Google Latitude is a new service from Google that allows you to broadcast your location to friends and family from your mobile phone or laptop device. I’ve set it up on my phone to see how well it works and it’s been surprisingly accurate considering I don’t have GPS in my phone (it uses mobile phone masts to triangulate my position).
It also managed to pin-point, to a few metres, the location of my girlfriend from me logging her into the service from a laptop in her house. I haven’t figured out how it managed to do this yet, and I find it a bit alarming. Any ideas? Can your IP address be that accurate?
Given all that I was pleased to discover that even Google gets it wrong sometimes when I looked at the Google Latitude widget on my home page this morning:
There I am, on the map at Hyde Park corner, correct, but I’ve never been to Finland.