EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

--- In exs-users@yahoogroups.com, Colin Shapiro <musos@i...> wrote:
Yahoo! is now using something called "Web beacons" to
> track Yahoo! users around the Internet and see what you are doing.
> http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/pixels/details.html

an excerpt:
 
>> Information Sharing and Disclosure
>> Yahoo! does not rent, sell, or share personal information about 
>> you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to 
>> provide products or services you've requested, when we have 
>> your permission,

so far so good, but ...

>>  or under the following circumstances: 
>> (O) We provide the information to trusted partners who 
>> work on behalf of or with Yahoo! under confidentiality 
>> agreements. 
>> ... (etc)

So Yahoo can rent, share, sell or share personal information about 
you with other companies, as long as they've signed some sort of 
confidentiality thing with Yahoo, the details of which are presumably 
private between Yahoo and those outside companies or people. 


>> These companies may use your personal information to help 
>> Yahoo! communicate with you about offers from Yahoo! and 
>> our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have 
>> any independent right to share this information. 

So it looks like Yahoo can collect information about your browsing 
habits to sell on, without your permission or knowledge (and 
presumably with your email and ISP details attached), but the people 
they sell it to or pass it on to don't have an independent right to 
sell or pass it on to even more people ("fourth parties"??) ... 
unless Yahoo says that they can.

Hmm.
As safeguards go, that's not exactly watertight, is it?

So (for instance) if you were a market research company working for 
political party X, you could presumably buy a list from Yahoo of 
account details of people who visit gay or lesbian chatrooms or sites 
(or whatever), then do a datamining search to cross-reference and 
isolate ISP details belonging to computers used by politicians' 
families of party Y, and end up with a sorted hit-list of which 
politician's spouses or kids were likely to be "usable" for blackmail 
purposes.

The blackmailee might never know that they'd been fingered with the 
help of personal data sold by Yahoo (it might even be part of the 
deal that the buyer doesn't tell people what their arrangement with 
Yahoo is), and even if it did somehow come out, Yahoo could say that 
they hadn't done anything wrong, and that it was all the fault of the 
people who bought the info, and then misused it.

Not good. 
If I was a journalist, I'd be asking Yahoo to provide a list of all 
the companies they've been selling personal details to, and copies of 
the exact agreements under which the information was transferred, so 
we can find out the sort of organisations who have been buying this 
data, who they work for, and what they are allowed to do with it.
You might not want, say, a right-to-life organisation being able to 
get hold of a Yahoo-generated list of ISP id's for people who'd 
visited an abortion counselling site, or a foreign power getting hold 
of lists of politians whose families had been looking for info on 
sexual diseases, or alcoholism, or mental illness, or whatever.