Coop's Corner

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. (Fire Eagle's not an original idea. There's also Loopt, a cell phone-based service that allows people to track and communicate with friends, as well as Whrrl and Brightkite.)

So this is progress? Maybe it's just my particular hangup but, truth be told, knowing that "they" (and that includes friends and family) may be watching me does not fill me with much enthusiasm. Sometimes it's comforting just being off the grid. I don't think I missed something growing up in a Fire Eagle-less world and I'm in no hurry to change now.

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.

So now, Yahoo's (rightly) taking a "let 1,000 flowers bloom" approach by opening up the APIs to the rest of the Internet, and the wisdom of the free market will decide the matter. For better, or for worse. We'll see.

(For more, check out what Webware's editor in chief, Rafe Needleman, had to say about the pluses and minuses of Fire Eagle on the CNET News Daily Debrief.)

After the list of losers they pawned off in the lead-up to the Internet bust, I nearly always distrust the pronouncements of venture capitalists about the future. Of course, why hold a grudge? Isn't that the price you pay in a hit-and-miss business? For every few Webvans, there's always a Google to convince the world that these guys really know how to read the tea leaves better than most folks. I suppose so.

So it was that I was especially curious when the Churchill Club earlier this week invited some of the A-List venture capitalists in Silicon Valley for a panel discussion on the top ten tech trends. (Eric Savitz kept good notes in his recap of the evening.) Most of what got offered up was unexceptional, but one comment in particular from Josh Kopelman may turn out to be one of the most prescient forecasts of the year. I'm actually hoping he's wrong because Kopelman's prediction scares the pants off me.

Vinod Khosla: Privacy is a red herring

Kopelman presented a scenario for the rise of the "implicit" Internet. I'm simplifying, but he was referring to the vast web of personal data that until now has existed relatively undisturbed in different corners of the data world. For example, you may have made a reservation over the Internet one day, or bought a book from an online reseller on another. But that that data is going to get collected from heretofore separate "silos" as companies that figure out ways to break through the barriers and deliver information based on that implicit cyber data.

That shouldn't strike anybody as a pipe dream. It's already happening in small ways and it's an idea that VCs will be in a hurry to fund. Some, though perhaps not all. Roger McNamee, who also participated in the panel, pointed out the obvious elephant in the room. Not only might Facebook know what I'm doing, he said, "but the Chinese government also knows." True enough. And not just the Chinese. Any government.

Vinod Khosla, who also took part in the discussion, was less impressed by the obvious privacy objections. Sounding a lot like his former partner in arms at Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, he described this as a big opportunity, giving short shrift to nitpickers like me. "Privacy is a red herring," he said. "There are rules and laws and ways to address the privacy issue."

Maybe he'll be proved right, but that's still one helluva leap of faith. If the experience of the last several years teaches anything, it's that the best of intentions often get sacrificed to political expediency. I know what Khosla wants to sell, but isn't it better to take a hard second look at the price before committing? Of course, good luck trying to tell that to the herd once it picks up the scent.

On the eve of the RSA security conference, there's a showdown in the offing between "Old Europe" and U.S. search operators. Earlier Monday word leaked about a European regulatory plan to press search engine providers to dump personal search data after six months.

(Credit: CNET News.com)

Barring the unforeseen, it's likely the European Commission will look kindly upon the plan. This would be quite a big deal, setting the stage for a continent-wide challenge to the way big search engine companies set procedures handling log deletion and browser cookies.

Until now, privacy advocates haven't gotten very far convincing search companies to drastically curtail the length of time they retain data. For instance, the argument made by Google is that keeping log data around can keep you safe, help prevent fraud, and improve search results (using the argument that "better data makes for better science").

That all may be true--though I've known more than a few security experts who argue otherwise--but this is less a matter of computer science than of public policy. And it's not a fight the search engine companies are going to win. Can you see some congressman campaigning back in the home district for reflection on the campaign plank, "What's good for Google is good for all the rest of us?" I don't think so.

On its public policy blog, Google sounded less than thrilled with the news, although it boiled any bitterness out of its official reaction.

We believe that data retention requirements have to take into account the need to provide quality products and services for users, like accurate search results, as well as system security and integrity concerns. We have recently discussed some of the many ways that using this data helps improve users' experience, from making our products safe, to preventing fraud, to building language models to improve search results. This perspective -- the ways in which data is used to improve consumers' experience on the web -- is unfortunately sometimes lacking in discussions about online privacy.

The Working Party's findings also stated that IP addresses should be treated as personal information, with the full weight of data protection laws. Based on our own analysis, we believe that whether or not an IP address is personal data depends on how the data is being used.

The findings are another important step in an ongoing dialogue about protecting user privacy online -- a discussion in which Google will continue to be engaged. It's also a debate in which we hope our users will participate.

Google figures that it's already met privacy advocates' demands by reducing to 18 months from 24 months the length of time it stores private data. I imagine Microsoft, which similarly retains data for 18 months and Yahoo, which keeps data for 13 months, feel the same. They can't be thrilled with what's going on because it presents a threat to their Internet business. Unfortunately for them, there's not a really good counter-argument. (Here's a good primer News.com assembled on the companies' respective privacy policies.)

Greg Sterling of SearchEngineLand.com offered a quote to Bloomberg that was spot on:

"Today's decision may threaten "the golden goose" of the broader business of Internet advertising, which uses customers' online records to offer personally targeted ads, Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview."

That's why you can expect search engine companies to fight as hard as they can, enlisting support from political and business allies. But when it comes to privacy, most people are less concerned with the stock price of big tech powerhouses than they are in keeping their personal data safe.