Fire Eagle : Developer Code of Conduct

Before developing an application using Fire Eagle, it's vitally important that you read and understand this Code of Conduct and the service's Terms & Conditions.

All applications that you build should follow these guidelines—they're designed to help protect users and make sure that they understand how their data will be used. We take our users' privacy and security very seriously and so failure to follow the Code of Conduct may result in us revoking your application's access to the APIs.

Obviously, if you think you have a reasonable use for the Fire Eagle service that doesn't conform to this Code, then feel free to send us a note and we'll do our best to talk to you about it.

(1) Always tell users what you want to do with their location

Before you send a user to authorize Fire Eagle to share their location, you must tell them how you're planning to use the service. If you are planning to access a user's location information on Fire Eagle you must tell them in easy to understand language what you will do with that information. In particular:

• You must tell them if you're storing their location history in any form
• You must tell them if their location will be made publicly visible
• You must tell them if their location will be shared with other users
• You must tell them if it will be shared with any other parties

The clearer you are about how their information will be used, the easier it is for them to make an informed decision about whether to use your service or not. Having a clearly articulated privacy policy is also a significantly good idea.

(2) Clearly indicate if a Fire Eagle mobile updater is active

Applications that run on mobile devices and update Fire Eagle with a user's location must clearly indicate to the user when they are running. It must also be easy for a user to turn the updater off.

We consider it best practice to give users flexibility about how often they update and the ability to easily suspend their updates temporarily.

(3) Give your users control over their own data

If you're planning to store a user's location then you should give your users a way to delete stored information. The more control they have over the data, the more comfortable they will be sharing it with your application.

(4) Make sure your users' data is secure

You must take responsibility for protecting all the relevant keys and secrets for your users and for your application. Also, you must never let your general purpose access token and/or secret get out in public, or distribute it with libraries or sample code. This is super important!

Remember - if you're caching data about your user's locations then you should make sure you protect those caches as well (and clear them when requested).

(5) Don't hammer or misuse the API

Fire Eagle is not to be used as a geocoder. It's simply not designed to do that. Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google all have geocoder APIs that you can use. And please don't pound our APIs unreasonably. It's generally unnecessary to query our API every time someone loads a web page, particularly if it's displaying the location of multiple users.

(6) Don't use Fire Eagle commercially without talking to us

At the moment by default the API terms are for non-commercial use only but we're pretty open about waiving that condition and allowing people to use the APIs commercially as long as you talk to us first.

(7) Only use Fire Eagle to help a user manage their location

Fire Eagle is designed to give individual users ways to capture their own location information and use it across the internet. It is not to be used to manage information about other people, animals, packages and the like.

(8) Follow best practices

Please read the OAuth Best Practice document and build responsibly. We want to develop good habits for users interacting with OAuth, help us and your users by using OAuth authentication properly!

(9) Don't be creepy!

Location is a sensitive area. Be careful not to weird out your users (or us) by doing anything too creepy.

(10) Let us know when you've done something cool

If you're excited about Fire Eagle, that makes us happy. Let us know.