Do you Yahoo?

If so, I've got 2 interesting tidbits for you.

The first one is of the 'fucking annoying' variety. In its inimitable style, Yahoo has changed a small element of their Privacy Policy in a way that allows them to follow your tracks more than you'd probably like, by using a Web Beacon (better known as a web bug). As usual, they went ahead & made the change, and you can only avoid it by opting out as opposed to requesting you to opt in, which would be the honest, upfront way. Of course, by being underhanded about it, they just make me that much more suspicious.

Here's the relevant part of the updated Yahoo! Privacy Policy:

• Yahoo! uses web beacons to conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes.
  
• Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners. This aggregate information may include demographic and usage information. No personally identifiable information about you is shared with partners from this research.
  
• When conducting research Yahoo!'s practice is to require our partners to disclose the presence of these web beacons on their pages in their privacy policies and state what choices are available to users regarding the collection and use of this information. (yea, right. ed.) You may choose to opt-out of Yahoo! using this information for this research. Please click here to opt-out.

  
  Note: This opt-out applies to a specific browser rather than a specific user. Therefore you will have to opt-out separately from each computer or browser that you use.

Sneaky huh?

As the exerpt mentions, you can follow the link provided to opt out, and I would suggest you do. Note that if you use more than 1 browser, you should use each one to activate the opt-out link.

Thanks go to Bravo Romeo Delta at Anticipatory Retaliation where I first found out about this. By the way, AR has recently ditched BlogSplat in favour of the luxurious accomodations at Munuviana, so check out their new bunker if you want the latest intel.

The second tidbit is of the cool! goodies! variety. For those of us who use Yahoo's Instant Messenger, there is actually a bunch of additional hidden emoticons available for use. You use them by typing their text equivalents. which causes them to show up as regular emoticons in the conversation window. I found printing them out for reference was the easiest way to use them. Somebody I yak with a lot likes the cowboy, and I particularly get a kick out of the hugger. Check 'em out.

Comments

[Vicki Smith (CalGal)]

That tracking thing started several months back. And while I appreciate that "free to use" is not "free to provide", I left all my Yahoo mailing lists shortly after Yahoo stepped up its surveilance.

If you use several messenger services, you might want to give GAIM a try. You can import smiley sets into it too!

[Sallie]

Thanks for info on the tracking. I passed it on. :-)

[dragonfly jenny]

I can't remember the last time I used Yahoo to do a search. Now I have even less reason to do so!

[Da Goddess]

Yahoo's always had hidden emoticons. Some are downright silly.

As for the tracking...they've always had that as well. Makes you feel extra special knowing that someone's watching so closely, doesn't it?