Last week, however, this all changed. Google announced two new “features” in Latitude: Location History and Location Alerts.

Location History allows users to opt-in to having Google keep a history of their locational data tracked by Latitude. Only you can see it, and you can remove items from your history, which is great. But for everyone who activates this service, there’s now a log in Mountain View of everywhere your cellphone has been, a log that could be shared with third parties in according with its privacy policy.

More people might activate Location History when they learn about Location Alerts, a service that notifies you if a friend happens to be nearby. The beauty of Location Alerts is that you won’t be altered when people are simply engaging in their routine activities (ie, you won’t be alerted every time your coworker sits down at their cubicle across from you) . Instead, it “learns” what users’ “normal” locations are, and only notifies friends if they are nearby in an unusual place or time. To make this work, you need to have Location History activated, and in the process, Google is able to create a type of “locational profile” for each user. It is unclear whether this profile might be used for other purposes (ie, targeted advertising).

Google, of course, realizes the privacy implications of all this, and again takes some steps to help mitigate these concerns. there are FAQs for each product detailing how they work and the privacy concerns; the services are op-in; users are reminded periodically when they have Location History activated (Google should do this for all products, btw).

But all this makes me wonder: did Google plan to provide these services from the start, just with a delay? Did Google learn the lessons of Facebook, who repeatedly bites off more than it can chew as it relates to users’ privacy, and decided to launch Latitude without these features, thereby winning the praises of privacy advocates (guilty), and then strategically add them 9 months later, claiming it is simply in response to user demand?

If my fears are true, it’s not quite what I had in mind when calling on Google to engage in value-conscious design in order to protect user privacy.

Unsurprisingly, concerns have arisen regarding the privacy implications of Latitude, and I, of course, have taken issue in the past with Google’s approach to (not) protecting locational privacy (as well as cellphone tracking in general).

But this time, I think Google got it right, and designed Latitude with user privacy in mind.

Here’s a quick rundown (based on my analysis of the help pages and this video) of what Google’s done to help give users control of their information flows in Latitude:

• Only friends you have explicitly invited or accepted can see your location
• You can hide your location to everyone so no friends can see where you are (and neither will Google)
• You can hide your location to select friends
• You can share only city-level data with select friends
• You can manually select a location on the map that will be shared with friends (which means you can send the wrong location to obfuscate your location)
• And, perhaps most importantly, Google is not logging your pings to servers; they only keep you latest location on file

Now, Privacy International has made some waves with their strongly-worded condemnation of Latitude. PI’s main concern is that someone could have Latitude surreptitiously activated on their phone, allowing employers, spouses, parents, stalkers, etc to track their location. While possible, this seems an unlikely scenario (and, besides, businesses have much better ways of tracking employees, as do parents their kids). That said, I do agree with PI that it would be wise for Google to create some kind of persistent warning/reminder to users that they are sharing their location with the data-servers in Mountain View (this alrleady exists on some phones, and only after a period of inactivity).

In sum, compared to Street View and the reluctance to provide a direct link to its privacy policy, I think Google (mostly) got it right this time.

:: As an aside, Google seems to customize the maps that appear on the Latitude homepage based on the geographic location of your IP address. When I pulled up the page from my office, it showed a map of Milwaukee. When I used a proxy, it showed Cambridge. When I used an unresolvable IP, it just showed Manhattan (unless, of course, Google knows I spent my last 7 years in NYC, and that’s why it’s showing that by default! ).