Levi Wallach's dashboard

@V All valid points. However, the Fire Eagle location feature works perfectly well for users who are comfortable sharing their location with the public (many are). Therefore, we made the decision to go ahead with the feature in it's current state (in part because we wanted to solicit feedback from the community and see what adoption would be like and how the feature would be used).

Like I said, the separation between privacy controls for permanent location and Fire Eagle location was an intentional design decision, and is not a bug. As such, adding additional privacy settings is a feature request, and will likely be implemented once we have resources available to implement it properly.

As an interim solution, Leah has added some language on the Fire Eagle account setup page that makes it clear to users that their Fire Eagle location information will be publicly available (this will go out with our next code push). We do appreciate your feedback, and take privacy matters very seriously. Again, I'm very sorry that the privacy policy w/ regards to Fire Eagle was not clear to you from the beginning.

@mmalone

Thank you for getting back to me. It is a fair point that the inclusion of location information on notes means solving this is not straight forward. But if you are not yet satisfied with the solution you are able to provide, surely the responsible course of action is to not include this feature on your site - until you are in a position to provide users with an appropriate level of control of their data privacy. That the programming challenge is not negligible is not your users problem, and not something that should impact their data security.

If I managed a billing website, or a bank website, and had not yet completed an encryption algorithm that would permit secure storage of user's credit card information on an application server, it would be highly irresponsible of me to store that credit card information and tell them, if they complained, that "I haven't got around to coding security yet". It would be putting the user's data at risk for the sake of deploying incomplete functionality.

What concerns me - as someone who has managed billing and bank websites before - is that your priority does not appear to be safeguarding user's data.

If your "location privacy" option does not apply to Fire Eagle data (and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't) then this should be made absolutely clear in the privacy options. It is not.

If there is a problem providing full privacy functionality this should also be made clear both on the privacy settings and within the fire eagle integration dialogues - It is not.

Your users should not have to be telling you this. That they are tells me I cannot trust your organisation with my data - because unless I'm continually looking over your shoulder to see what you've done with my data I have no confidence you will be handling it responsibly.

My account is now deleted. I suspect we won't agree on this, and I'm not really interested in corresponding any more about it - I've already taken the time to spell out to you my concerns and its really up to you what you decide to do or not do about it. But I hope you will consider the risk that prioritising incomplete functionality over user data privacy may pose to your organisation commercially, if not to your users personally.

@V, I'm sorry you feel like we're disregarding privacy information. We're sensitive to privacy, and we try hard to make things clear to users. In this particular case, we view Fire Eagle (current/transient) location and Pownce (where I'm from/permanent) location as separate features, and therefore manage privacy for them differently.

We have discussed more robust privacy controls for your Fire Eagle location, but it's not quite as simple as it seems. First, the straightforward lookup of privacy information on a per-note basis may be trivial to implement, but scaling it on Pownce's infrastructure to handle many thousands of notes per second is not quite so trivial. A proper implementation will require a bit more planning, and unfortunately we haven't gotten to the point where we can devote resources to this task just yet.

It would also be nice if users could specify location granularity for friends/fans/public. Again, this is something that would require some careful thought before implementing.

Keep in mind that the Fire Eagle location feature is still relatively new. We're carefully considering suggestions and feedback from the community, and you will likely see some tweaks in the future.

The answer you've posted does *not* solve the problem or explain why it exists. Disregarding the location detail on notes (which you could display conditionally based on who is viewing if you've stored the location as a key rather than inserted it as text in the note record), there is no reason why location information is being displayed on the profile page when it is set to friends only in privacy settings. It is completely straightforward to achieve this programmatically - you just conditionally display the Fire Eagle location information in exactly the same way as you conditionally display the regular (static Pownce profile variable) location data.

This is the *second* time Pownce has ignored user privacy (check the history for an entry about birth dates in xml markup) and I'm seriously concerned and yet again pretty offended that as an organisation you see fit to distribute my data in a way I have not permitted. I am even more outraged that a month after this issue was reported, you've done nothing to address it!

