I've written before on Fire Eagle. It's a nice idea, Fire Eagle is. I complained on Twitter that there seems to be no private flag in the API, and confused Tom Coates. I responded, with an extra post containing more info, which confused him more, so he asked me to IM him. Well, I saw that tweet while I was out at a restaurant, so I wrote a blog post instead (the one I mentioned in the first sentence) and let him know. He didn't respond. I tried to IM him on both accounts, his AIM failed, and later his Y!M had no response. I added him to my 'friends', later he messaged me while I was not at the computer (and I responded, but he apparently was offline the whole time, and has not responded in the days since). Now I have asked why he is avoiding me now.
I understand that's a lot of tweets, but you don't actually need to read them, they just provide backstory if you're unsure about my summary.
So, since I had grouped my Fire Eagle with my BrightKite, I posted an update to brightkite in private mode. Brightkite told Fire Eagle the full address, instead of just the city and state (like it is supposed to, to non-trusted friends and the public). I can understand their intention: Fire Eagle needs the full address in case it has to update other sites, like Dopplr, with my full address (for friends) and partial address (City, State) for public. But as far as I can tell, there's no way for BrightKite to tell Fire Eagle, "hey, he's in private mode, so tell the other sites he's in private mode and don't display the full address to them". You have to go in, and either set private mode in Fire Eagle (kinda silly since FE is supposed to be the middle man and not the home base where you go in and update your address to push it to other services), or go in and say
ok, I'll tell my full address to brightkite, it will pass that on to FE, but since there's no privacy tag in the api I will have to tell FE that Dopplr is only allowed to know my City, State, even though it's allowed to know MORE, I just can't tell Dopplr the full location with a 'and only the city/state is public' notice.
I don't see how this doesn't make sense as I said it above, but some people seem to find what I say difficult, so I'll give a run down. There is NO PRIVACY TAG in the location API. NONE. Not on a individual scale (imagine being able to say that the street was public, but which city it was in was private!), and not on a master scale. However, there is still some semblance of privacy.
User Location Permissions
From the user's perspective, when she is authorizing your application, she is setting two things. Firstly, she is authorizing how much of her location information in Fire Eagle is accessible to your application. Secondly, she is deciding whether your application can set his location in Fire Eagle.
Users authorize which of the following levels of their location information your application is able to access. Your application should be prepared to deal with inputs at any of these levels.
- user has not allowed read access.
- as precisely as possible
- at the Postal Code level
- at the Neighborhood level (currently unused)
- at the Town level
- at the Regional level (currently unused)
- at the State level
- at the Country level
After authorizing your application, the user can change either of these authorization settings at any time without notice to your application.
This is an interesting way to go about it, I'm reminded of Aza Raskin's method (check the mockup at the bottom of his post!). However, this is not the correct way to go about it.
What if, like BrightKite obviously understands with their user customizable "private" mode, I could tell Fire Eagle that sometimes I want Dopplr to know/show my full location, and sometimes I don't? Just sometimes. There's no way to do this. I have not used Dopplr (so maybe there is no private mode), but there's still no excuse not to support a privacy tag in the API. I'd be able to tell Fire Eagle
ok, we know Dopplr has no privacy mode, so when BrightKite tells you I'm in private mode, don't tell Dopplr my street address. Just the City, State.
That's too logical, I'm afraid.
Update (Aug 13, 2008): Tom Coates has sent me a direct message.
June 27 @ 06:34 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: brightkite, fireeagle, location, geolocation, api, privacy | TrackbackHey - we didn't ignore it - we're still thinking about it. No promises it'll happen, but we're definitely considering it.
writing from my phone for Tom Coates
I finally got my Fire Eagle invite today, and immediately signed up with the wrong account. I tried changing accounts by signing in to the correct account, but your invite is used after you click the link and before you agree to the terms, lame.
Afterward, I got to see what all the fuss was about: a temporary location storing service that apparently can't pass along private tags (tweet), where brightkite could tell fire eagle that I'm in a mode where the most info I'm showing to non friends is the city. Fire Eagle, however, supports stateless (no private sometimes, public other) location sharing on a per service basis, as general or specific as I like. Lame.
Will expand later if necessary
June 25 @ 08:40 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: fireeagle, brightkite, location, geolocation, privacy | Trackback