Thursday, August 14, 2008

Yahoo - Fire Eagle

Yahoo executive Tom Coates recently went to England and rendezvoused with more than 100 random friends who just happened to be in Old Blighty as well. Coates found them thanks to Fire Eagle, a new database service Yahoo launched Tuesday. Fire Eagle scoops up real-world location information the way Web crawlers swallow Web pages and dishes it out to whatever services an individual selects. It is an open platform that will hook up data providers with application makers all over the world. ''Fire Eagle is designed to make every site on the Web, everything that is connected to the network, 'geoaware,'" Coates said. Right now, Fire Eagle is part of the technology behind just a handful of services, including Dopplr, a social network for frequent travelers, and Pownce, an e-mail substitute. But in the future, it could feed information about where you are and where you have been to everything from Internet search engines to coupon providers to your employer or HMO — if you let it. Geolocation services tend to alarm privacy advocates because they make it trivially easy to track individuals and could endanger people who are vulnerable to abuse, such as women who are trying to escape domestic violence. "For individuals who do not want their location to be known, these services could be harmful," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Coates, who heads product development at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator, where Fire Eagle was born, said the service is designed to protect users by giving them control of who can see what information, by allowing them to hide and by making it easy for them to delete their data from Fire Eagle.But critics wonder if users will realize that copies of their data will be stored by virtually every application that connects into Fire Eagle as well, making it extremely difficult for anyone to completely erase their tracks...Mercury

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