Fire Eagle
Yahoo! is currently running an invitation-only beta test for it’s Fire Eagle location broker. The idea is as simple as useful: Fire Eagle takes your current location as input from different services or applications and passes them on to other services or applications. To locate yourself, the Fire Eagle web site, services like plazes.com, or (possibly GPS-based) applications on mobile devices can be used. The location information is then passed on to all kinds of location based services that provide you with local weather information, shopping guides or simply update your current location on twitter.
It is quite obvious that this raises privacy issues, but I think the people behind Fire Eagle have done quite a good job addressing them: every application or service must be enabled for every user, both for setting and receiving the user’s current location. This permission can be revoked for any service at any time. What is more, Fire Eagle can even be activated only for a given time (1 or 3 months), before the user is required to reactivate it. This is supposed to prevent users from forgetting they are on this services, but still (unknowingly) providing it with location information. And, of course, you can just temporarily disable it.
Having that said, you still have to decide whether you want a to permanently provide Yahoo! with updates on your current location, since they provide the collection point for all your location information, which might raise concerns for some people, although the website says:
If a new piece of ‘Exact Location’ information comes in, then we throw away the old one. No historical record is kept of your location.
After all, you need trust the people behind such a tool. This applies both for Fire Eagle and the applications that you permit to share it your location with. If you do not trust these people, it is probably better not use such tools at all. (Which makes the whole post sound more negative than it was meant to be. It is a neat idea.)
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