Hacking Truths

As you all know, Yahoo! upgraded its features and the capacities of the mail accounts have grown to 2GB. That's good for sure, but the "monitoring" methods that we all have been far too familiar with in the last couple of years have been renewed with this move also. Yahoo! is now keeping track of which sites its members that are getting into groups or using Yahoo! services are visiting and storing this data with a method called "Web Beacons". The aim is to give these statistics to the partner companies arranged by agreement and to improve the "advertisement guiding" function.

However, those who are bothered by this and do not want to be kept track of have still a choice. Yahoo! has hidden this option way deep inside somewhere but I'm declaring it here in case there are people who want it anyway:

1. Go to the address http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy and click the "Cookies" link under the "Special Topics" column.

2. Click the "Web Beacons" link under the "Reference Links" Column.

3. On this page, click the "click here to opt out" link toward the end of the third paragraph under the "Outside the Yahoo! Network" title.

4. After a while, a page that says you have been out of the monitoring program will load. Without doing anything, close that page or continue your usual surfing by typing another address in the address bar. (Do NOT click the "Cancel Opt-out" button, your action will be cancelled!)

5. You're done! Now Yahoo! will not record what you're doing during surfing.You can let your friends that might be interested know about this; since no matter how "innocent" it may seem, it's still a violation of privacy