As some of you may know I use Google Latitude to record exactly where I am at any given moment (whenever my phone is on). And of course I also share it with a couple of people, so if you want to stalk me you can do that from your couch on a laptop. At least if I add you as a friend on Latitude, I am a bit more conservative there than with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.
Why do I do this? Not sure actually, I just turned on the feature when it became available to try it out and never really turned it off anymore. I don’t use Latitude a lot, but it’s sometimes fun to look at the places that you visited over the past couple of days. You can calculate exactly how long your daily commute was for example. My phone calculates my location 1-2 times per minute and Google Latitude stores that data in its history.
Generally Latitude’s data are quite accurate, but for some reason the data from Monday night are not: according to Google I was at Schiphol Airport at 4:32 PM and the next morning at 12:11 PM in Shanghai, but in between I made a stop in Mexico for just one minute! At that time I was probably somewhere above Siberia or Mongolia but certainly not in Mexico. My last trip to Mexico was an afternoon in Tijuana last March!
I can’t explain this. I once accidentally left my phone on during a flight and received a welcome message from a Russian mobile provider while flying over Russia, meaning it’s sometimes possible to connect to a base station when you are flying. But my phone was off this time and we were nowhere close to Latin America, so a Mexico location in Latitude is something I don’t understand.
Well, I hope no murders were commited in those locations while you were there – or Interpol will be looking for you.