Stalked!

Over the past few weeks I've been getting these e-mails to my Yahoo account, from complete strangers, wanting to 'connect' or some such thing, with me. Obviously, I just deleted them, thinking it was some new scam, or something. Eventually, I realised that it all had to do with the ever=changing nature of Yahoo accounts. To be precise, it was all to do with 'Yahoo Pulse', something I didn't even know that I'd signed up to. Now, I knew that I'd submitted The Sleaze's RSS feed to Yahoo, in much the same way I'd submitted it to Google - in the hope of getting some traffic from subscribers. What I didn't realise was that Yahoo now appears to publish your RSS feed, Twitter and Facebook posts, (I'm not even sure how they got details of those, they aren't part of my profile), and publish the whole lot as a feed in your public profile. It was this people were reading and trying to 'connect' with me over. Obviously, as soon as I found this out, I changed my profile settings, (a public feed is the default, apparently), to remove this information from public view.

Now, I know that it must appear a bit strange for someone who publishes a web site, blog, associated RSS feeds and Twitter account, to be getting so uptight over having a feed mashed together from these sources made public. However, it's a matter of principle. I've chosen to make all of the aforementioned things public, and have some control as to where they appear and who can read them. Effectively, I was inviting people to follow them. Just follow them, you note. Not actually contact me on an e-mail address I don't make public. By contrast, when I signed up to Yahoo Mail, I didn't expect to have all of these things exposed to other Yahoo users. I especially didn't expect to have every Tom, Dick and Harry contacting me on my private mail account wanting to befriend me - to be frank, I found it pretty creepy. It was a like being stalked. Anyway, I seem to have shaken off the stalkers by ensuring my account details are now private. Although I would have hoped that 'private' would have been the default setting...