I think its about time Pownce ceased to be one of the social networks I'm involved with because making once mistake is fair enough, but repeating it within a few months is completely unacceptable.

I am an iPhone user and I really like Loopt a lot, but I like most of the people here will be glad when it crosses more platforms. I find it hard to believe that none of my friends but the ones with iPhones can use Loopt. None of my friends other smartphones are in the supported list... I have one friend I can use Loopt with at this time, but when the support for other devices expands then I will be able to interact with more of my friends through Loopt.

Totally agreed with Keenglouie!! Priority, should have been iphone, WM, then others. If you are having success with J2ME then go with that. There are clients to download for free for WM users that let them run Java apps. I would hope Loopt would at least show an effort. Get some beta testers.. let's move on already

I must say... the Windows Mobile systems is one of the top OS out there. Its been around much longer than any other OS and there are hundreds of applications made for it.

I being loopt would have had this in my forecast and would have planned to tackle this task since it would expand the service and brand. I understand development and the challenges of planning and the testing of the process.

It seems to me you have a market in the Windows Mobile arena. I for 1 know I can have my whole sales force and most if not all my territory reps on a system like this. That's over 400 Units which use Windows Mobile...

To be honest, for various reasons, we're stretched pretty thin when it comes to mobile development resources. We don't have the resources right now to write and maintain a native windows mobile client, but JVMs have just recently made it to the point where our J2ME client might work on Windows Mobile in a JVM. Our latest J2ME build works really well on the Tilt, and may eventually be released. – Nick Sivo, on September 18, 2008 19:23

I know on my Tilt I can access information on com4 ( the default ) at 9600 relatively easy. I am just curious what is holding up the development with something like this. Is the trouble coming from finding the position how google maps does by using the location relative to the towers? I am sure every windows mobile user on here (That has a built in GPS) would agree that if we just had a version for now that needed to use the GPS and couldn't use the tower positioning to update loopt we would be happy with that. I understand that when it comes to programming it is always easier said than done, but I would have thought that Windows MO would be easier than most phones out there.

While our API is secure and could theoretically be exposed to the world, it's not particularly pretty. We're also in the midst of making some big changes that will make a client written using today's API obsolete within the next 6 months. Perhaps some time in the future? – Nick Sivo, on September 12, 2008 07:11

Back when we first ruled out WinMo the Sprint Mogul had just come out and didn't yet make GPS available to applications. J2ME support was also pretty bad so it looked like we'd need to do an all out port (too much work).

Now it looks like we can get a J2ME version working and actually get GPS from some devices.

I'm not making any promises, but we've had limited success running our latest (currently under development) client on the HTC Tilt and Samsung BlackJack II. We're going to assess how much extra work it would be to really support them, and revisit our WinMo decision. Even if we decide to support WinMo, it's unlikely we'll release anything this year :(

We wish there were more hours in the day! We're striving to make Loopt available on as many handsets as possible, and we’re up to 100+ handsets. We obviously still have work to do, but unfortunately, we don’t support Windows Mobile devices right now and probably won't be able to for a while due to a number of factors. Thanks for your patience, and if you want to use Loopt right now, take a look at our device coverage: http://www.loopt.com/phones

+999

I'd like to see it on Windows Mobile Also, there are already alternatives out there (Mologogo, etc) but they aren't nearly as great as Loopt. So if others can similar software function on Windows Mobile why can't Loopt?

where I have been on the map and where I am checked in at now would be a good start.

Def want a customizable Tab outside of just a Boxes widget thingy. In mine, I would want a giant google map with all the places I've checked into! And perhaps a sidebar with the list of my recent checkins and posts.

Also, the newsfeed item should contain a link to the brightkite page for that location so that friends sitting next to me checking out my profile can check in within two clicks (or easily sign up!)

Naturally, pictures taken at a location should also show up in the long newsfeed setting. – Timothy Moenk, on September 03, 2008 03:29

I'd use it, but I can't because my Sprint Mogul (PPC6800) isn't supported.

I'd like it to have links to the native iPhone app. ;)

Jeez.
A little desperate for some excitement are we? ;) – Logan, on August 31, 2008 15:19