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Yahoo! spying

This is critical information for all YahooGroups users. If you value your privacy, please read this message and take the recommended action.

Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you're doing and where you are going

-- similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit. Notice that they did not alert you to this snooping, but they hoped you wouldn't find out about it.

Take a look at their updated privacy statement:

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About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says "web beacons." Click on the phrase web beacons.

That will bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network."

In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link that will let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping.

Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted.

WARNING: Notice the "Success" message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a "Cancel Opt-out" button that, if clicked, will undo the opt-out. Don't be fooled by it. These guys are trying very hard to gain information with or without your cooperation.

Please pass this along to any other Yahoo groups you might be members of.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon
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Yes, this is common knowlege to me. They do this all the time. Please consider Firefox and Thunderbird! Cancel cookies and JAVA..

Reply to
Glen Cooper

If you view the web, or newsgroups, through a service you have to expect that they may monitor your use of that service.

Get a real newsreader and news server account. I'm going through news.individual.net; no fee, fairly responsive, and a good newsreader will let you automate the password entry so it doesn't pester you every time. Of course they may still be monitoring my newsgroup usage -- but since they're run by a university, I'm reasonably confident they're only doing so for academic rather than commercial purposes... and since it's a straight news server there's no question of cookies or other spyware.

Reply to
Joe Kesselman (address as shown

-snip-

Shocking

Reply to
Putyourspamhere

Occasionally, you may be redirected to a Yahoo search page if you type in a nonexistent url. DO NOT use the Yahoo search engine. Stick with Google.

Reply to
dumpjunkmailhere

Uhhh, Why is this a big deal?

The term web beacon is simply another way of saying that they track when you acess THEIR servers or the servers of their partners/clients.

Their web beacon will not tell them that you visited my site, nor that you were at hot mail just before that. It will let their partner report back to Yahoo that user number jasdlkjasd8971243982394 was just looking at purple widgets. Yahoo can then sell or use that info.

Did you know that most browsers will tell the web server where you came from? That means that if you surf to

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and then to a yahoo group, they know you were at
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Cool, huh?

Are you also aware that Microsoft uses similar cookies to track you? They own hotmail, so they can combine a lot more information about you than Yahoo can.

Then there's Inktomi. They've been accumulating consumer tracking information for a long time. You'll notice they are now owned by Yahoo. They pioneered the use of 'invisible images' to track users. Look at this link I got in an e-mail, for instance... img src="

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" width=1 height=1 width="1" height="1" border="0"

That's a transparent gif that's 1 pixel with no border. The user ID is in the middle (11Ds0v_t96xX_73O82), and is tracked at link.p0.com. You don't have to reply to this email (if you have an html enabled web browser) for them to know that you got the mail and that your address is valid.

So, in short, I'm not too worried about yahoo.

Daniel

Reply to
dbs__usenet

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