Paul Gillin's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

Indeed, the location tracking feature could offer parents of teenagers peace of mind, social media strategist
Paul Gillin told TechNewsWorld.

Safety could also be a benefit, he added. When mobile users get lost, for instance, they could use the technology to backtrack.

'A Digital Breadcrumb Trail'

Fans of geocaching, who may lose track of their whereabouts on their convoluted treasure hunts, could use the feature as "a kind of digital breadcrumb trail," added Gillin.

In the business world, meanwhile, applications could include package-delivery and field service organizations, both of which "very much want to know where their people are and where they've been" in order to monitor routes and productivity, Gillin suggested.

While both Latitude and Glympse -- which also offers tracking capabilities -- are free, there are subscription services built around a similar idea, Sterling pointed out.

"It is amazing how open we have become," Gillin observed. "It seems like every time some new innovation comes out in terms of making our lives more public, there's invariably a privacy backlash, but then we accept it."

Google and Facebook are both in "a race to make the Web a social place," Gillin added. "They're both testing the limits of what people will accept."

As a result, "citizens of the U.S. in general are learning to live with a high degree of visibility that we never would have accepted 10 or even five years ago, because we find out it really isn't all that big a deal," he asserted.

New rules of etiquette are also evolving to make the potential intrusiveness more palatable, noted Gillin.

"It's not a matter of the technology being offensive or intrusive, it's a matter of how people use it," he said. "Emily Post never conceived of this stuff."