A question of privacy within Yahoo Groups?

Question

I am Group Moderator of salvationarmy3 and have received this message from one of our members [e-mail]. Now at the present time I do not know what web site Yahoo or an other he is talking about. perhaps you could investigate this for me and let me know how to answer this question

Thanks

lennardrenouf

Dear Mr. Renouf:

I suspect that members of the SA3 group may not know this, but it seems to be the fact that all of the messages we post to our group are available for the whole world to see and read through a basic Internet search. A friend of mine brought this to my attention yesterday and today he tested it out by getting to see all of the postings I have made. He could access all postings for the group and use the search tool to identify my messages and those of others who mentioned my name. Just to prove what he was doing was not specific to me, I gave him your name to enter and within seconds he could view a listing of your messages as well.

Perhaps this lack of privacy for Yahoo groups is not a problem for members, but I suspect some might be concerned if they knew.

Is there anything that you as the Moderator can do, dealing with Yahoo, to see if the postings of members could be restricted to the membership of our own group?

Alternately, is there anything we can do as individual members to restrict access to our own postings?

Sincerely,

Ed Wicks

J. E. WICKS

15 Cleadon Drive

OTTAWA, ON K2H 5P5

Tel: [phone]

Answer 1

Speaking of privacy...why did you just post this poor man's name, address and phone number on the Internet??

Answer 2

Well Duh! Yahoo groups is for people to share like interests- the idea is to MAKE information availabe for people.

On the other hand, Wicks lives in Canaduh- the US needs to invade Canaduh, anyway but for different reasons- like in the movie Canadian Bacon with John Candy! :p

Answer 3

If you are a moderator, go to you Management section at your group and make sure that the group message settings say 'for members only', (if anyone besides members can read your message boards, then you have not selected that option, it is easy to fix)

If that option is not selected, then yes, messages from your group are available on the internet through Google and other seach places.