Global Coverage, 21 Languages

While this might seem like a simple task at first (just look for references to 'San Francisco' or 'New York City'), Placemaker actually uses very sophisticated analytics to disambiguate which of the 39 Springfields in the U.S. a text actually refers to. To do so, Placemaker, will, for example, also look for colloquial names for bridges or references to streets and local sights in a text. As many texts obviously contain references to more than one place, Placemaker will often return more than one location per text, though it will try to determine the location.

While Placemaker's database covers the globe and will work for texts in 21 different languages (including texts using double-byte character sets in Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese), it will - at least in this first iteration - work best for texts in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

Opening Up The Deep Geo-Web

Yahoo is trying to make this service as open as possible, and there is, for example, no formal rate limit. As Bell told us, Yahoo wants to help developers to open up what he called the "deep geo-web." In many ways, this new tools also fits in with the general strategy of moving away from a "web of pages to a web of objects" that Yahoo announced yesterday.

GeoPlanet for All

In addition, Yahoo also announced that, starting today, it will allow developers to download and use the full data set of Yahoo's GeoPlanet. The GeoPlanet data, which contains information about millions of placenames in multiple languages, also forms the basis of Placemaker's geographical knowledge.The GeoPlanet data will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

According to Bell, Yahoo is looking forward to seeing what developers will do with this data. Placemaker is definitely an interesting addition to Yahoo set of geo tools like FireEagle and GeoPlanet, and we are also looking forward to seeing how developers will make use of these newly available tools and we are hoping to see more of Placemaker in Yahoo's own tools as well.

However, it is important to note that Yahoo has made privacy a central focus of the platform and right upon sign-up, users are given the option to receive regular emails from Yahoo to see if they are still comfortable with sharing this kind of information. If you do not respond to this email, Yahoo will automatically disable your Fire Eagle account. Yahoo also allows users to turn the service off when they want to keep their location private.

Upon launch, Fire Eagle seems to be having some trouble with keeping up with the sudden rush of new users, as the service was sometimes unable to pinpoint our location. Once it is running smoothly again, we would not be surprised if Fire Eagle could make good on its promise of becoming the central clearinghouse for location services. Already, close to 800 developers are working on applications that make use of Fire Eagle in some form or another.

But what happens when companies or governments start using technologies like these to track us against our will, or without our consent?

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports tonight about definite example of cell phone location privacy intentionally violated without the knowledge of the phone owners. Researchers at Northeastern University won't say where the 100,000 people they tracked live or what companies helped them do it - but they made sure to do it outside of the United States.

What The Scientists Did

Ethically challenged physics researcher Cesar Hidalgo used cell phone towers to track the locations of more than 100,000 people whenever they made or received phone calls and SMS over a six month time period. Hidalgo and fellow researchers used the installed tracking technology in the phones of another 206 unwitting people, checking in on where they were every two hours. The conclusion: most people don't go that far from home in their every day lives. Almost half of the people tracked generally stayed within the same six mile area. Shocking, isn't it? Now just imagine what they could find out if people were given implants unknowingly.

That's Worse Than Creepy

It's reminiscent of the MIT researcher we wrote about last year who is collecting "passive social graph data" by watching whose cell phones come near who else's, something he calls "reality mining."

In this case, though, the subjects of the Northeastern study didn't know they were being tracked and studied. Hidalgo says that's ok because they were studied in anonymous aggregate. "In the wrong hands the data could be misused," Hidalgo told CNN. "But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns.... We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better." Tell that to a long history of science experiment subjects tested against their will.

Even the study of people in anonymous aggregate needs to be opt-in, otherwise there's just too much trust being put in anonymous researchers.

This is why we celebrated FireEagle as much as we did when it launched. That platform for other location aware services to collect data through asks users on a regular basis if they are ok with FireEagle continuing to keep track of their location reports.

That's beyond opt-in, it's respectfully, effectively communicative. Anything less is reason to reject location awareness in general.

Creepy eye photo by Flickr user Jimmy_joe