Google's service is to some extent dependent therefore on the operator's infrastructure. At present, this would not be an issue for most operators who are seeking to drive further data traffic on their networks and Google's applications are contributing to this. But for those operators who are providing their own location services either as a D2C offering or business-to-business (B2B) offering, Google may well be undermining their business case.

The G1 Android phone offered in the UK by T-Mobile does not support Google Latitude, even though Google Maps is available, and G1s offered by other operators do support Latitude. This is allegedly because T-Mobile UK has requested that the feature is disabled, citing privacy concerns. This suggests that the operators are not prepared to go down without a fight, and that Google is still sensitive to operator concerns.

In line with its core business model of advertising, Google is likely to focus on monetizing Latitude through advertising revenues, mainly local advertising. It may look at how it could generate revenues from selling contextual information on its users, presumably to advertisers. This will have to be done on an aggregated level in order not to compromise the data privacy of its users.