Yahoo’s recently launched Fire Eagle has privacy advocates burning up about the new open platform that allows users to show their location on the Web and also allows developers access to users’ locations.
Yahoo officials insisted control is in the hands of the users. Users may decide how much they want to expose about their location, including the country, state, city and even street address.
“Location presents some unique challenges, and people inherently feel creepy when content is targeted to where they are and your actual physical location is being tracked,” said Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “If people know this is being shared, then people will react more strongly and protect themselves.”
While Fire Eagle users control information about their location, privacy advocates say privacy policies for third-party developers may differ from Yahoo’s, leaving users confused and open to privacy breeches.
Ted Morgan, founder and CEO of Skyhook Wireless and the brain behind Loki, one of the 50 third-party developers using Fire Eagle, agrees that there is room for user confusion. But he said companies are adopting a general approach to privacy and offer similar policies.
If users opt out of Fire Eagle, previously collected information can be kept by the developers offering the service through their applications.
Morgan said Loki offers users a delete-history option and Fire Eagle users also have the option to hide their location and delete all their data from the databases.
“It’s great that application providers are informing people and have robust controls, but its important for people to realize if they turn it off for one application, they are not turning off their whole device,” Cooper said.
Companies, especially those that have spent decades building their brand, are not going to risk losing the trust of customers and risk hurting…