Protecting Your Privacy
| Overview | Making Yourself Invisible | Changing Your Stealth Setting | Ignoring a Contact | Showing or Hiding Updates |
Overview
Yahoo! Messenger strives to provide an environment in which you feel safe, while letting you enjoy easy access to your contacts. Messenger offers a number of ways to avoid interactions with people you don’t wish to communicate with while using the Messenger features, including:
Invisibility—Shows you as unavailable to every contact who has your name on their Messenger List. You can decide to be invisible when you sign in, or set the invisible state while using Messenger.
Stealth setting—Lets you to appear online to some people and offline to others. You can activate a stealth setting for an entire group or for individuals. Not available with Pingbox™ visitors.
Ignore—Shows you as unavailable to specified contacts and stops all communication from them. These contacts can initiate communication from their computers, but you won’t see or hear any attempts to contact you. This is the right choice to make when you really don’t want to interact with someone. To use this feature, the contact’s name can’t be on your Messenger List. You can ignore contacts on your Ignore List or anyone who isn’t on your Messenger List. Not available with Pingbox visitors.
Allow Yahoo! web sites to show when I am online—You can uncheck this option on the Privacy pane of the Messenger Preferences window to prevent other users from discovering your true availability. When this option is enabled, other users can view your profile, Yahoo! 360°, or other pages and see that you’re actually online. Not available with Pingbox visitors.
Note: Your Yahoo! Mail contacts who use Mail’s chat feature will be able to see you online even if you have this option unchecked.
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.
For a general guide to internet safety, take a look at the Yahoo! Safely site.
Words to Know
- Contact: a person with whom you interact; someone to whom you might want to send an email, instant message, or text 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.
- Messenger List: the main part of the Contact List in Yahoo! Messenger. The Messenger List includes the contacts with whom you communicate most often.
- Pingbox: an embedded box on a Web page where visitors to the page can send you instant messages and which lists visitors on your Messenger List.