Google Latitude isn’t anything new, its been available for more than a year now but many people haven’t heard of it.

Latitude lets you to track your family, friends or even your employees in real time. This opens up a whole new way of using location based information and you don’t even need an iPhone to do it. It’s a lot like the Quoox GPS Tracker we wrote about back in 2008. The Quoox GPS tracker is a lot more limited than Google Latitude because it has an internet connection requirement.

Before you get all don’t tread on my privacy rights with your GPS stuff – let me give you a few examples of where this technology can help out a lot.

• Keeping Track of Your Drivers – With Google Latitude a small business wouldn’t have to make a huge investment in infrastructure to be able to track their drivers. This could mean that you’ll get more accurate information when you phone that food joint you ordered from to ask them where your food is.
• Public Involvement in Search and Rescue – Sometimes you need to get a lot of people together really fast. When it comes to locating a missing child or something of similar grave importance the general public is always willing to help. Keeping track of where all these helpers have been and where they currently are is a lot more easy and a lot more cheap with Google Latitude.
• Concerned Parents Have Rights Too – I support the privacy rights of children but sometimes there’s a real need for being able to track them. Maybe if you could keep track of their location via Google Latitude it’d give you that extra confidence to give your child permission to take that first road trip. Ask your child to allow you to do this as a condition of extending permission and you might be surprised when you come to an agreement.

A device with Latitude software installed can retrieve the location of the device from either a built-in GPS module or through your WiFi connection details if you don’t have a GPS enabled device. If your device doesn’t have a GPS you’ll find that your location information will be less accurate and even non-existent when you get out into rural areas. You should consider the drawbacks of a non-GPSs enabled device if you’ll be using the system under mission critical conditions.

You can download Google Latitude and find out more about it on Google Latitude‘s web site.