Pseudonymous Ramblings by Psychobunny

Evils of spyware

Yahoo is totally freaking me out lately. I have their toolbar--even though I know it's spyware--because I really like the one-click access to My Web, Flickr, My Yahoo, comics, Answers, Launchcast, etc, but it has been getting really intrusive lately.

Remember the big stink everyone made over Gmail? "It reads your email and targers ADVERTISEMENTS at you! What could possibly be worse?!" Well, I think Yahoo does the same but is just sneakier about it. And what's worse, they're not simply providing links that might be of interest to me; no, Yahoo has an agenda. I've been keeping a list in my private journal for a while now because I found it interesting at first (now it's just creepy). Examples:

• I signed up for emails from the Planned Parenthood Action Network and NARAL, and, though I had never previously seen any ads of the sort, the next day every ad I saw was for various methods of birth control. (And while I'm on the topic, does anyone else find the new NuvaRing commercial a tad disturbing? I mean, I've never thought, you know what I want to do tonight? I want to hear some bad poetry about vaginal rings!)
• I signed up for emails from the Democratic party, MoveOn, and Amnesty International before the 2004 election. The next time I logged in I got several banner ads that redirected to the Bush/Cheney campaign site and a link to a survey that asked me "why will you be voting for Bush this November". The only way I would ever vote for Bush is through a ballot counting "mistake" or under threat of torture--how convenient both could actually happen, right?
• I signed up for emails from Campaign to Defend the Constitution, set my My Yahoo page to monitor the RSS feed from ExChristian.net, and added a freethought comic to my Geocities page. I got ads for Christian literature and links to poorly-written treatises on how the author's god is the One True God and the tortures we dirty agnostics and atheists can expect to suffer while burning in hell. (Speaking of which, how can anyone seriously consider that telling the nonreligious that we're going to spend eternity in something we don't believe exists to be a valid threat?)
• I started looking at the websites of grad programs in which I might be interested. yahoo started giving me student loan ads, links to pay-for-paper sites, and offers to buy rather than earn my PhD.
• My favorite though: When I first signed up for Gmail, I sent a test message to my Yahoo account to see if the settings were how I wanted them. The ads that started appearing almost immediately? Yep. Links on the evils of targeted advertisement. :D

The list goes on and on. But now it's getting really bad. I think it's somehow getting into my offline content. I get error messages from my Yahoo toolbar asking me if I'd like to debug it using Visual Studio. I write for my classes in Word and see ads for research technology. I installed an older version of SPSS and got ads for upgrades to the current version along with offers to buy SAS and Minitab. It's getting progressively more disturbing, but the toolbar is so convenient... how can I give it up?

posted by Psychobunny at 10:04 PM