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Protecting Your Privacy

OverviewMaking Yourself InvisibleChanging Your Stealth SettingIgnoring a Contact

Overview

Yahoo! Messenger strives to provide an environment in which you feel safe, while letting you enjoy quick access to your contacts. Yahoo! Messenger offers a number of ways to avoid contact with people you don’t wish to communicate with while using the Yahoo! Messenger features, including:

  • Invisibility—Shows your status as offline to every contact who has your name on their Messenger List and displays all names in your Messenger List in italics indicating your offline status. You can set this preference when you sign in, or you can set it in the Yahoo! Messenger Preferences window to cause it to take effect the next time you sign in.

  • Stealth—Allows you to appear to be online to some people and offline to others. You can activate a stealth setting for an entire group or for an individual contact. The settings are:

    • Online: Shows your true status of offline or online (the default setting).
    • Offline: Shows your status as offline. Once you appear to be invisible, you can change your status to online, permanently offline, or back to offline for selected contacts. Contact names appear in italics to indicate that you appear offline to them.
    • Permanently Offline: Shows your status as permanently offline for selected contacts. This setting remains active until you change it. The contact names appear in italics to indicate that you appear to be offline to them.

  • Ignore—Shows your status as offline to specified contacts and stops all communication from them. Those contacts can initiate communication from their computers, but you don’t see or hear any attempts by them to contact you. This is the right choice to make when you really don’t want to interact with someone at all. To use this feature, you can’t include the contact’s name on your Messenger List. You can ignore contacts on your Ignore List or anyone who isn’t on your Messenger List.

  • Allow Yahoo! web sites to show when I am online—You can uncheck this option on the Privacy pane of the Yahoo! Messenger Preferences window to prevent other users from discovering your true status. When this option is enabled, other users can view your profile, Yahoo! 360°, or other pages and see that you’re actually online.

Tip: Other Messenger users can communicate with you, even when you appear offline. You can see, and possibly hear, the communication unless you put them on your Ignore List. Those contacts, however, do see your status as offline, and a note appears in their IM window stating that you’re offline.

 

What’s Next

You can change your status to offline for all contacts who have your name on their Messenger Lists by signing in as invisible.

 

Help Topics

 
 

Words to Know

  • Contact: a person with whom you interact; someone to whom you might want to send an email or instant message.
  • Group: one or more contacts that you organize together under one unique name, similar to an email list. By default, Yahoo! Messenger adds contacts to the "Friends" group included in the application.
  • Ignore List: a list of people from whom you don’t want to see or hear anything while you’re using Yahoo! Messenger.
  • IM: the acronym for instant message.
  • Messenger List: a list of coworkers, friends, family, and associates who also use Messenger.