Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s new geolocation service, is fresh out of the company’s Brickhouse development team, and third parties are lining up to cut deals.
Who can deny that location is going to become increasingly important for Web services? In the initial rush of coverage, MG Siegler correctly noted that Fire Eagle essentially serves as the intermediary between services offering that geolocation capability and those wishing to make use of it.
From a business perspective, Yahoo probably has a winner. Whether it’s Fire Eagle or a better, similar incarnation by someone else, this is another signpost of a future where we choose from a panoply of location-based services. From what I understand of Fire Eagle, I can’t find any evidence that it won’t succeed. Already, more than 50 services make use of the Fire Eagle technology and more will follow. Unfortunately, don’t you just know that some marketing go-getter is going to figure out a way to exploit location-based programs to shove targeted advertising (and spam, naturally) down our throats as we navigate around town. Again, you don’t have to play. And you can shut the darned thing off for a time. Still…
The reassuring part is that Fire Eagle is permission-based. And Tom Coates, who joined Yahoo from the BBC to serve as product director at Yahoo’s Brickhouse, said all the right things about protecting privacy rights at the Fire Eagle debut. The service does allow you to restrict location reporting or even shut it down for a period of time. Without that variable privacy feature, Fire Eagle would be one more hellish intrusion into our already over-snooped, overwrought lives.
In fact, Fire Eagle will ask you every month or so to review your permissions. Reminding you of the responsibility to order your own life – and who gets to watch.
Why does technology depress me more and more these days? Does it always have to be about advertising?
I’m waiting for the next huge natural disaster that’s going to snap people back into a more human reality.
There seems to be a lot of “Social Networking” allowing you to find friends near you and allowing you friends to find you.
What I want is “Antisocial Networking” displaying the locations of people you want to avoid. Now that would be a public service.
Problem is a slippery slope. Now Yahoo! allows you to protect yourself from snooping by temporarily disabling it (and I take opposite view from the original poster on the forced monthly review of the settings… I see that as a badgering to set everything always on and just press “Yes” next time when asked).
However, I strongly fear the day when we are forced to own and constantly use one of these (even some prominent TWIT guests have recently advocated such mandate for cars!). And, I fear even more that (shea)people will be accepting it for a trivial reasons such as up-to-date traffic report (check above mentioned TWIT).
Before that time we should fight for the privacy law expressly banning enforcement of such tracking devices as a violation of the privacy right. Than bring in the technology.