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Yahoo Knows Best, Resets Users' Marketing Prefs
Go to your Account Information screen (for each and every ID you have) and about mid screen you will see "Edit Your Marketing Preferences" link. Click on it and set them back to the way you want them, otherwise get ready for *LOTS* of advertising spam type emails from Yahoo's advertisers. Note also at the bottom, that you will be marked YES for 'By US Mail' and 'By Phone' as well."
In additional Yahoo News, smagruder writes: "Starting today, I noticed that Yahoo! stopped forwarding my mail and when I go to setup/change the POP Access/Forwarding settings, they display a page for me to give them money to get my mail forwarding back. The issue: In their recent widely distributed press release, Yahoo! said that this all would start on April 24, NOT March 28!"
Update: 03/29 20:24 GMT by J : Yes, of course Yahoo is a TrustE customer. For a small fee, TrustE certifies: "You can edit your Yahoo! Account Information, including your marketing preferences, at any time." Isn't that great? I can edit my marketing preferences that I had no reason to know existed! Thanks, TrustE!
Update: 04/07 11:54 GMT by J : Nine days later, Yahoo notified me that these preferences existed:
From: Yahoo! <yahoo_privacy@reply.yahoo.com>
To: [me]
Subject: Message from Yahoo! about changes to our Privacy Policy and your Marketing Preferences[...]
In order to keep you up to date about our many new products
and services and how they might be of use to you, we have
created a new Marketing Preferences pagehttp://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount
within the Account Information area. It is designed to make
it easier for you to manage the marketing communications
you receive from Yahoo! and ensure you get the latest
relevant information to meet your needs. We have reset your
marketing preferences and, unless you decide to change
these preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages
from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience,
including special offers and new features. Your new marketing
preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date
of this mailing so you have plenty of time to decide what you
want to receive and what you don't. To change your
preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page.
If yahoo is offering all of it's features as a
free and publically accessable system, don't they
have the right to do whatever they want with
the default settings? Granted they due operate
on the sole basis of being used, but I wouldn't
get up in arms if something that I used for
free just up and changed one day in some way
that I didn't agree with. If it really has
such a huge negative reaction from enough people
then yahoo make other changes. However somehow
i doubt that the hundreds of thousands of yahoo
users are all in that slashdot mindset.
there are alot of droids out there.
These marketing data, as set by the user, could have been a very valuable commodity to sell to other companies. Those companies would have a very good idea of what to market to these users as a result. This makes this kind of information quite valuable. However, in resetting all of the user's preferences to be interested in everything, and given that most users will probably not give a rat's ass and change it, then these data become worthless to 3rd parties because it does not provide them with any new information. So effectively, Yahoo killed off an asset that could have been worth the money to rent and/or sell to others.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
I'm absolutely disgusted with Yahoo's behavior here...
It's one thing to activate "Yes" on all those email spam options, but I provided Yahoo with my address and phone number when I made a credit card purchase through Yahoo Travel. I'm pretty sure I was told that these would be kept confidential and were mainly for the purpose of credit card verification. At any rate, I trusted them with these details.
But it turns out they put "Yes" on my phone number and physical mailing address, as well.
I'm really disgusted with Yahoo on this. They've gone too far.
All I know is that whoever lives at 123 Fake St. in my town is going to be very offended at the manner in which mail is addressed to them.
I simply went in and added their mailing address and phone number as my primary contact. Now, their marketing department will be sending their own contact info to their partners.. Maybe if we all did this, they'll get flooded with all their own goddamned SPAM!
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice.
... Which is pretty much whenever they feel like it.
Even so, lawyers have been known to have differing opinions about and interpretations of law. That's why as a final tie-breaker in tough cases we sometimes refer people to a group of nine highly respected lawyers.
They're plain and simply not free to change this or to use information you provided for other purposes. Prove it. If all this does is result in you getting email from them then they have only contacted their own customers, which is not illegal. In fact, their terms of service clearly state "Yahoo provides its service to you, subject to the following Terms of Service ('TOS'), which may be updated by us from time to time without notice to you." Which is pretty much carte blanche to do what they want.
Furthermore their privacy policy states: Yahoo! does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances: We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with Yahoo! under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help Yahoo! communicate with you about offers from Yahoo! and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.
Finally, they clearly are in the business of providing services in exchange for your acceptance of targeted advertising. This is not SPAM (which is not typically targeted in any way). This is simply targeted advertising delivered via email.
I do not have a signature
No, the laws about telemarketing do NOT apply. You are signing up for an email service. Have you read their service agreement lately? If you never signed up for mail then normal telemarketing laws/regulations would apply, but since you signed up for their service you agreed to whatever they got you to agree to - including being able to change their service agreement and privacy policy without notice and at will.
Oh - I forgot - you don't spend time reading those, do you?
-Adam
I work with a lot of older people who don't read Slashdot, but have Yahoo. I made sure to tell them about this new disgrace. For all those at work, please do the same; it's a courteous thing to do, and your workplace will be a helluva lot happier.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
Yes, this is true - but you will only have about 2 to 3 weeks left on that POP account. Yahoo is now charging for POP access and will disable your 'free' POP access soon enough anyway.
Looks like an intentionally deceptive contract. In the section about privacy, they describe in direct terms, how your privacy will be protected. Following that, they say you have no expectation of privacy but do so in an indirect manner, describing "trusted partners" and other vague and indirect terms.
In the same document they've promised to::
1.) Not release your personal information.
2.) Release your personal information.
Since those are contridictory concepts, which one should be binding? They've chosen the latter. But someone who wanted to sue them, could just as easily choose the former. They didn't have to put both terms in there. They had to have know that stating their true intentions in a clear manner that people would be less likely to want to do business with them.
Seems to me that intentionally confusing the promises of a contract goes counterwise to the whole purpose of having a contract at all. If both parties end up doing what they want according to vague loopholes they've inserted, what's the point?
I say that ifd a contract has contridictory terms, the most clear and direct terms are the onces that should be abided by.
Yesterday I wrote an article on how Google, for all its good Netizenship, has sold out to the spaming industry.
If you enter the search query "bulk email" you'll see that Google is quite happy to play its role in the promotion of spamware and spamming services -- by way of the list of paid-advertisements down the right-hand side of the page promoting such products and services.
Surprisingly, I had a raft of feedback from readers who seem to think that there's nothing wrong with Google carrying paid advertising for the promotion of spamware and spamming services.
I know that over the past seven years I've started and run (and sold) a number of very successful ad-funded online publications and I've never felt that I had to stoop so low as to accept advertising dollars from spammers.
Perhaps I'm just one of a dying breed of entrepreneurs who are prepared to put his money where his mouth is in the battle against spam.
I see this latest move by Yahoo to simply be part of a slow but inevitable move towards the day when we're all forced to swallow our daily diet of spam along with the few little morsels that are actually real email.