As you may know, we recently rolled out some design changes to a small percentage of Yahoo! Groups in the US. During the rollout, users discovered a bug in the user interface that may have inadvertently allowed some users to see the email addresses of other users that were not previously visible to them. When we were made aware of this bug, the new design was disabled within 24 hours to make sure that we could adequately investigate the situation.
At Yahoo!, we take privacy very seriously. Our teams work closely together to ensure that privacy is key component of the product planning process. We are always working to improve our testing processes to try to ensure that these things don’t happen in the first place. When we do discover a bug with our products we work quickly to resolve it. Your trust is paramount to us.
Anne Toth and Jim Stoneham
Well, cynical or not, admit it’s a failure or not, the bottom line is when you hear what she has to say in the first two questions of that video, you know without a doubt and unequivocally that our voices were heard! We really truly won our fight to keep our Classic Group Option.
And honestly, that’s what matters when it comes down to it.
(sigh of relief)
Brenda
Nightowl >8#
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/modsandmembers/
Carol Bartz explains herself here:
(Why wasn’t this posted by Yahoo staff?!)
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid42806360001?bctid=628449885001
Enjoy.
-RS
What about a feature that shows sent messages on the group site for members to members? It would be great when I am emailing each person within the group to know to whom I have sent the email after it is sent. That might mean traditional folders and email application features, like blind copy, cc and direct one on one emails. The reason this came up is that I sent an email to the group with a link to my social network, and the network added the group email for each person that wanted to join. It was a mess, so now I am emailing each member individually.
For some reason I can’t post comments in the ‘Mail Delayed’ entry, so forgive me for posting it here, but what is going on??? I have sent a post through twice, and it has not come through. It appears Yahoo is still suffering from delays. Can this be fixed?
Please?
It’s a good thing I automatically have things sent to my sent folder, otherwise I would have lost my work.
And just so that this is on topic of this specific entry…. THIS is why I’ve been getting spam in my inbox and on my group? Are you serious? At first, I actually thought it was a member emailing to become active again, but after that I’ve just been deleting them, but if this was caused by error on YGroups part…. That is not cool. That is not cool at all.
Yeah, I’m with everyone else here….fix the bugs you have (such as Delayed Mail), before trying to ‘improve’ things, and don’t improve something that doesn’t need improving. It just ends up making things worse for us instead of better.
Please keep Yahoo Groups as they are – changing something that is really great is not needed!
HELP!! I went into Manage My Identites and tried to create an alias and it wouldn’t let me. So, I went into Edit My Information. I updated who can see my information and then saved. Now everything, including at log in, is in Spanish. I cannot read it. I did NOT change my language setting. Please HELP.
Is *this* why I’m suddenly bombarded by so many bots on Y!Messenger as well as people who claim they want to “connect” to my Yahoo! profile? I was wondering why they came out of nowhere…
Even in this news story, it is recognized that even after repeated complaints about security, your staff repeatedly denied that there was a problem for multiple groups.
“Moderators and members of groups for HIV/AIDS patients, people with disabilities, and celebrities said they were stunned to see previously private profile information and email addresses exposed. After Yahoo insisted no privacy settings had been changed, user “Marilyn” replied:
On the website for the group, email addresses ARE showing. They do not show for the current sender of the message, those are truncated … BUT… if they had replied to a previous message and have it included in the reply, then that sender’s email address IS showing in full.”
http://gigaom.com/2010/10/04/yahoo-quashes-groups-redesign-in-wake-of-user-backlash/
I want to trust you again. If you say that you took action within 24 hours after your staff told you about the problem, I will believe you. However that doesn’t mean that it was only 24 hours from the time of the first privacy complaint and the time Yahoo took action. I need to know that in the future your staff will begin communicating to you about our concerns in a *timely* manner. 27 days is inexcusable negligence when dealing with privacy issues.
On September 1, 2010 at 11:08 am Tom replied to a blog written the previous day:
“Privacy
One of the email list we run has many celebrities as members. Our membership list is not publicly accessible or viewable. Members do not post their email addresses.
The new look suddenly made all those addresses viewable. A violation of Yahoo’s own Privacy policy. What the heck were you thinking? Did you really do comprehensive testing?
Overnight we have lost over 100+ members as they scrambled to remove themselves from our list.”
There were others on that blog that expressed concerns about privacy also. Then even more people complaining on later blogs about privacy issues. Then on September 10th a blog was posted stating:
“Privacy options will continue to function exactly as they did before.”
A blog entry on September 15th states:
“The new look and feel has not changed privacy settings at all.”
After continuing complaints about privacy issues, another blog entry on September 20th states:
“The display of your email address has not been changed at all as part of this remodel.”
Of course these complaints were made very clear in many, many posts on the Yahoo Groups Suggestion Board also.
Then on September 29th the remodel is rolled back. That’s 28 days after the first reports of security issues with the remodeled version.
Are you saying that even though your staff knew of this issue for 27 days, they failed to communicate this serious issue to you? Who is responsible for the grave lack of judgment of your staff? What have you done to insure that Yahoo staff members will start taking reports of security issues seriously in the future?
