I am a design engineer at Monday, August 8th, 2011
FireFound Shutting Down
They say all good things must come to an end.
FireFound is a Firefox add-on and companion Web service that I wrote for the Extend Firefox 3.5 competition in 2009. It allows users to track their device’s location via Firefox’s then-new geolocation API; additional features include the ability to view a device’s location history on the website and the ability to turn on a “killswitch” that would clear your browsing data (history, saved passwords, etc.) if someone opened your browser and could not provide your chosen password. It was the first add-on of its kind, and it has been well-received.
That being said, FireFound will be shutting down on June 1, 2012. I don’t have the time to keep it compatible with the newest Firefox and Firefox Mobile releases, nor can I keep up with the feature requests and bug reports.
FireFound users who would like to save a copy of their location data can, as always, export their data by logging in and clicking the “Download” button on the “My Data” page. Any users who have pre-paid for a Premium account past June 1 will be given a prorated refund.
For those looking for a suitable replacement, I recommend Prey. It’s an open-source implementation of a similar idea, but it runs at the operating system level rather than inside the browser, so it’s always on.
(If you’re interested in taking over FireFound, e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com. If you’d just like to run your own instance of FireFound, all of the code is open-source.)
August 10th, 2011 at 9:36 pm
Thankyou for your work!
August 14th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Is prey compatible with OSX?
August 14th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Yes, you can download Prey fox OSX here: http://preyproject.com/download
August 16th, 2011 at 10:31 pm
My wife and I wish to thank you so very much for your attempt to make a run at providing a service that would have saved the people millions of dollars in lost computers and billions of lost,unsecured and mis-used information.the cost to them was nothing,but the cost to you was time,effort and frustration.
Again myself and my wife,sons-want you to know that we truly like and will miss this computer security product.Please keep up the efforts to become the next great inventor to the world
December 28th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
I wanted to say ‘Thank you’ for providing both Firefound and the service for all this time. Even those of us who have never needed to make use of the service or to activate Firefound are in your debt. May you be blessed abundantly for all that you have given all of us.