Yahoo's Spam Delight
Copyright 2002 Jason Anderson
I didn't really have to think hard to come up with a topic for discussion this month. One word - Yahoo. As you all know, Yahoo made a change to their privacy policy last week. The net effect being that members settings to do with receiving advertising messages (ie: spam) were all set to "send me everything!". There have been several articles written about the change - here are just three of them:
Wired -- http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,51461,00.html
CNet -- http://news.com.com/2100-1023-871730.html
The US Register -- http://www.theregus.com/content/6/24520.html
The US Register article is particularly scathing of Yahoo - and rightly so I think. I found one point interesting in particular - the message which Yahoo is supposedly sending out to all its members, notifying them of the change (I say supposedly because I haven't received one, and I haven't heard of anyone who has). If you haven't read the article, apparently the message urges everyone to check their contact information, and update it as needed. Especially your phone number and (physical) mailing address information. According to the article, the message doesn't actually tell the member that they have changed all the marketing preferences to "spam me to death" (at least, not in so many words), and that Yahoo will now use your phone and mailing information for advertising material.
As a member of Yahoo I am annoyed by the change. But, thanks to the warning I received on another mailing list which I am a member of, I've reset my preferences to "go away Yahoo". So personally the change isn't really a big concern.
However, as a list owner (and in particular as the list owner for this mailing list), I am downright angry. If you look at the privacy policy for BMS (http://www.bmsw.com.au/privacy.html), you will see that we promise to never give out your information to anyone else, with two exceptions: Kagi (who process your purchase, and who receive your information before we do, so we couldn't stop them from receiving it even if we wanted to), and Yahoo (who host this mailing list). Now, at the time of creating this list, Yahoo's privacy policy stated that they wouldn't share your information with anyone else either. Silly me, I believed them.
I hate spam as much as the rest of you. I certainly receive my share of it every day, since I publish my email address in many places on the web. And I will not keep my business with a company which totally disregards peoples privacy. As a result, some time during April the Flickering Candle will move to a new mailing list provider. For the time being I've also removed all the "subscribe to our newsletter" boxes on the BMS site until the list has moved to its new location. I'll post more about the list changeover when it occurs.
Finally I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to you all about the entire Yahoo incident. If I had known what they were going to do, I would have never set up this mailing list with them in the first place. I deeply apologise for everything that has happened, and I promise to work hard to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.
