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Yahoo Treading Carefully Before Exposing More Private Data
crimeandpunishment writes "Yahoo hopes to turn on a new sharing option without turning off its users. The company is trying to avoid the privacy backlash that has befallen Facebook and Google. It's advising its email account holders, all 280M of them, to review their privacy settings in advance of Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books, unless they take steps to prevent it."
STOP IT WITH THE GODDAMNED "WE'RE GONNA SHARE YOUR ONLINE LIFE" bullshit!
Seriously. DO NOT WANT.
Yeah, great, you can "opt out". How about just don't fucking do it in the first place, Yahoo!?
Christ riding a sheep, this is retarded.
Sent from your iPad.
The right way to do it is to leave it off by default. Assuming your primary concern is to protect users' privacy. Which it isn't: they mainly want to bring this new feature (whatever it is) to the majority of people whom they think will like it, without upsetting a (vocal) minority of users who really care about privacy.
Qxe4
Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books
So you can do a lot of things on Yahoo! like play chess, manage finances or e-mail. But what level of detail is going to be shared and for what possible reason?
Let's take the most basic possibility -- similar to XBox Live -- where it says eldavojohn is playing Futurama. You only ever get a few pieces of data: my name, I'm online and my activity. But it doesn't popup with "eldavojohn has died" or "eldavojohn has reached achievement X." The specifics are hidden resulting in this only facilitating friends noticing they're online and playing together. Might work with Yahoo! Chess but it I can't see it working for finances or e-mail. "Hey, eldavojohn's online, let's read up on some mutual funds together!" Or, "eldavojohn's e-mailing, I should e-mail with him!" Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This only sense this makes is if you're one of those "microbloggers" that likes to inform everyone what you're eating and when you're urinating because you have some weird infatuation with yourself.
The most extreme possibility is far worse. What if you knew who I was playing chess with, what stocks I was buying and who I was e-mailing. If this is the case then Yahoo! could be poised to overtake Facebook as the number one source of evidence in divorce proceedings. I think anyone would agree that this extreme is highly undesirable.
So I don't get it. Yahoo! is trying to build a better service by switching this on? How are they planning to do this? The cynic in me is defaulting to some sort of money related advertising scheme whereby you say surely whatever you share with your friends can be shared with an advertiser. There is some money in that. Is that already baked into this privacy statement or will that be done behind your back or will that be a future "feature"?
My work here is dung.
This is reminiscent of the "negative billing" scams, whee if you don't opt out, you're automatically going to be subscribed for $EXTRA_CRAP_SERVICE_I_DONT_WANT at $X_MORE_PER_MONTH.
Seriously, Yahoo, sharing is not always a 'Good Thing' Some things are better kept private
Instead of it being "Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books, unless they take steps to prevent it.", how about they make it "Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books, if they take steps to enable it."? Problem solved.
Unless, of course, the problem is that Yahoo wants to do something it knows the majority of it's users don't want done, in which case I still think it's "Problem solved.", it's just not a solution Yahoo likes. But it isn't Yahoo's information Yahoo wants to share, so I don't see why what Yahoo likes should figure into it.
Because Yahoo! shareholder's want their stock value to grow, and social networking is perceived as a way of acheiving that.
Social networking features promote stickiness (which helps advertising sales) and provide something that third party developers can leverage to provide additional social apps, which then further promote stickiness, and help sell more ads.
More competition in the social networking space means more consumer choice in that space. If you aren't interested in social networking features, that's not a benefit to you, but social networking is a big thing in the market specifically because lots of end users are interested in those features.
We need a general legal prohibition against implicit consent. We need to legislate that any contract provision which allows one party to modify the terms of the contract without the explicit consent of the other party is null and void. Consent cannot be given merely by continuing to use the service or pay for it. If companies want to change terms, they should have to get explicit consent, given as a transaction separate from ordinary use of the product or service. This should be an FTC rule.
The effect is that when a company changes something, some of the customers are going to move to a competitor. That's in line with the basic principles of capitalism.