not

Here’s a quick rundown (based on my analysis of the help pages and this video) of what Google’s done to help give users control of their information flows in Latitude: * Only friends you have explicitly invited or accepted can see your location * You can hide your location to everyone so no friends can see where you are (and neither will Google) * You can hide your location to select friends * You can share only city-level data with select friends * You can manually select a location on the map that will be shared with friends (which means you can send the wrong location to obfuscate your location) * And, perhaps most importantly, Google is not logging your pings to servers; they only keep you latest location on file
http://michaelzimmer.org/2009/02/06/with-latitude-google-actually-got-it-mostly-right/

Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google