By George Norman
Added on 20 Oct 2009(744 Views)



Thanks to Yahoo! Messenger, the Yahoo! developed instant messaging (IM) application, you can stay in touch with friends and love ones, you can socialize with people you know, and you can easily contact anyone on your friend’s list. When it is so easy to contact and be contacted by someone, privacy concerns start to appear. According to Yahoo!, the Yahoo! Messenger user should feel safe in the environment provided by the IM app and should enjoy the fact that he has easy access to all his contacts (and all the contacts have easy access to him).

There are several privacy protection means at your disposal. They are meant to help you avoid people you do not want to interact with. Check out the list below:
  • Availability Settings

When you do not want to be disturbed, you can set your availability setting to Invisible. This means every person in your contacts list will see you as offline. By checking the box next to Sign in as invisible to everyone when you log into Yahoo! Messenger, nobody in your contacts list will notice you are online. Or you could become invisible to everyone by clicking your name and selecting Invisible to everyone from the dropdown menu.

Alternatively you can select to be invisible only to a certain user or a certain user group. Additional details available here.
  • Yahoo! Web Sites

When you sign into Yahoo! Messenger, some Yahoo! web sites will show that you are online. This option can be disabled from Messenger -> Preferences -> Privacy -> uncheck the box next to Allow Yahoo! web sites to show when I am online -> click Apply -> click OK.
  • Ignore List

You can add people you really do not want to talk to, to the Ignore List. These contacts will see you as unavailable; if they send you an IM, it will not be delivered to you.

You can add a contact to the Ignore List by clicking Messenger -> Preferences -> Ignore List -> Add -> type in that user’s Yahoo! ID or email address -> click Ignore.



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Tags: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Messenger, Instant Messaging, IM, Availability, Privacy

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Comments

kate - 07 Jul 2010 14:19
i know somebody's cheating on my YM. How can i protect myself and my boyfriend from that cheaters? He knows everything about us...about our conversation over the YM. Please help me to solve this problem. Thank you so much.

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