Yahoo finally launches Fire Eagle, but you can hide

As Media Guardian has just reported, Yahoo has launched it's long-awaited Fire Eagle location tool. According to the press release:

"Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location," said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo! Brickhouse. "We're here to help people take their location to the Web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with."

The press release is worth a look for the list of services built on Fire Eagle during the private beta. These include Brightkite, Dash, Dopplr, Pownce, Spot, and Outside.in Radar. Blogging site Movable Type is also using the system, though UK government is so far strangely absent.

Fire Eagle has a "hide me" button so you can opt out, either temporarily or permanently.

The report in Information Week says:

Yahoo doesn't store old location data, said Coates. That should save Yahoo from a lot of subpoenas from those seeking to use location data in litigation. As a further deterrent to legal uses of Fire Eagle data, the service's coordinates aren't necessarily reliable. While devices may accurately report where they are, users updating Fire Eagle manually can enter any location they choose.

"We think it's a good thing that users can lie," said Coates.

Many readers will know Tom Coates from his blog at Plasticbag.org