Google Mobile Maps has introduced a new feature called Google Latitude that will allow you to broadcast your location to select friends, family, and colleagues based on the coordinates of your cell phone (via GPS or otherwise). That's the good news. The bad news is the Saudi Arabia is not on the 27 countries listed for the service at launch, but that should change at some point. The major countries in the list are mostly European, and the US, Australia, and India. If you have the GPS feature enabled in Google Maps on your mobile phone, you are probably familiar with the pulsating blue dot on the map that represents you wherever you go. Google Latttude is now essentially letting you share that blue dot with anyone you like. “This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun,” said Steve Lee, a Google product manager. It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service. “Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we've built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application,” Google said in a blog post announcing the service. Friends' whereabouts can be tracked on a Google map, either from a handset or from a personal computer. Google Latitude will work on BlackBerry and devices running on Symbian software or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. It will also operate on some T-Mobile phones running on Google's Android software and eventually will work on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iTouch.
