Google today announced the launch of Latitude, a tool that lets you keep track of your friends’ locations as well as share your whereabouts with your loved ones.

“How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to?” is the question Google asks with the introduction of Latitude.

“It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives,” explains Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering at the Google mobile team. What about that other question? How often do you want your friends to know where you are and what you are up to? We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not up to something shady but even then, you might just really dig your privacy.

That said, it seems as though Google has it all figured out: EVERYTHING is opt in. First off, you have to switch it on before anyone can see you. Second, when you receive a Latitude request from a friend, you can choose to accept and only see their location, or accept as well as share your location. You can, of course, also deny requests all together.

Second, you can control which friend sees what. You might only want some friends to see exactly where you are while others are only allowed to see what city you’re in. Latitude also lets you control the location that your friends see. Say you’re in Vegas but you don’t want your boss to know you called in sick to gamble, you can manually set your location to elsewhere. Lastly, you can hide and disappear off of everyone’s radar completely.

We can tell already that this application is going to receive a lot of mixed reviews. Sure it’s going to be handy for keeping track of friends if you’re all at Six Flags and you need to find out where everyone is but wouldn’t it be just as easy to call or text? One thing we definitely like is that on a city-level, it makes for a cool way to keep track of your travelling friends. It'll also be handy for parents who want to keep on an eye on kids but then again, what's to stop the kids from changing their location to show they're somewhere they're not?

Useful implementations aside, we’re not too crazy about Latitude. There’s a lot of layers privacy-wise and adding people would involve adjusting the settings connected to that friend accordingly. We’re all for social networking and staying connected in every possible way but we draw the line at stuff that takes more time and effort than it’s worth. Sure it’d be nice to share locations, but for the most part, I’d like to be able to tell people I’m not answering the phone because I’m at the movies when I’m actually at home playing Peggle for three hours straight.