Yahoo! following the Opt-Out trend with “Updates” expansion

June 7, 2010 - By Erin Stuelke

Last week, Yahoo! announced it will begin expanding its Facebook-like news feed it calls Updates. Updates allow you to share information about your activities such as comments and ratings you leave on Yahoo!-based sites; Flickr and Picasa public photos; blog posts on Blogger, Tumbler and the like; music preferences on Pandora and Last.fm; YouTube activities; tweets from your Twitter account; Yelp reviews; and information from a handful of other sites like Goodreads.

Yahoo! Updates

Currently, Updates are only seen by your Yahoo! Connections, but Yahoo! is expanding it so that Updates will also be seen by your Messenger friends and anyone in your Yahoo! Mail contacts. Similar to the Google Buzz roll-out, as soon as this update is effective, everyone will automatically be able to see your Updates. Unlike the Google Buzz fiasco, though, all your contacts and Messenger buddies will remain private.

Even though Yahoo! is learning from Google’s mistake of revealing a person’s contacts, the expansion is still opt-out, meaning you will have to manually turn off this feature. The other major flaw, as pointed out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that you will never fully know who is following your updates. Since Yahoo! mail contact lists will not be revealed; if someone has you in their contact list, they will be able to view your Updates news feed without your knowledge whenever they log into Yahoo!.

While we agree that keeping contact lists private is the only way to go, a person should still be able to control who has access to their information. Some people will argue that shouldn’t matter since the information can easily be found publicly by searching in a few places. But in this case, Yahoo! has made it all-or-nothing. Users don’t have the ability to cherry-pick individual access to their Updates, only the ability to choose which information is displayed. The only way to ensure the wrong people aren’t looking at your information is to completely opt out of Updates. Or just not post anything publicly on Yahoo!.

After reading Yahoo!’s blog about the Updates expansion, it’s clear they are trying to avoid making the same mistakes Google did with Buzz and Facebook did with their privacy controls. One point they made clear was that anytime you’re about to share a piece of information on Yahoo!, you will be informed and a link to your settings will be readily displayed in case you want to change them. But if Yahoo! wants to roll this expansion out in the right way, they’re going to need options that reveal who is following you and options that allow blocking individual people as well groups of people (such as all email contacts). They should also make this expansion Opt-in.

Sources:
Your Privacy, Your Controls, Your Yahoo! Updates [Yahoo!]
Yahoo! Updates FAQ [Yahoo!]
Opt-Out Required to Prevent Your Yahoo! Mail Contacts From Being Used for Social Network [EFF]