turning off those features.

The first few years of social media brought about intrigue – intrigue and fascination with these new technologies.  But, now that we have been able to see and evaluate the results of these technologies, I think a lot of individuals will be more reluctant to participate.  I think that we are going to see a backlash and an attempt on the part of many to recover their basic rights of privacy – despite what Marc Zuckerberg wants them to do.