@ Stanley: Could you kindly send me the name and link to your group so we can have a look at your stated issues? Thanks
To Major Group:
We’d love to have you in our group.
Come talk to us!
Brenda
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/modsandmembers/
The PRIVACY VIOLATION BY YAHOO GROUPS MANAGEMENT occurred over a period of 20 days. During that time, the spammers harvested all our email addresses widely.
YahooGroup’s error exposed all of the email addresses of all “new format groups” to the open web for almost 3 weeks. The result of this error by YahooGroups is that we now have spammers using the email addresses they harvested.
The spammers are now sending spam using these harvested addresses to spoof their return address, by masquerading as a member of each yahoo group.
YahooGroups was warned by users on the 2nd day this breach of security was caused by the YahooGroups Team, but they continued to forge ahead with it for another18 days!
In addition to this security breach, YahooGroups has not assured us that it will maintain and support “Classic YahooGroups”.
Yahoo management should be having meetings right now on the topic:
“WHY HAVE USERS LOST TRUST IN THE YAHOO BRAND?”
.
To: That Noisy Guy….
Some of the members of our group are were wondering if you were a member of it. If not, we’d love to have you.
Owl
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/modsandmembers/
i like yahoo groupssssssssssss
In case you were wondering who Anne Toth is:
“Vice President, Global Policy; Chief Privacy Officer at Yahoo! Inc.”
Source: linkedin
Please, don’t follow Big Tent or do anything they’re doing! Keep the easy functionality and flexibility that has been a hallmark of Yahoogroups for over ten years now.
A few of my more high volume large groups recently switched to Big Tent (ex, Flylady with over half a million members) and in my opinion it ruined the group experience for me. It went from being an email list to being a forum which sends updates, which is not what I wanted.
So please, don’t follow in BigTent’s footsteps.
Part 3 here. You blog site has some mystery filter that makes it hard to post.
In ten years on the web, my experience say it’s the “do it all” places that win. Google wins because it finds everything. Face book wins because everyone is on it. Yahoo used to win because you had everything and it was easy to use. That’s why I used Ymail and geocities, until you cluttered up Ymail and spiked Geocities. I used groups because you didn’t mess with what egroups did, and I used groups because it did everything a group could want at the time. Yahoo groups would win if you gave us the tools to continue to do it all in the constantly changing web environment, rather than you picking the tools and design you think we want. Anything less is coasting and taking us for granted. Again. Give me options but let me add them in, without disruption to my existing experience. That’s all I ask. Give me an option to make it look like facebook, if that’s an direction you want to go towards. Don’t force it on us. For some groups, it has a place. For others, it’s horrible.
Glad to see you closed the barn door and intend to keep it better secured, but next time, check it twice before you let the monkeys loose in there. We’d appreciate it. And if we tell you you left it open, let us know you are over at the door looking at it. You want trust from us, stop the “mushroom treatment” of your users. Ask us what we want, and make it available. You have a suggestion board full of ideas. Otherwise, leave us to make our groups the best things on the web. Update code if you need to, by all means, but let us keep things as similar as possible if that’s what we want. Yahoo lately has bragged about how user-centric it wants to be. How are you going to do that if you don’t let users do what they want to do on your site?!
Anyway, I hope this helps your direction. I’m happy to tell you more about what I want in a group.
Cheers,
-RS
WELL!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/23/yahoo_compute_coop/
Mightn’t this be where my Photos get off to when they go out for the evening?
Too cool! No, seriously.. this would explain a LOT of the disappearing data issues for many groups, as this new server farm gets up and running.
Nice numbers on that efficiency, BTW..
(and to mama aurel: Apa yang menyusui anak-anak harus dilakukan dengan Yahoo?) :-\
Deb.
Someone’s under the impression that Yahoo is still bent on transforming Groups into a social network:
http://www.efytimes.com/e1/51952/fullnews.htm
Is this article accurate, or were its source(s) just not up-to-date on the rollback?
If you take our comments seriously, and you told us on September 29th that we would get to keep our Classic Group design and instead a white list would be created for those who want to try the new one, how is it that this story is in the news today: http://www.efytimes.com/e1/51952/fullnews.htm
With this quote: “Yahoo! Groups Redesign: Yahoo! Groups is being redesigned from the ground up to allow people to easily communicate, coordinate and share.”
We deserve an explanation as to why this was stated to the Press today when we were told on the 29th that we could retain our Classic Groups. And we need that explanation ASAP, or I’m sure people will start jumping ship again.
Brenda
Nightowl >8#
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/modsandmembers/
I love Yahoo! Groups. Keep up the good work.
I suggest you take a look at photos. The problems of late August/early September are back, only now it seems that when you look at the folders at one of my groups, you do not see any picture inside the folder, although it show that there are actually pictures inside the folder. And I know they’re there because every time I try to refresh the page to fix the problem, some show up while others disappear. Also, the front picture at one of my groups is not being shown when you enter the group at the front page. Oh, it’s there when I check to see if it’s still inside the description section of management. Kindly fix these problems, as I’m sure these are just the tip of the iceberg as far as photos are concerned.