Fire Eagle - A Centralized Location Service

Yahoo! Research released the beta version of Fire Eagle last week. This web service allows you to store and update your (current) location, and then it can propagate your location information to other web services, such as Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and etc., that you have authorized. Fire Eagle claims to be

the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online. We want to make the whole web respond to where you are, and to help you discover more about the world around you.

Security of location information and privacy are in question here. Also, how much can you trust Yahoo! with your location information and location history? Nevertheless, it is an interesting service and might be useful in some way.

Comments

[Christopher Schmidt]

A key aspect of FireEagle is that Yahoo! doesn't have the ability to get your location information, I believe. It's encrypted: the only way an application gets access to it is being given permission by you, which requires access to a piece of information only you hold. (I could be wrong on this, since it's been a long time since I've heard it mentioned, but with the relative dearth of information, I don't feel it's completely out of the question based on what we know.)