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Stop Yahoo! tracking your every move
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
If you have a Yahoo! account, whether to be a member of a Yahoo! group or to use their webmail, you may be surprised to hear that you are now being tracked via 'web beacons'.
If you go to the Yahoo! privacy page and scroll down to the 'cookies' section, you'll see 'web beacons' mentioned.
Now, when you are logged in to Google accounts, you know that Google is tracking your search history, and you can safely assume the same with Yahoo! However outside of Yahoo! services;
"Yahoo! uses web beacons to conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes."
Hmmm...sounds like they're logging more than search history...
"Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report anonymous individual and/or aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners."
Ahh...so patterns of our web use can be sold to enable advertisers to use ever increasing ways to get our attention...They do say no personally identifiable information isn't used. What's to stop them saying 'a female aged 23* living in Leeds is most likely to use these sites at this time of day'? It's anonymised data, but still quite frightening when you think about it.
There is an opt-out available - just click the opt-out option on the web beacons page and it's done. Don't press the big 'cancel opt-out' button that appears on the next page - it's not a confirmation button!
* it's just an example!
Labels: searchengines, security
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