Sunnyvale (CA) – Yahoo introduced a new open location-based services (LBS) platform called Fire Eagle that helps users publish their current location to the Web, while giving them the ability to control how and where their location data is shared. Geodata are shared with authorized applications on the Internet, mobile and desktop applications. It is easily the best LBS approach we have seen so, and easily the front door to a privacy nightmare scenario for people who do not fully understand the concept of online privacy and its implications.

Think of Fire Eagle as an aggregation service that can feed location data to an online service of your choice or receive your location information from other applications and devices. You can set or import your location information and then share it with authorized web, mobile or desktop applications. To make sure your information does not get into the wrong hands, there are granular privacy options to determine how much location information will be revealed to each authorized application.

The service acts as a simple interface for managing location information and deciding how, and with whom, to share it. Fire Eagle is currently in beta but it is open to anyone interested to play with it at fireeagle.yahoo.net.

"Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location," said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo! Brickhouse. "We're here to help people take their location to the Web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with."

Fire Eagle does not know anything about your location until you enter it manually on the Fire Eagle site (also accessible from your mobile phone) or by using web, mobile or desktop applications to update Fire Eagle automatically. The most efficient way to supply location data is to use a mobile phone application to send location information in set intervals or in real time, obtained directly from a phone's GPS or through cell tower triangulation (supported by Dash, Navizon, Map My Tracks, and J2ME Mobile Updater for Nokia N95).

Your geodata is initially useless if you keep it within Fire Eagle. The fun starts when you authorize supported sites and services to use and/or update your Fire Eagle location information. Over fifty live applications support Fire Eagle now, like location-based social networks (BrightKite, My Loki, Plazes, Pownce, Rummble, ZKOUT), or location and travel timeline services (Dipity, Dopplr, ekit Travel Journal). Some of them are very entertaining – such as Outside.In Radar, a personalized local news service that shows its true power when authorized with Fire Eagle. The service shows you at the center of the map, with a radar showing everything going on nearby, wherever you are - ranging from the stories on your street, to the events in your neighborhood and to headlines relating to your hometown.

Of course, you have to be very careful how your share your geo-information in the Web 2.0-connected world. A few years ago, people would not think of revealing their location information in their wildest dreams, but now many Internet users are willing to share such information with online services. If social networking sites without geodata support enabled scenarios we saw in NBC Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator”, imagine what the addition of geodata can do. Not only can we see Chris Hansen’s team already working on a new idea, but we can also imagine a scary privacy nightmare for children and parents when too much data is shared with applications and other people. The problem here really is that careless sharing of geodata is not contained to Fire Eagle, but will spread to other applications around the Web.   

Users have the option to "hide" themselves temporarily from authorized sites, but bear in mind they may still continue to display your last public location. You can also purge your complete location information from Fire Eagle, but this will not delete location data collected over time by authorized sites from your Fire Eagle account. When it comes to sharing your location data with authorized sites and services, you can fine-tune the location granularity on a per-application basis, ranging from your most precise geographical info that you or your GPS-enabled devices provided to Fire Eagle, to a ZIP code or city information, to only the region or country data. You can also choose whether an authorized site can feed your Fire Eagle account with location data. In general, Fire Eagle's privacy options are simplified and instantly understandable.

There is just enough granularity to fine-tune exactly how much location data you wish to share with other sites. However, once your location data is sent to outside applications - you can't delete it remotely from within Fire Eagle. Instead, you have to login to the service that now has your location data and use its own options to delete your location content.

Yahoo will have to add a feature to allow users to remotely kill location data from other location based services rather sooner or later. Emergency scenarios we do not even want to imagine at this time make such functionality a necessary feature. And since we know that many of us are already more information with websites and people we do not know enough about, we wonder how the addition of geodata will work out. There is no doubt that Yahoo has a responsibility to educate users as much as it can about the implications of distributing geodata.   

Right now, we have to admit, Fire Eagle's features are beyond our comfort level as far as the average Internet user is concerned.

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