Warning: Yahoo Updates is now sharing your email list with everyone

[Guest guest]

This may explain why we're getting hit with these spam messages from users. I

got about a dozen from yahoo accounts who do not belong to this group.

You CAN opt out but you need to read carefully:

~Joe

http://femalefaust.blogspot.com/2010/06/yahoo-slipped-fell-landed-your-email.htm\

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Yahoo Slipped, Fell, Landed Your Email Contact List On Social Network Lap

Yahoo (note lack of " ! " ) is now, suddenly, enriching our online experience by

sharing our email contact list with everyone - including, of course and

especially, shadowy third parties - in a pathetic attempt to position themselves

on the Facebook/Twitter/Myspace continuum of Evil. Expletive deleted. Add

geolocation to enjoy the full functionality! Expletive deleted.

Without asking. You have to opt out.

Woe betide all who eschew webmail; little will they know, buffered as they are

by Thunderbird or Outlook, that their entire social network information has just

been plundered, only to be relinked, visualized, mined.

Opting-out procedure is of course non-intuitive.

Eff rocks the free world, and most of the U.S. Their article I humbly repost.

The screenshots show how Yahoo attempted to cling to my info, like a bug biting

you even as you are poised to kill it. Get every last drop. Expletive deleted.

Here's the original article - God bless EFF. Or whatever deity of Liberty,

Justice, and Online Goodness you would like.

Opt-Out Required to Prevent Your Yahoo! Mail Contacts From Being Used for

Social Network

Kurt Opsahl - EFF

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a plan to try to leverage its Yahoo!

Mail users' contacts into a social network of friends who will receive your

Yahoo! Updates. Once the most visited website in the world, Yahoo! now ranks

fourth worldwide, reaching about a quarter of all Internet users each day. Like

Google Buzz's ill-fated launch using Gmail contacts, Yahoo! wants to jump start

its social networking plans with the hundreds of millions of people who already

use its email and messenger services.

While Yahoo! made some effort to avoid the worst aspects of the Facebook and

Google Buzz privacy controversies, ultimately the plan conflicts with two

principles of the EFF Bill of Privacy Rights for social network users. The

program will begin a roll out next week, and Yahoo! users need to opt out if

they do not wish to participate.

What Are Your Yahoo! Updates?

Yahoo! Updates are similar to Facebook's news feed and Twitter's tweets. For

people who receive your Updates (more on that below), they will be seen on the

basic Yahoo! Mail screen, in a category called " Updates " just below where email

messages are displayed.

Updates will " include things like comments on message boards, songs you've

rated, movies you've reviewed, articles you've Buzzed, photos you've uploaded in

Flickr, questions you've asked or answered on Yahoo! Answers and other similar

activities. " If you have customized your Yahoo! homepage with apps, these apps

may also generate Updates. According to Yahoo!, " Because the majority of events

listed within Updates are inherently public activities, our defaults are set to

allow anyone to see them. "

Here's the problem: Even though many of these events are indeed available to

the public in that they can be found if searched for (often by looking in

specific places), this does not necessarily mean that users want all of these

activities to be pushed onto the home email screens of other users. Whether or

not users will want this publicity depends on who will see the Updates.

Who Will See Your Yahoo! Updates?

You can never know the complete list of those who will receive Updates about

your activities on Yahoo!. Previously, your Updates were shared with your

Connections, an earlier Yahoo! effort at opt-in social networking that was not

widely adopted. More recently, Yahoo! started sharing with your Yahoo! Messenger

buddies. Starting next week, your Updates will get posted automatically to

anyone who has you in their Yahoo! Mail address book, as opposed to, for

example, the people in your address book. Thus, if someone wants to follow your

Updates, they can just add you to their address book and you will not know.

What that means is that whenever your doctor, your ex, your stalker, or your

plumber include your email address as a Contact in their address book, they will

automatically see Updates about your activities on Yahoo!'s many, many websites

whenever they log into Yahoo! Mail.

In an effort to avoid Google's gaffe in making Buzz user's email contacts

public, Yahoo! Updates will not publicize who is in your address book or who has

you in their address book. By publishing Updates only to people who have you as

a Yahoo! Contact, rather than to those people whose addresses are in your Yahoo!

Contact list, Yahoo! will avoid revealing any information about who is in your

address book. This solves one privacy problem but creates another: you can't

make an informed decision about publicizing your activities because you don't

know who will see it.

The EFF Bill of Privacy Rights requires " a clear user interface that allows

[users] to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used, "

and that " Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any

particular piece of information about them. " Yahoo!'s system fails to uphold

these rights since it doesn't let you know or control who is getting sent your

Updates.

While implemented differently, Yahoo!'s strategy ultimately falls prey to

the same underlying problem as Google Buzz: your email contact list and your

social network are not the same thing, and in some cases may be quite different

– and products that try to turn one into the other are doomed to hurt users. As

Newsweek put it " Social networks are about sharing, and e-mail services are

intensely private. Like lightning and swimming pools, they just don't mix. "

Google Buzz incited controversy because its Gmail users' contacts were a

poor match for their friends. One might email with doctors, lawyers, landlord,

bosses, former spouses, and the like, and yet not want to share personal photos

and links with them (nor receive updates from them).

Likewise, when it comes to Yahoo! Updates, there will likely be other Yahoo!

Mail users who have your email in their address book, but are not actually your

friends; you may not even know them at all or you may know them only as your

doctor, your child's teacher or your car mechanic. Yet all of those Yahoo! users

who happen to have your Yahoo! email address will soon be getting a constant

stream of your online activity, unless you opt out. (They could also choose to

block your Updates, if they do not care to see your activities).

Can You Control Who Receives Your Yahoo! Updates?

Not on a person-by-person basis. You can control what categories of content

are included in your Updates stream. For example, you can choose to include your

comments on Yahoo! News stories but not include the photos you post to Flickr.

You will also be able to decide whether or not a particular action is published

to the Update stream at all, on a per-post opt-out basis. Or you can decide to

just opt-out of Updates completely. However, as noted above, there are currently

no controls over who receives your Updates. As a result, Yahoo! Mail users will

soon find themselves automatically opted in to a new sharing program without

control over with whom they are sharing.

This opt-out program conflicts with EFF's Bill of Privacy Rights, which

provides that " When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it

must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. " These contacts were

provided to Yahoo! for the purpose of email and messaging, not social

networking. If Yahoo wants to use that data for a new purpose, it should only do

so on an opt-in basis.

How to Opt Out of Yahoo! Updates

You must opt out if you don't want to publicize your activities with anyone

who has your email address in their address book. In the wake of the Facebook

privacy settings controversy, Yahoo! has made the opt-out process fairly

straight forward.

Yahoo! Updates Sharing Control

To opt-out of the new program, go

tohttp://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates/ and uncheck the box next to Share

My Updates. In addition, to opt out of sharing authorized by your friends, you

need to go tohttp://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/permissions, and uncheck " Allow

my connections to share my information labeled 'My Connections' with third-party

applications. " While on this page, you should review your settings, and adjust

the privacy levels as appropriate. This page also allows to to hide your profile

entirely.

TELL EVERYONE.