Yahoo! Privacy Concerns
I am so annoyed with Yahoo! this last while that I decided to vent publicly here on my blog. Now, I am complaining about a free for use service so a lot of people out there would say that you just have to take it and I tend to agree but I still don’t like it. Anyway on with the story.
Quite a few years ago I setup a Yahoo! account using the user ID ‘hitman200ca’ for the express purpose of playing Pool on Yahoo Games with my friends at University. By the way, I love that game despite all its flaws, its really fun. A couple years ago I decided that I needed an online calendar. The Hotmail one included with my 25MB (!!) paid account (boy times have changed) was no good to me. There were (are?) too many bugs including a particular one that didn’t allow the email reminders to be sent for me. I dusted off my Yahoo! account and started using Yahoo! Calendar which incidentally I loved because of its features and it just worked great. Now when it came time to share my calendar for work purposes I was a little embarrassed by the Yahoo! ID I had selected so I created a new account with a more grown up ID. After a short migration period I deleted my old Yahoo! ID and continued on happily.
The first time I realized there was a problem was one day when I noticed that I received two reminders for a birthday and then two more again. I took a look at the emails and noticed that the extras were coming from my old account that I had deleted. Immediately I went to go and delete all reoccurring event in my old calendar but of course since I deleted it Yahoo! would not let me login anymore. I contacted Yahoo! support several times over the next few months trying in vain to get the extra reminders to stop. I received some generic responses that looked as if the support person noticed the word ‘Calendar’ and sent me a form response but no luck.
Yesterday I thought of a new thing to try “Hmm… I wonder what would happen if I signed up for ‘hitman200ca’ again?”. After a couple minutes and an activation email I logged into Yahoo! Calendar and lo and behold my reoccurring reminders were still there. I was so pleased with myself I immediately deleted the events and then deleted the account again.
But wait, what if someone other than me signed up for ‘hitman200ca’? I’ll bet you can guess! I looked through the documentation on the pages when I deleted my account and it certainly said Calendar was among the things deleted. Also it was much longer than 90 days between the time I deleted the old account and the time I noticed the extra reminders (GMail conversation threading, didn’t notice the (2)). I hope my experience was an isolated incident but I doubt it was.
As for me, I am starting to migrate my calendar entries into Google Calendar so I can get away from Yahoo!. Although I’m sure that nobody over there cares much, oh well.
I agree, Yahoo! sucks. Though, since I have Rogers Internet, they give you Yahoo! branded e-mail and such. It’s not so bad, since there are minimal ads and you get priority support (HAH!) but I prefer sticking to my own domain name when it comes to e-mail. I like having control.
The one good thing about Yahoo! Mail, though, is that they’re testing out a brand-new interface right now. I’ve been lucky enough to get a spot in the beta, and I must say, the interface is pretty impressive. It’s almost as good as Outlook, except it’s 100% web-based and doesn’t rely on crap like ActiveX or Java, which make me cringe each time I hear their names.
Hi.
Good design, who make it?
Thanks very much for the compliment.
My blog theme is custom. I created it. However I no longer like it and will be switching to a new theme (of my own creation as well) within the next year.