People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

In Snow Leopard, you can ask for the computer's location. Without a GPS, how accurate could that be? The answer in my case is: very accurate. In this post, I'll show you how to write a CoreLocation app for the Mac that shows the current location in Google Maps, so you can see exactly where your computer thinks it is.

I feel a lot of anger and frustration in this list.

Some of the items seem fine to me. I would not have written them like this ;). I disagree strongly with the last one, not because of the rationale but the form. It’s an unproven affirmation. There will be cases where it will be indeed the case and some not. :)

About geolocation privacy, the issue has hit the fan already ;) Advertising the user’s location is one way to make aware the user (or users in developping countries) of a mobile device. Blocking access to the location is *not always* a solution either. Sometimes the solution will be in how long the data can be kept, sometimes the solution will be in how the data will be used.

Repeat after me 1000 times: It is not a privacy issue, but a lack (or very thin) opacity issue. The network makes the access to information very quick and easy. There’s no need or no use to block it. There is need to be able to slow down the stream at will.