March 29 — Tired of spam you’re getting at your free Yahoo! e-mail account? Get ready for more. Tucked inside a privacy policy change the company made this week was notice that more Yahoo! e-mail marketing offers were coming — even if users had formerly indicated they were unwanted.
YAHOO! GRANTED ITSELF PERMISSION to spam by creating a new “marketing preferences” page that lets users pick “yes or no” to specific categories of marketing pitches. The problem is, Yahoo! set every users’ option to “yes” — even if long ago, they indicated they never wanted any Yahoo! spam.
Yahoo! started e-mailing the privacy policy change to users Thursday. In the notice, the company suggested the marketing policy changes were made for users so they could more easily control the amount of e-mail offers they receive.
“It is designed to make it easier for you to manage the marketing communications you receive from Yahoo! and ensure you get the latest relevant information to meet your needs,” the notice says. It also says that marketing preferences have been “reset,” and unless users actively follow a sequence of steps to change these preferences “you may begin receiving marketing messages from Yahoo! about ways to enhance your Yahoo! experience, including special offers and new features.”
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But some Yahoo! users don’t see the change as an enhancement, but rather a tactic to trick users into accepting more spam — and a betrayal of their initial registration agreements.
“I checked and they had changed all my settings!” writes one irate poster to an Internet mailing group devoted to privacy. “This means that you may well be inundated with even more junk mail than you are already receiving. In order to change your settings back to whatever you had them at before, you will need to log in to your account and physically change them,” the poster adds.
A Yahoo! spokesperson said no company officials were available to comment on the change, but offered an e-mail statement explaining the company’s position.
Users who don’t want marketing offers from Yahoo have 60 days to do the following: Visit the user profile preferences page at http://edit.my.yahoo.com/config/eval_profile; select “Edit your marketing preferences” from within the Member Information section; and individually change selections in a series of marketing categories from “yes” to “no.”
In e-mail marketing lingo, the process is known as “opt-out.”
But even performing that slightly cumbersome operation is no guarantee that Yahoo! marketing offers won’t come, since the firm reserves the right to add marketing categories at any time.
“I’d suggest re-checking periodically,” writes another mailing list poster.
“We have created a new marketing preferences page which allows users to choose how Yahoo! communicates with them about Yahoo! products and services. Yahoo!’s products and services have changed and grown over the years and many were not available when users registered in the past,” the e-mail says. “We are notifying users proactively via e-mail of this change, after which they have 60 days after the date of the mailing to edit those marketing preferences, giving users plenty of time to decide how they want Yahoo! to communicate with them.”
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