privacy

From: Lois Goldthwaite (loisg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-01-26 13:47:00

If anyone feels as I do about not displaying all your personal data to
everyone in Yahoo, you can suppress some of this by going to
uk.profiles.yahoo.com. To encourage you to click the link to edit one's
own profile, this page offers a search screen that not only has boxes to
search by Yahoo ID, name, and interests but adds: 

       Use Power Search to search by age, gender, location and more!
       Search only locates information that users have agreed to make
public.

An experiment with "females" in "London" turned up a bunch of names that
I don't want to be associated with <blush>. 

If you click on a user name in a member list, you go straight to their
profile page. If there's a smiley face next to the name, it indicates
they are currently online and you can send them an instant message.
Terrific. I didn't agree to make my gender public, but it was there on
the public profile.

If you look around, there's a box to turn off this nifty "hey, pervs,
I'm online" feature, and you can even set the gender to display "no
answer" instead of "female" (or "male," of course, as the case may be).
You can even change the colors on your profile page, but unfortunately
black text/black background isn't an option.