Cool Free Cell Phone Tracker App

Okay, now it's time to get down to the nitty gritty. In 2009 Google introduce a new free cell phone locator app. They already had the amazingly successful Google Maps service that millions of people were using. It just made sense to increase it's functionality to allow users to track cell phones with it.

Google realized that with so many cell phones having GPS receivers built right into them that they could make and app that would allow users to utilize this GPS functionality to locate their friends and family members. They did this by developing an application for smart phones called Google Latitude.

Google Latitude is free to download and use. It's actually quite amazing that such a cool service that works so well is totally free. The way the service works is that users download and install the app onto their cell phone. They then sign up for a Google Gmail email account. Then they run the Latitude app on their phone and send a request to their friends and family members who also have Latitude installed and a Gmail account. When these individuals accept the friends request, they will be able to locate them with the Google Latitude map.

If their Latitude friend has their phone turned on, is in a covered service area, and has Google Latitude running one their phone, they will see a little picture image of their friend on the Google Latitude map. If they click on their friends image, they will get the exact location of their friend.

Pretty cool, huh?

Google realized that there would likely be some concerns about privacy with the introduction of this free cell phone locator app. They thought ahead and built in some cool privacy features that are easy to configure. Users can choose to set these privacy settings for individual friends or for all of their friends at once.

If the user doesn't want a particular friend to be able to track them, they can simply click on the "hide from friend" option. The user can also choose to only allow certain friends to see that they are in the city. Let's face it, not all friends are great friends and you may want to customize how closely a friend can track you. Google Latitude makes this a snap.

You can also choose a global setting that applies to all of your Latitude friends called, "hide my location". If you choose this option, no one on your friends list will be able to track you.

It was pretty smart of Google to build these powerful privacy controls into the app.

In order for this free cell phone tracker to work, it must be running on your phone. The Google developers designed this app to use minimal resources. This means that the app can run all the time when your phone is turned on and not bog your phone down or drain your battery.

After you install Google Latitude, set it to run automatically every time you turn your phone on. This way you will always be able to find your friends and they will always be able to find you.