Google Latitude Foils Purse Snatching

Google Latitude, which was added to Google's Mobile App in February and allows you to track your friends, has helped catch a purse snatcher.

This isn't the first Google tech to foil a crime; earlier I wrote about clever use of Google's Street View which helped locate a kidnap victim.

Last week, Janina Valiente was waiting for a bus in San Francisco. A man ran up and snatched her purse off of her shoulder. She remembered, however, that she had installed Google's Mobile App, which meant that Latitude would show where the phone was.

She called her sister, who also has the program and could thus track the location of Valiente's cell phone via Latitude. Her sister told her the phone was at the corner of Fell St. and Ashbury St., which is exactly where police found it when they arrested the purse snatcher.