Location privacy not working with FireEagle

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.

@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.

@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 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.