I’m pretty worried, a statement sort of says that all data stored and collected by Flickr/Yahoo will be shared to the new overhead company and they can use that for any other of their companies for whatever they please.
Am I right to be worried now? Or should I have been worried years ago when I started storing my pictures at Flickr. Or is it ok what is happening?
I find it pretty difficult to interpret these messages.
Here’s the statement:
Yahoo is now part of Oath
Q: What has changed?
A: Yahoo is now part of ‘Oath’, a digital and mobile media company with more than 50 brands globally (including Yahoo, HuffPost, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone and Makers), and a member of the Verizon family of companies working to shape the future of media. Oath strives to create a passionate and engaged community of users by building content and products that inspire and entertain the world.
Q: Why am I receiving this notice?
A: We would like to inform you in advance that, as of 18 September 2017, Yahoo and Oath plan to share some user information within the Verizon family of companies which will enable us to integrate our business, allowing us to coordinate more and improve your experiences.
Q: How will my information be used? How will this help me as a user?
A: Your information is used to continually deliver innovative, engaging and entertaining products and services to you. We believe that we can more efficiently deliver a better experience to you by sharing user information across the various Oath brands and within our Verizon family of companies. We will use this shared information to integrate and improve our services, and to provide more customised advertising & content, as well as for other analytics purposes.
Q: What user information is being shared?
A: We will share the same information that our companies have previously collected and used for the development and operation of our products and services. This may include your account registration information (such as your user ID, gender, name, email address, postcode & age), your content and advertising interests, content associated with your account, the types of services you use and how you engage with them, cookie and device IDs, IP addresses, geolocation information and activity information from across our websites, apps, software and other services. All of the information that we collect about you may be shared across the various Oath brands and within our Verizon family of companies.
Q:What is not changing?
A: Your privacy is important to us. How Yahoo and Oath handle your personal information as well as what information Yahoo shares with third parties outside of the Oath organisation and the Verizon family of companies has not changed. The Yahoo EMEA Terms of Service and Privacy Policy continue to govern your activity when you are on a Yahoo site, using a Yahoo app or interacting with our products, services or technologies.
Integration of Yahoo into the new Oath organisation is an ongoing process. We are carefully managing your data during this period of transition, and we will notify you in accordance with our Privacy Policy as and when additional significant changes occur.
Q: I don’t want my Yahoo personal information to be shared with Oath and/or the Verizon family of companies. What can I do?
A: Yahoo users are empowered to shape their privacy preferences. Your ad personalisation opt-out preferences will also be shared and honoured across Oath ad systems. We recommend that users take advantage of these options to optimise their experience; however, should you prefer that Yahoo does not share any personal information with Oath and/or the Verizon family of companies, instructions on how to delete your Yahoo account can be found here.
If I were you, I wouldn’t be keen either. There’s very little concrete information in that statement about what they actually intend to do with all that shared data. Not knowing what they’re going to do makes it impossible to decide whether you’re happy with it.
Unfortunately, there is a trend in modern business to deliberately make this kind of statement as broad and ill-defined as possible, so that anything they later decide to do will still be covered by the statement.
A) You should not be surprised.
B) Yahoo is a search engine/advertising company the idea that their “Owners” want “more data” from them should be as surprising as Homer wanting “more donuts”.
C) legal departments have never been interested in limiting the scope of their employers enterprise contractually.
TANSTAAFL
If it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.