This morning one of my clients contacted me with an emergency request. For the last couple of days very strange things were happening with his Yahoo account. His wife was notified on her Yahoo.com that he had just visited a particular internet site. It appeared even his emails were publicly visible to his contacts. He was able to see emails of a business associate who also used Yahoo mail.
I don’t use Yahoo webmail and I don’t advise my clients to do so but as with all relationships, clients come with baggage. We are currently setting up a WordPress website for him and will give him a much nicer e-mail shortly. Next step will be off webmail on to Outlook.
I took a look @Yahoo (Yahoo on Twitter) for clues as to recent changes they have made. I found reference to #YProductRunway which sounds a lot like the Facebook Social Graph project. I sent out a couple tweets.Then I went to my own Yahoo account to see what settings I could help my client edit. I believe pulse.yahoo.com/y/settings page is key. Make sure that you have unchecked the social graph option which says: “Allow my connections to share information about me with the applications they use; including those not developed by Yahoo!.”
I have everything unchecked as you can see below. 
I am leaving Hide my profile unchecked for now as I have just joined a Yahoo Group for a women’s group I want to participate in. Not thrilled about the platform but great group of women.
Be sure to also go to your Yahoo email settings (even if you don’t use it, if you have signed up for Yahoo to use one of their products, it has automatically set up e-mail for you).
Uncheck “Share my Updates”. How to get here? Yahoo does not make it easy to find this page. When you are on your Yahoo mail, click on “contacts”. Pull down “tools” and click on “seeing updates from”. Make sure you have unclicked “share my updates”.
In case your wondering about my inbox on yahoo mail – that’s 99% from Flickr.
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