Web Beacons: Is Yahoo Watching You Right Now? (Probably)
If you have a Yahoo! membership (including Yahoo! Groups), chances are Yahoo is watching more than you think they are. In fact, according to the company’s Privacy Policy, Yahoo uses web beacons, electronic spybots designed to “conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes”.
What type of information are the beacons collecting? Yahoo says “demographic and usage information” … “both on and off of the yahoo.com domain”. This means that if you click and accept the Yahoo! policy, you’re agreeing to allow Yahoo to follow you around the internet and record some of your actions. None of your personal identifying information is shared, Yahoo says.
Stopping the beacons is easy. Yahoo allows you to opt out of the program.
Thanks to Danna Katzman for spotting this interesting policy change.
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It appears the Opt-Out link is not working in the post. The correct URL is http://pclick.yahoo.com/p?optout
Ready for some irony? Constantcontact, the mail company that The Content Wrangler uses to send out email, uses web beacons.
Source: http://www.constantcontact.com/learning-center/hints-tips/ht-2006-10.jsp
That is ironic! And, of course, it should be noted that lots of firms now use this technology. We’ll be exploring these technologies more in the future.
Expect a conference session on this topic at our upcoming Web Content Management events. These new tracking technologies are very interesting. Their use opens up all kinds of questions.
Scott Abel
TheContentWrangler