Post
Is this how you’re supposed to treat clients?
Asked about the disparity between online media usage and internet ad spending at UBS Media Week, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz said that the gap was in part because internet advertising had initially over-sold itself: “I think internet advertising oversold itself at the beginning, over-promised preciseness.” That, however, she said, was beginning to change. “Things are looking up. We’re seeing marketers engage.” Some other highlights from her remarks:
—HotJobs: Bartz appeared to confirm for the first time reports that Yahoo was willing to part with HotJobs, saying that the company had said “all along” that HotJobs was “not strategic to the company” and that Yahoo was willing to sell it at the “right price.”
—Local: She played up Yahoo’s position in the local space because of the company’s relationship with AT&T (NYSE: T) and the newspaper consortium, both of which provide it with a large local sales force. She played down online competition in the market, saying that the real competition remained offline advertisers. Bartz also hinted that she was interested in adding hyperlocal content to Yahoo properties, although she did not offer details.
—AOL: Bartz said that a public AOL (NYSE: TWX) would increase “awareness of online advertising”—and also validated Yahoo’s own focus on content.
—Search: Continuing on with a refrain she has made for months, Bartz said that while Yahoo was outsourcing the “engine of search” to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), it would keep control of the search user interface. “It won’t even be close to Bing,” she said, referring to how the search results on Yahoo would look after the Microsoft ad pact goes into effect. As for the company’s recent decline in search market share, she said that most of the drop could be linked to the end of toolbar distribution deals.
—Standing with college students: Asked whether she was worried that Yahoo was not a “starting point for college kids,” Bartz said she did not need it to be, noting that if a young person was a sports fan they would invariably head to a Yahoo sports site—and adding that there was a “huge population” outside of that demographic. “This is not a problem I go to sleep worrying about,” she said.
Yahoo has just rolled out its Ad Interest Manager which according to Yahoo is a new consumer tool which aims to make online advertising, particularly interest-based more transparent. Â This, according to Yahoo is one way of building up user trust. The Ad Interest Manager site lets you see a concise summary of your online activity on Yahoo’s content network, so much so that you can determine your level of exposure to interest-based ad served by Yahoo Ad Network.
Anne Toth, Yahoo VP for Policy and Head of Privacy, said that Ad Interest Manager will provide Yahoo users/visitors transparency into how Yahoo’s interest-based advertising works as he emphasized that users can opt-out of Yahoo’s  interest-based ad targeting.
“Yahoo! is committed to providing consumers with increased transparency and control when they are online. Ad Interest Manager will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up-to-date information.”
Specifically, Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager Tool :
- Provides a central point where Yahoo! visitors can assert even greater control over their online experience.
- Gives visitors an unparalleled view into the information used to deliver interest-based advertising.
- Shows the visitor both Yahoo!’s educated guesses about their interests and a summary of observations, along with other information they have provided.
- Provides a list of specific interest categories that Yahoo! has placed a user into and lets people turn those categories off.
- Allows people who don’t want to see interest-based ads to turn them off entirely.
If you want to opt out of this program, check out the Ad Interest Manager site. Be sure to allow cookies from Yahoo and you must be logged in to your Yahoo account too.
If this article has any relation to MS and Yahoo (which I doubt), then you can see why this wasn’t a title too:
Xbox 360 – It’s all fun and games until it RROD’s!
The fact is these products use batteries, any battery will degrade overtime and with charge cycles just like the batteries that are used for remote controls and the 360 pad.
The cell type used in these batteries for the DS3 is the same for laptops and are very reliable, I think the article was very poorly written and seems to group the PS3 unjustifiably with unreliable products, which quite simply is not fact.
I know that my pad last for days on end without charging and nobody I know has ever had problems (apart from when I got a bit too competitive on Beijing 2008)
Has anybody actually had problems charging their pad?
Maybe the writer should just get some coal for xmas, after all the article does mention this:
“But I’m starting to think that coal isn’t a bad gift at all. For one thing, it lasts forever”.
Go buy some coal then.
