After Day1 I am wondering How Much do I Really Trust Google

So as I mentioned this morning I enabled Location History on my Google Latitude Account.  This evening I decided to take a look at what my day looked like, and well it looks something like this Pretty accurate, as you can see I took one route to my office and another one home.  While the history feature is private, looking at this map it really shows that someone could track your movements if they got a hold of the data.   (Just as a side note when viewing your history in Latitude you can also export it to a KML file and share/view the data in Google Earth.) The other piece that I mentioned this morning is you can see there is a large cluster at the bottom of the map, and really there is one at the top too, it is just harder to see as it covers a smaller area.  So apparently there is no way to throttle or control when the application on your phone checks in (well unless you are using the iPhone of course where the only way to check in is to load up the page in the browser since there is no app, and even if there was it would not run in the background).  The instructions for all of the supported devices (Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android) are the same

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

This does not seem to be to be very efficient as last night while I was sleeping and my blackberry was still and plugged in it checked in about 40 times an hour.  I think I like the brightkite model a little better where I have control over where and when I want to be checked in to a location, who can see my location, and the ability to post it out to Twitter or Facebook selectively . I am going to keep location history enabled a few more days out of curiosity, but unless they tweak it a little I don’t see much value in it.