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

Grab your free copy of Lucid SEO

Thursday, November 01, 2007

I got an e-mail this morning from David Congreave (he's not a friend, I'm on his mailing list) and in it he talked about a new product launch - Lucid SEO. Now, if you subscribe to a lot of Internet Marketing e-mails, you'll be able to recognise the hype from far far away. I've never had this from David's e-mails - he sends a couple out a month, and comes across as very genuine - you know he's actually tried and tested products he recommends.

LucidSEO doesn't launch until 20th November, but there is a free report that you can grab. I did, and it isn't full of fluff or affiliate links - just a few pages of common sense that puts SEO (search engine optimisation) in a whole new light for the average webmaster.

Grab it while it's still available.

Labels: seo

Wordtracker coupon code - 15% discount

WordTracker currently have an offer running for a whopping 15% discount off their annual subscription price.

Follow this link here, then enter codeus-annual-15.

If you don't know what WordTracker is and you want to build a successful money making website, I suggest you have a look. By using keywords and keyphrases that people are searching for, you are guaranteeing that your website is more likely to be found - WordTracker does all the hard work for you when you tell it what you want to research.

You can optimise your website content, utilise the keywords for your PPC (pay per click) campaign or research new niche ideas and know before you start whether you'll be successful or not.

Labels: resources, seo

Subscribe | By e-mail

Stop Yahoo! tracking your every move

Grab your free copy of Lucid SEO

Wordtracker coupon code - 15% discount

Links

Previous Posts

Archives

Categories