Yahoo has now also joined those companies which will track their users, whether you like it or not, in order to present a ‘personalized experience’ to the users. The company will not honor “Do Not Track” requests, which are made by user’s browser if the user has chosen to not being tracked, on any of Yahoo’s websites or services. Interestingly, the announcement was made by “Yahoo Privacy Team” in a blog post.
“Here at Yahoo, we work hard to provide our users with a highly personalized experience. We keep people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the world. We fundamentally believe the best web is a personalized one.”
Yahoo claimed in the blog that it was the first major company to actually implement and honor the “Do Not Track” policy. The request made by the user’s browser is not compulsive in nature and the website may choose to ignore it which is exactly what Yahoo will do from now on. Yahoo also expressed the lack of standardized practice in this domain and its wish to provide a ‘personalized’ experience to its users.
“As the first major tech company to implement Do Not Track, we’ve been at the heart of conversations surrounding how to develop the most user-friendly standard. However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.”
However, Yahoo did not expressed any details of the ‘personalized’ experience that they wish their users to have. ‘Personalized’ advertisement can bring big cash for Yahoo if it can tailor the advertisements according to marital status, age, gender and interests. Yahoo does has an “interest-based advertising” policy at the moment and the users can opt-out of it if they want by disabling it in “Yahoo Privacy Center,” however they need to be logged in to their Yahoo accounts all the time and across all devices and will also have to accept cookies.
“Yahoo Privacy Center” does allows you to control some of your privacy by giving you different tools and this is what Yahoo also recommended in their blog.
“Users can still manage their privacy on Yahoo while benefiting from a personalized web experience. We encourage our users to tailor their online experience through the variety of privacy tools we offer within our own platform, accessible via our Yahoo Privacy Center.”
The last statement is very ironic and interesting one in the blog.
“The privacy of our users is and will continue to be a top priority for us.”
