The Circles of Latitude: Adoption and Usage of Location Tracking in Online Social Networking

This paper reports preliminary results of an ongoing ethnographic study of people’s attitudes towards and adoption of Google Latitude, a location-tracking technology for mobile devices. In order to understand barriers to adoption, participants include both users and non-users of Latitude, and those whose usage has dropped off. The report focuses on how participants perceive Latitude to be conceptually situated within the ecology of social networking and communication technologies. Earlier work on user attitudes with regard to location tracking emphasized potential privacy concerns. In our research we also identified privacy concerns, but additionally several other more salient tensions such as adoption trends, social conformance, audience management, and information filtering.