"Perils in switching to Yahoo"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Richard Jay Solomon <rsolomon () dsl cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 19:10:17 -0500
To: farber () cis upenn edu (David Farber)
Subject: "Perils in switching to Yahoo"

read down

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/13/BU191399.DTL

> LAZARUS AT LARGE
> Perils in switching to Yahoo
>
> David Lazarus   Friday, December 13, 2002
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Pacific Bell may be taking on a new name, but it's still up to the same old
> tricks.
>
> The company's customers were outraged when I wrote how Pac Bell, which now
> wants to be known by the moniker of its corporate parent, SBC, slipped an
> insert into recent bills advising that personal information will be shared
> with business partners unless the customer says otherwise.
>
> Pac Bell is currently e-mailing high-speed Internet subscribers urging them to
> download new software to accommodate the company's marketing partner, Yahoo.
>
> The upgrade, Pac Bell promises, will provide "incredible new features and
> services."
> What the company isn't saying is that Pac Bell DSL subscribers will be exposed
> to a whole new world of commercial exploitation as Yahoo mines their personal
> information and online habits to blitz them with ads and enroll them in
> unwanted marketing schemes.
> snip
>
> According to Yahoo's -- not Pac Bell's -- privacy policy for DSL subscribers,
> the Sunnyvale Internet powerhouse will make use of "information about you that
> is personally identifiable like your name, address, e-mail address or phone
> number, and that is not otherwise publicly available."
>
> That's not the half of it. For some services, Yahoo says it will request Pac
> Bell customers' Social Security number "and information about your assets."
>
> The online company says it will track DSL subscribers' Internet browsing and
> share personal information with "trusted partners." Such info will be used in
> part "to customize the advertising and content you see."
>
> "Once you create an SBC Yahoo account and sign in to our services, you are not
> anonymous to us," Yahoo warns in surprisingly stark language.
> Yet nowhere is any of this spelled out in the Pac Bell/SBC privacy policy that
> most Pac Bell customers would see -- if they're among the relatively tiny
> handful of people who wade through all that fine print.

snip


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