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5/17/2000
Yahoo account holders are battling a vexing calendar problem—and a
potentially serious privacy violation—in which the portal is sending
their calendar reminders to the wrong people.
“I
received email reminders from the calendars of four other Yahoo users,”
one puzzled Yahoo Calendar user wrote in an email to CNET News.com.
“This information included reminders of dental appointments, meetings
and lunch appointments. This is a serious compromise of users’ privacy!
“I
store rather private information about bill payment due dates/amounts and
other personal information in my calendar and am concerned that other
people are receiving reminders from my calendar as well.”
Yahoo
acknowledged that a technical gaffe created the privacy fiasco over the
weekend, sending electronic reminders of events marked in its calendar
service to the wrong people.
“Yahoo
Calendar experienced a technical problem that caused a very small number
of reminders to be redirected,” Thad White, producer of Yahoo Calendar,
said in an interview. “We take privacy very seriously. We do everything
in our power to comply with our privacy policy. We implemented measures to
make sure this never happens again.”
But for
at least some Yahoo calendar users, the problem continues. One person
complained as late as this morning that he was still receiving the wrong
calendar reminders.
“The
Yahoo user who emailed me told me that when he checked his reminder
settings, it was actually set to send them to my email address,”
reported the Yahoo customer. “Not only that, but I received another
misdirected reminder this morning from the calendar within the same group
having the problem the other day.”
White
estimated that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Yahoo Calendar users
were affected. He declined to say how many people use the service.
The
calendar glitch comes on the heels of a Yahoo Mail email imbroglio in
which a few hundred new sign-ups were piled into two accounts.
White
stressed that the calendar glitch did not compromise passwords and said
the account holders’ email addresses were only distributed if their
usernames and email addresses were the same.
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