Yahoo! hooks up to Facebook blabberstream

all turned on by DEFAULT !!!!

it was all set by default t share everything with anyone

BIG FAIL

this is as bad as google buzz

the options to disable it are hidden

you need to go into you yahoo mail account, then the blue "OPTIONS" and select the "mail options" link to get to the first page

you immediately see the share my updates option box is already selected

TAKE THE TICK OUT OF THISS IMMEDIATELY and save the setting

then at the bottom of the page IN VERY SMALL PRINT you have two important options

"Disclosure settings" and "show all YAHOO! sources"

click on the show all sources and notice immediately that ALL THE SOURCES ARE SET TO SHARE YOUR UPDATES WITH ANYONE!!!!

you have to go in one by one and select either "no one" or My Connections" from the drop down on the right of each source to have any semblence of privacy

once you have done that , you then have to go throught the whole process again for any sub account

this is just yet another attempt for a portal to grab as much iformation as possible from joe public with little or no benefit for those who's private information is being shared without prior consent

you could possible forgive yahoo for the blunder (assuming it wasn't a premeditated information grab) if GOOGLE had not gone through the same with BUZZ and facebook had not had to changed its updated privacy / sharing policy several times in the last few months

when are people going to realise these tools are not free , you have to give up so much privacy and give away so much information when you sign up

just look at any sign up page and ask yourself why do they need that information and who could they sell it to, before you click accept the terms and conditions and create the account

the other indicator is how easy is it to find the privacy policy and how easy is it to find who they share YOUR DATA with, and most of all CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THE PRIVACY POLICY AND HOW IT APPLIES TO YOU

peter

WHO DO THEY SHARE THIS WITH

the big question is why do they want you to expose these links to other sites and update

the reason is simple, more information = more money

if you provide them with the information that your joe.blogs yahoo account is the same as your fred.blogs facebook account and the same as your phil.blogs twiter account etc, they can then share (probably read sell) that information to others so they can also build more upto date / complete profiles of you

you probably built the seperate named profile in the hope it was harder to link them (or one was work eg linkedin, seperate nickname for your gaming etc) and all this sharing just undoes all that work of keeping thing seperate in one go

all of this has one aim of getting as much information about each person as possible so they can be tracked across multiple social network sites easilly and linking many disimilar named accounts.

this information is then able to sold to anyone (they say shared with carefully selected partners) to see this in action try and find the list of partners or email them and ask them outright who they have "SHARED" you details with and exactly what information about you has been shared

do not expect an answer from them

peter

Tie up with Facebook and screw your web users

I live in VietNam and frequently visit China - two countries that have blocked, wisely IMHO, Facebook - and as a result web sites that use FB as a login (one is The Daily Beast) are no longer accessible for comments.

Yahoo should be careful as in VietNam it is No. 1 in e-mail here.

Besides FB privacy is so dubious I am extremely careful who gets my core e-mail addresses relying on single use email addresses in case some idiot tries to 'share' FB with me.