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WASHINGTON (AP) - A new online tool from Yahoo Inc. will let users see and edit the personal profiles that the Internet company compiles about them to target Internet advertising.
Yahoo’s new Ad Interest Manager , released in test form on Monday, is part of a broader industry push toward self-regulation amid mounting concerns about online privacy in Washington.
The new tool allows consumers to see a summary of their online activities, including a list of the Web pages they visit and online services they use, such as e-mail and personal finance channels. It also lists a consumer’s areas of interest, with categories such as consumer packaged goods, debt consolidation and automotive.
Consumers can modify their preferences and decline particular types of targeted pitches. It also lets consumers turn off targeted advertising altogether with the click of a bright yellow “Opt Out” link.
Users won’t be rejecting ads altogether, though; at most, behaviorally targeted ads would be replaced with others that aren’t tied to personal surfing habits.
In the past, users were able to rejected targeted ads, but they weren’t able to edit and modify their personal preferences â for instance, saying “no” only to ads for video games or ads with a health focus.
“Up until now, it has been an all-or-nothing choice,” said Amber Allman, a Yahoo spokeswomen. “But now consumers can see the different choices have and it gives them context and more transparency.”
The launch coincided with a Federal Trade Commission conference on Monday about behavioral advertising, a practice used by Internet marketers to target ads by tracking where people go and what they do online.
The FTC released a set of self-regulatory guidelines for the Internet advertising industry this year. Those guidelines urge online marketers to give consumers clear notice of the information that is being collected about them and how it is being used, as well as the opportunity to remove themselves from data collection.
Congress, meanwhile, is drafting legislation that would mandate such privacy obligations for Web sites and online advertisers.
But many Internet publishers and advertisers argue that self-regulation offers a better approach for managing an industry evolving as quickly as online advertising.
Yahoo’s new tool offers one such model for self-regulation.
The rollout of the new tool follows last week’s launch by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of an online campaign to educate consumers about how Internet advertising works. The IAB represents many leading Internet publishers and digital marketing services, including Yahoo and Google Inc.
Among other things, IAB’s “Privacy Matters” Web site offers explanations of demographic targeting, interest group targeting and data-tracking files known as cookies. The site also informs consumers how they can control the information collected about them by changing their cookies settings.
A number of IAB members, including Yahoo, are running banner spots on their Web pages linking back to the page.
WASHINGTON (AP) - A new online tool from Yahoo Inc. will let users see and edit the personal profiles that the Internet company compiles about them to target Internet advertising.
Yahoo’s new Ad Interest Manager , released in test form on Monday, is part of a broader industry push toward self-regulation amid mounting concerns about online privacy in Washington.
The new tool allows consumers to see a summary of their online activities, including a list of the Web pages they visit and online services they use, such as e-mail and personal finance channels. It also lists a consumer’s areas of interest, with categories such as consumer packaged goods, debt consolidation and automotive.
Consumers can modify their preferences and decline particular types of targeted pitches. It also lets consumers turn off targeted advertising altogether with the click of a bright yellow “Opt Out” link.
Users won’t be rejecting ads altogether, though; at most, behaviorally targeted ads would be replaced with others that aren’t tied to personal surfing habits.
In the past, users were able to rejected targeted ads, but they weren’t able to edit and modify their personal preferences â for instance, saying “no” only to ads for video games or ads with a health focus.
“Up until now, it has been an all-or-nothing choice,” said Amber Allman, a Yahoo spokeswomen. “But now consumers can see the different choices have and it gives them context and more transparency.”
The launch coincided with a Federal Trade Commission conference on Monday about behavioral advertising, a practice used by Internet marketers to target ads by tracking where people go and what they do online.
The FTC released a set of self-regulatory guidelines for the Internet advertising industry this year. Those guidelines urge online marketers to give consumers clear notice of the information that is being collected about them and how it is being used, as well as the opportunity to remove themselves from data collection.
Congress, meanwhile, is drafting legislation that would mandate such privacy obligations for Web sites and online advertisers.
