Yahoo Group warning OT

[jwcat]

I copied this from the Qimage group, and have not verified it, Some more peeking going on it seems. I am going to opt out and see what happens...John

EDIT...It played out as described, no questions about user identity or such.

rom: TonySleep@...
Date: Thu May 12, 2005 10:26 am
Subject: OT but relevant : Yahoo privacy issue tonysleep2
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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.
Take a look at their updated privacy statement:
http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy


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. 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. Feel free to forward this to other groups.
----------

Regards

Tony Sleep - http://www.halftone.co.uk

 

[kiev4a]

Tony:

Thanks for the info. It's valuable.

 

[stet]

whoa, thank you. I just opted out.

 

[JoeFriday]

very surreptitious of them to add that "cancel opt-out" button on the next page where people would be expecting a "click to confirm" message.. moral of the story, pay attention

and thanks for the info, Tony!

 

[nwcanonman]

Yep, Yahoo's had that up for some time now. But it's good to remind people.
If they want to know I went to the Sponge Bob web site ......... well, more power to 'em - LOL.

 

[jlw]

"Web beacons," aka "tracker pixels," aren't exactly new. They're just little 1-pixel images on web pages. When you load the page, the server is signalled to download the tracker pixel, and that causes a record of your request to be entered in the server log.

By snorking all the log entries into a database, it's possible to construct relationships such as, "The Yahoo user with ID xyz123 loaded this page, and then this page, and then this page." But all they're doing is organizing informatiion that you already gave them when you visited the pages in the first place.

There's no way this technology can follow you ALL over the Internet -- only to pages that download off Yahoo servers.

Lots of sites have been using tracker pixels for a long time, usually without disclosing it to visitors. (After all, it's their site, so they probably figure they're entitled to use their log entries any way they want.) So, you could say that rather than being unusually snoopy by using tracker pixels, Yahoo is being unusually candid by disclosing that they DO use them.

 

[cbass]

Thanks, Tony! Very informative.