Overview
I made a web tool that draws a heatmap to show where you’ve been if you upload your history file from Google Latitude.
What I made
See a heatmap of where I’ve spent the most time at heatmapforlatitude.appspot.com.
If you like it, you can upload a Latitude history file and make a heatmap of your own.
Update (8 May 2011): I revisited this a year later to make a version that you can try online with your own Latitude data
Update (15 Jan 2012): A fixed version of the code to handle the new Google Latitude file format.
Google Latitude is starting to get very interesting. The new dashboard lets you see some graphs of how much time you spend at work, home, and out and about, and a list of your most visited places.
You can also see a Google Map with your 500 latest updates added as pushpins.
I had a random idea while looking at it this evening – why don’t they let you see all your updates on a map, in a heatmap that shows where you’ve been?
Naturally, once I had the idea, I had to give it a quick try.
From the Google Latitude dashboard, you can export your history of location updates as a KML file. I downloaded my history, and wrote a short, hacky Python script to parse it, and generate a heat map to overlay on a Google map.
In this post, I’ll show the sorts of results it can generate, and share my script, in case any other Latitude users fancy giving it a go.
This is what you see if you press the “Find Dale” button on my TV remote control.
(Well, actually the “Teletext” button… cos I wasn’t using it, and there isn’t another button that makes any more sense!)
The on-screen-display adds a message at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds, saying my last recorded location and when I was there.
People following me on twitter may have noticed me talking about setting up a new home media server: a small Linux server that has become our Freeview box, PVR, home photo album, and music server.
And now it’s set up, it is surprisingly easy to do amazingly useful, and not-at-all annoying things like this! 😉
In my defence, I stopped just short of making the script poll for my location and display an on-screen message whenever my location changes. Which would’ve been very cool, but probably drive my family nuts. So I compromised with a script that runs when you press a button on the remote.
I wrote a quick post on Sunday morning about the mobile location sharing hack I wrote at Open Hack London. My post tried to explain the tech behind it, but I wanted to follow it up with a post to explain my thinking around the social innovation in the idea.
Sharing your location with your friends. People have been talking about this for ages, but recently it’s started to hit the mainstream.
More and more mobile phones are coming with GPS. For the ones that don’t, systems like Skyhook and Google Maps for Mobile are getting smarter at using GSM Cell IDs and WiFi access point addresses to work out where you are.
The reaction to this stuff finally arriving for the masses hasn’t all been positive, though. The response to the UK launch of Google Latitude – Google’s mobile application for sharing your location with friends from your Google contact list – is a good example.
A threat to privacy?
Privacy International said that “…Google has created an unnecessary danger to the privacy and security of users…”. They argued that it was too easy for Latitude to be “…enabled by a second party without a user’s knowledge or consent…” and that once enabled it could remain undetected for a long time, with massive potential for abuse.
Liberal Democrat MPs Tom Brake and my local MP Chris Huhne submitted an Early Day Motion to Parliament arguing that Latitude “…could substantially endanger user privacy…” and that “…Google has created an unnecessary danger to user privacy…”.
Tom Brake followed this up with the now widely reported quote that “Google Latitude poses an insidious threat to our hard-won liberties“.
I personally think this was unnecessarily alarmist, but at any rate, it is clear that the model of granting ongoing access to your location (until / unless you revoke it) worries some people.