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Re: ARCHIVES Digest - 31 Mar 2002 to 1 Apr 2002 (#2002-92)



In a message dated 4/2/02 12:01:43 AM Eastern Standard Time, LISTSERV@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU writes:


Anyone with a YAHOO group subscription should read this


I just noticed this when I followed the procedure thankfully suggested by Mercat and from the Meerket Preference update page selected HELP then the question on what Market Preferences are. Here is part of what came up.

<<
Yahoo! is notifying users of these changes to marketing preferences via email. Your new marketing preferences will not take effect until 60 days after the date the email is sent to you so you have plenty of time to decide what you want to receive and what you don't. To change your preferences, go to the Marketing Preferences page. Please note that these new preference categories only relate to how Yahoo! communicates with you about Yahoo! products and services. Your Yahoo! Delivers preference, regarding special offers from our selected partners, remains as you selected it.
>>

If this is true, it would suggest that no changes have been made if you didn't agree to them.  I have never received an em from yahoo informing me of these changes. As I belong to about a dozen private business project and family yahoogroups, this is something that is of considerable interest to me and I want to say thank you to Jill Schneider and other posters on this subject.

While doing this, I also ran into something else that I had never noticed before, i.e., that I had a "public profile" linked to my Yahoo ID for each :  a bunch of 'r' characters followed by a bunch of 'b' characters. I have no idea when this happened. I did not set it up myself. I don't want to get paranoid about this, but it would seem to suggest that even though a member might have group settings as private, the public profile would be there for anyone wishing to use it. Unfortunately, I deleted that profile before looking to see what was in it.  I.e., did they transfer personal information from my yahoogroups private profiles into my "public profile" thus making personal contact information accessible to anyone searching yahoo, such as personal information harvesters?  I don't know, but those of you interested might want to look to see what is in your public profile before you change the settings. I would say, more generally, it would be a good idea to re-c! heck all of the settings in yahoogroups while you are in there. I may have missed one or two myself.

While we are bashing yahoo here, I can mention another item that may be of special interest to archivists. I originally got involved in these groups through "eGroups" which was founded by, inter alia, Carl Page (brother of google cofounder Larry Page). Carl is an old board member colleague from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility <cpsr.org>. He is a highly socially responsible computer professional and as an owner of eGroups saw to it that it maintained a consumer oriented privacy opt-in (rather than opt-out) policy, something that is almost nonexistent today.  eGroups also had the policy of maintaining group archives indefinitely. It was an outstanding way to do projects with a private homepage for the group, message board for posting group EMs, file room for depositing various kinds of files, group survey options, etc.  A couple of years ago, eGroups was sold to Yahoo and egroups became yahoogroups.  After a short time, Carl withdrew from ! yahoogroups for personal reasons.  So I wound up with membership in several Yahoogroups. I've been disappointed in the changes in policy since that time.  One of these was the announcement that Yahoo would disestablish groups that had not had a posting in 90 days (also those with fewer than 3 members).  So far at least, none of my groups that qualify for deletion have been deleted, but yahoo can delete these at any time. Some of my yahoogroups are completed projects and therefore are now "inactive."  To me, the term "inactive records" has always been an oxymoron.  I outlawed its use when I was managing archives and records management as part of information services in an organization years ago.  8^)

It was great to have these online, private group archives to refer back to as necessary. I never had any problem with yahoo discontinuing that very nice archives feature, but what I did object to was the fact that they didn't leave any exit strategy for people to download or copy the files into some other media where they could continue to be of archival value. I pushed hard for it but was told that that was not possible. It was one of those good old "proprietary software" things and there wasn't a way that it could be preserved. 

So if any others were using yahoogroups as project websites with the thought that the pages would continue to be maintained and that you could use them for group records of continuing value, be aware that your only options, as I understand them, are to either laboriously copy and paste each message, survey, file, etc., into a word processor, or to send a message to the group every couple of months, which of course could be very annoying to the other old members.

Regards,

Rick Barry
www.rbarry.com (soon to become mybestdocs.com)