Ben Bodien …

The BBC ran an article today voicing the concerns of a couple of privacy groups over Yahoo’s Fire Eagle.

I’d love to know whether the director at the Centre for Digital Democracy actually used the service before declaring that sites like Fire Eagle are “building and collecting more data, not just about the content you like but where you go and where you are at the moment.” I’ll have to assume that he hasn’t, or he’d know just how daft he sounds implying that Fire Eagle is collecting data (it only stores the most recent location of each user), and that this data is being held for the purposes of extracting patterns in user behaviour (rather hard to do with a single location record per user).

I had reservations about using Fire Eagle at first, but after getting it set up and experiencing the extent to which its creators have gone to ensure that the information you provide is safe, I’ve been nothing but impressed and perfectly comfortable with it. There are a number of controls in place to keep your data safe. Here they are:

1. You can provide your location with as much or as little precision as you like, as accurate as exact latitude and longitude or as vague as your country.
2. You choose which third party applications you want to use, and you can stop sharing your location with them at any time.
3. You decide how much precision each third party application that you authorise receives regarding your location.
4. Fire Eagle reminds you on a regular basis which applications you are sharing location data with, and unless you explicitly confirm that you’re still happy with that, it will block all application updates for you.
   
5. You can put a temporary block on application integration so that you can go off-radar for as long as you want.
6. You can purge your location data from Fire Eagle at any time.

That all sounds pretty democratic to me, though it somehow fails to satisfy the CfDD’s definition of the word.

Quite honestly, if half the web applications that store personal data paid even a tenth of the level of attention to the issue of privacy as Yahoo have done with Fire Eagle, the Internet would be a better place. The Brickhouse team are doing an incredible job, and I have to believe that there are more appropriate targets for this kind of misguided assault.