Yahoo Groups Tracking: Privacy Invasion?

[Greg B]

http://rense.com/general69/tracking.htm
Yahoo is Tracking
Group Members

1-14-6

If you belong to ANY Yahoo Groups - be aware that Yahoo is now using "Web Beacons" to track every Yahoo Group user. It's similar to cookies, but allows Yahoo to record every website and every group you visit, even when you're not connected to Yahoo.

Look at their updated privacy statement at http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy.

About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says WEB BEACONS.

Click on the phrase "Web Beacons." On the page that opens, find a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network."

In that section find a little "Click Here to Opt Out" link that will let you "opt-out" of their snooping. Be careful! NOT to click on the next button shown. It is an "Opt Back In" button that, if clicked, will UNDO the opt-out.

Note that Yahoo's invasion of your privacy - and your ability to opt-out of it - is not user-specific. It is MACHINE specific. That means you will have to opt-out on every computer (and browser) you use.

Please forward this to your other groups. You might complain, too, but I'm not sure if anyone is listening..

Related article:

Yahoo Web Beacons Igniting Controversy Yahoo's current privacy policy is causing consternation among some users who object to their use of so-called 'web beacons'. Known in most circles as web bugs, these invisible images are embedded in websites and email and used to track your surfing - and even tell whether you've opened a particular email. http://antivirus.about.com/od/spywar.../yahoobugs.htm

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Smash The State WWW
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smashthestate
Yahoo! Groups Links

[psili]

That's a great idea.

I'm going to disseminate the hottest image ever seen by man, say:

http://hotimage.com/fucking_hot_image.gif

It mod_rewrites to a serverside script that gathers everything it can about the user, the URL it's sourced on, etc, and then just dumps some stupid image data to the browser.

I then sell that marketing data to anyone who wants it.

Fucking data mining genius.
And I must say, it sucks, but how can you stop it?

[Furious_Female]

You always have very informative and useful posts, Greg

[Greg B]

Originally Posted by Furious_Female

You always have very informative and useful posts, Greg

Thanks Furious.

Believe you me, this answers a whole lotta questions.

Like most of you on this board I've worked web security, debugging, anti-hacking for almost ten years now. In that time I've never seen as much activity as in the past 6 months and in the past 2 months have been ridiculous. What pisses me off most is that all the old timers on this board will remember how the feds wouldn't listen to us back in the day and we ended up having to do THEIR jobs.

I worked for AOL for years. Every fucking day we had to report people. We had to invent techniques and technologies. It was the adult webmasters who lead the charge! When it came to CP and hostile programs the adult webmasters were faster and more efficient than the government. I just talked to good ol' Compdoctor about this the other day. It's getting ridiculous!

I got an email from a pal who runs a very successful software company. He was caught up because there were embedded codes in images hitting his customers and his company. He remembered years ago when I warned him about this and tried to show him how to prevent it. I think it was Compdoctor and CA Dave that hipped me to this way back in '01. So did TLA and the crew at his board. They were always ahead of the game.

This kind of shit is what's going to destroy the internet. When the NSA got busted putting cookies illegally on people that just said to the public that you can't even trust the people you're paying to trust so what're the bad guys doing?

Remember how last year some of the big banks got busted for letting out people's personal info? That's horrendous! Yet sure as heck they'll blame the adult industry and it's no where near as criminal and incompetent as the mainstream and government.

Know why? Because most of you know that the only reason the web blew up commercially is because there is an army of people who got bullshitted into the technical field and lost their jobs cause of corporate bullshit and treachery. Soon as mom and pop sites started up both adult and non-adult and people started becoming affluent, that's when the shit started.

This country is set up to make sure you can't succeed. It's not the foundation of the country but the control of it by industrialists just as Thomas Jefferson had warned about. So any avenue or venue that helps you break that stranglehold of debt is attacked.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Google, etc. weren't supposed to happen.

Geeks are getting the girls and it makes the jocks look bad.

It's about pussy control believe you me.

[tristan_D]

I bet they have been doing that ever since.

[Bluewire Ross]

welcome the world wide web--not surpsring at all to find out about yahoo's "invasion of privacy." Just be good guys!

[Matt 26z]

It might be dated 1-14-6, but it's been circulating Yahoo groups for a lot longer than that. I'm guessing it probably started in a group whose members were paranoid of being tracked due to what was in the group, and then it spread from there.

[WME]

it is always advisable to be ever watchful of the info we divulg over the net.

[reed_4]

is it true that Yahoo User Rooms will be back?