But many Internet publishers and advertisers argue that self-regulation offers a better approach for managing an industry evolving as quickly as online advertising.
Yahoo’s new tool offers one such model for self-regulation.
The rollout of the new tool follows last week’s launch by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of an online campaign to educate consumers about how Internet advertising works. The IAB represents many leading Internet publishers and digital marketing services, including Yahoo and Google Inc.
Among other things, IAB’s “Privacy Matters” Web site offers explanations of demographic targeting, interest group targeting and data-tracking files known as cookies. The site also informs consumers how they can control the information collected about them by changing their cookies settings.
A number of IAB members, including Yahoo, are running banner spots on their Web pages linking back to the page.
Yahoo Sells All Its Users Private Email Contents to U.S. Agencies for Small Price
After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its âlaw enforcement and intelligence price listâ, someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo companyâs spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.
The 17-page guide, which Yahoo has tried to suppress via legal letters to the Cryptome.org site run by freedom of information champion John Young, describes Yahooâs policies on keeping the data of Yahoo Email and Yahoo Groups users, as well as the surveillance and spying capabilities it can give to the U.S. government and its agencies.
The Yahoo document is a price list for these spying services and has already resulted in many people closing down their accounts in protest. However, closing a Yahoo account is not as easy as one might expect: users have reported great difficulty in finding the link to delete their account, and, Yahoo will still keep data for another 90 days.
If you ask Yahoo! to delete your Yahoo! account, in most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from our user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.
Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases.
Many government leaders and officials around Africa, Asia and Latin America are known by Mathaba to widely be using Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail in spite of these Email services being hosted on U.S. computers and the ease that gives the hosts to access their data.. Mathaba has also long been aware of a great many business people, politicians and even Presidents who use the âfreeâ web-based email services of Yahoo for their Email communications, thus making it easy for the U.S. and its owners to spy on them with negligible cost.
Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and Internet service providers.
But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahooâs lawyers alone who have been stupid enough to try to issue a âDMCA takedown noticeâ to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document.
We estimate Yahoo stand a near-zero chance of success given that Young has thousands of intelligence and other leaked documents on his site and in the past decade has yet to remove a single document upon legal threats, the same 10-year track record held by Mathaba on documents on British Intelligence in spite of having computers seized and properties raided.
Mathaba is now also hosting the Yahoo leaked document on its servers around the world, and the cat is long out of the bag with the original document having been downloaded and distributed by many already.
When John Young was asked if there was anything he wouldnât reveal on his site â a fault in the Presidentâs Secret Service detail, for instance â he said, âWell, Iâm actually looking for that information right nowâ, much to the chagrin of those who believe that the U.S. government and its hopelessly corrupt agencies should have a right to supress information from the public.
The Compliance Guide reveals, as has been known to Mathaba prior to the leak via our own sources, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once theyâve been removed from a userâs trash folder.
The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the companyâs logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, the photo sharing and storage site which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.
Chats conducted through the companyâs Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahooâs server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not save the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.
Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holderâs friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.
Young responded to Yahooâs takedown request with a defiant note:
I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahooâs copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.
Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahooâs contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.
Note: Yahooâs exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here.
The company responded that a copyright notice is optional for works created after March 1, 1989 and repeated its demand for removal on Thursday. For now, the document remains on the Cryptome site.
Threat Level reported Tuesday that muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian had asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to provide him with a copy of the pricing list supplied by telecoms and internet service providers for the surveillance services they offer government agencies. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that the information was proprietary and that the companies would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it âto âshameâ Yahoo! and other companies â and to âshockâ their customers.â
âTherefore, release of Yahoo!âs information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,â the company added.
The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriberâs account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other U.S. âsocial networkingâ sites are at minimum providing information in similar fashion to U.S. agencies, and in some cases have also received substantial funding by U.S. government related entities as a most efficient and cost-effective means of spying on their users around the world. â Mathaba
â Includes extensive reporting by Wired.comâs Kim Zetter
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