Yahoo's social-mapping service

This can be like micro-blogging without saying a thing – Yahoo's new Fire Eagle geolocation service reports your physical location via blogging or social-network sites you choose to allow access to it, CNET reports. For example, if Twitter signed on as a partner, it could announce where you are whenever you post to Twitter, and the same for MySpace or Facebook. I don't think they're partners yet, but this is where things are headed: the marriage of GPS, or location pinpointing, and socializing on the fixed and mobile Web. It has security and privacy implications for users, of course. Fortunately, Fire Eagle says you have to turn the feature on, not just at sign-up. Every month is asks if you still want to share your location via the specific sites you allowed originally. It also lets users choose how granular the info is – I'm in San Francisco, or I'm at a specific street address in San Francisco. And users can shut it down for specified periods of time. It certainly spells the need for alertness when making choices about how accessible one's location info should be!

People-tracking phones

If you'd like to know more about global-positioning-enabled phones, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid surveyed the scene for the New York Times. He looks at the various child-tracking phones and services from Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Disney, and Wherify, as well as social-mapping services by Helio and Loopt that are very cool but not really for kids because they actually map users' physical location (with the users' permission). But on the flipside of this tech marvel is a story out of Australia illustrating the privacy concerns involved in countries where consumer privacy isn't a top priority. Australia's national security agency and "law enforcement agencies will be able to track the movement of people through their mobile phones secretly, without obtaining a court warrant, under new laws, legal and civil liberty groups are warning," Australian IT reports. Meanwhile, in the US, on the Web, and as privacy concerns grow, search engine companies are tightening their privacy policies, the Washington Post reports.