Google Maps - Pushing the Limits of Spatial Privacy?

Attached is a link to a New York Times blog on a feature of Google Maps that allows Google to "know' within varying amounts of accuracy where the user is located based upon the user's cell phone, even if the cell-phone is not GPS-enabled. Google will then communicate this back to the user so that he or she can find out where they are or where they want to go.

I highly recommend that anyone who is interested in privacy in a spatial context pay particular attention to the wide divergence in the comments to the blog; they show the varying degrees of knowledge about the technology as well as levels of concerns about its implications. Courts will struggle with identifying an expectation of privacy that is "reasonable" in this context.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/google-doesnt-know-where-you-are-but-it-has-a-good-guess/?ref=technology#comment-60383