Last week I wrote a Tip about Facebook Privacy and another one about syncing your Address Book contacts to Yahoo. Well, there were significant developments in both of those topics this past week.

First off, Facebook ran afoul of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its privacy and security policies. This story hit the NBC Nightly News, the cover of Time magazine and the cover of Consumer Reports magazine all in the same week.

Facing mounting pressure about its privacy policy, Facebook is thought to be working on making privacy control more simple and direct. Watch your Facebook Notifications for any changes they may implement.

Yahoo! Spammed my contacts!

I have a Yahoo! Mail account that I only use for testing. I had no contacts associated with that account until I wrote the Tip on syncing your Address Book contacts to Yahoo! and Google. As part of my research I synced all my contacts to both services. Once I completed the tip, I pretty much forgot about having my contacts online.

BUT, only three days after uploading my contacts to Yahoo!, something grabbed all of my contacts and sent spam to all of them. It is embarrassing to be told by your family and friends that they received an email from your selling certain, ahem, enhancement products.

A tiny bit of Googling informed me that this is a common problem for Yahoo Mail users.

I promptly changed the password on my account and, more importantly, removed all of my contacts from Yahoo!'s database. Assuming that all the addresses were not sucked up into some huge spammer database, I should be fine now.

The moral of this story is that storing your personal information online leaves you more vulnerable to attack than keeping your information local (such as in Address Book).

If I hear anything more about these two stories, I will let you know.

Related Items: Facebook | Yahoo!