Google Latitude
location-aware feature of Google Maps
Google Latitude was a location-aware feature of Google Maps, developed by Google as a successor to its earlier SMS-based service Dodgeball. Latitude allowed a mobile phone user to share their current location with certain people. Via their own Google Account, the user's cell phone location was mapped on Google Maps. The user could control the accuracy and details of what each other user can see — an exact location could be allowed, or it could be limited to identifying only the city. For privacy, the user can also turn it off or manually enter a location. Users had to explicitly opt in to Latitude and could only see the locations of friends who had chosen to share their locations.
On July 10, 2013, Google announced plans to shut down Latitude, and it was discontinued on August 9, 2013. After the feature moved to Google+ in between, Google incorporated Latitude's location sharing feature into Google Maps in March 2017.
History
Dodgeball
Dodgeball was founded in 2000 by New York University students Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert. The company was acquired by Google in 2005, and Crowley and Rainert were hired as Google employees, which led to the coinage of the term acquihire.
“Google Latitude” enters the record as location-aware feature of Google Maps. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Google, Latitude and location-aware can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1011979. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2017, 2000 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Google Latitude” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.