It's no secret to anyone who has spent 5 minutes online that the Internet has made snooping on your friends, family and neighbors a lot easier.
But these days, as new social networks, mobile devices and location-based applications continue to spring to life, the question is becoming "what's acceptable stalking?"

Enter the new kid, Google Latitude, a service that debuted today that lets others know where you are at all times.
Using Google Maps software, you can basically broadcast where you are and what you are doing while simultaneously following the whereabouts of your friends through a cell phone or from the comfort of a home computer.

We'll ignore the fact that I'm not writing this from Dock Fore

Sound creepy yet?

That shouldn't be a new sensation.

As a number of other blogs have pointed out Google snatched up and subsequently killed a similar service recently.

But the big G is not alone, thanks to Loopt, a self-described "social compass," andBrightkite, a location-based social network, among others.

This is already on top of familiar faces such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, all of which allow users to update where they are from their cell phone.

Since we've all been down the long and tortured road of where does our privacy begin and end online" before, we'll skip past that argument and get to the question I asked before: "What is acceptable stalking?"

It seems to start and end with Google, since all of us engage in low-level stalking anytime we type someone's name into the search engine. But with more developers and technology companies look to explore social networking and expand the uses for mobile devices we can only expect more ways to LoJack those around us. To a lot of people, Twitter and Facebook are just as harmless - if not even more respectable - forms of stalking. (Of course some may say that's implied when you agree to be "friends" with someone on a social network.) At the same time we can't ignore the fact that these sites can be a fun and extremely useful way of communicating with others.

But is that the same as the down-to-the-exact-intersection detail of information you can now get through Google Latitude or any other location service?

As is the case with so many other social networking and location-based services, Google Latitude allows you to decide who can access your whereabouts. It also has a feature that allows you to give a fixed position (for instance, your desk at work or a barstool at Rosies).

What it all really comes back to once again is managing your online footprint and deciding just how deep you are going to jump in the pool. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary ( yes, I'm looking at you people who continue to post embarassing info on the Internets), there are ways to keep your privacy and be active online. Maybe it's time we started to accept that and just get used to either ignoring or answering the question "What are you doing?"

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