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.

Tags: Uncategorized