I’m not saying all companies are not to be trusted. Yes, lawsuits would abound if a company were to be found guilty of harvesting personal information with malicious intent. But, how would an end user prove it was a particular company that was maliciously using their personal information for their gain?

For those that are concerned with their own personal privacy and identity security (like myself), using programs such as this one allows the potential for future problems. All you need is a couple of smart and/or disgruntled employees from ‘Company X’ to gather information, search through personal emails and use that information to screw with your credit rating, bank accounts etc. They may not use it right there and then, but they have access to it, can save it, sell it or basically do whatever they wanted with it.
The kicker is that by the time you find out you’ve been messed with, the damage is already done and you don’t know where to lay the blame. And before anyone says it, yes I know we deal with putting our personal information out there all the time, when it comes to online shopping or even paying for pizza with a credit card. But allowing someone access to your email could be likened to handing the keys to your house to a stranger and saying it’s OK to look around when I’m not home, I trust that you won’t steal anything b/c you’re a trusted employee from ‘Company X’.

Email security is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly, by anyone. All these ‘ease of use’ programs do is allow a conduit for potential backlash later on down the track and a truckload of possible grief. The number of naive people who actually allow third party programs to log in and scan their email for contacts and friends for a particular site or application alone is absolutely absurd.

My grandfather always used to say “Err on the side of caution”. When it comes to your personal identity and credit rating, they are your life and you can never be too cautious in this digital era.

If being too cautious is considered paranoid, I’d rather take that label over ‘stolen identity’ any day of the week.

It appears that, despite people’s security concerns, this is the way that combined-service Apps are going at the moment:

Twhirl, for instance, is another client that allows multiple social interactions and brings a number of networks together on a single client. Once again one has to input the relevant usernames and passwords nito that single App to benefit from multiple services through said App – The difference being that its nature is standalone rather than integrated with the browser, plus the fact that it’s a lot less versatile than Yoono.

Can you imagine what the operators of an App such as this could lose if they were to use it to harvest people’s login details for malicious purposes? The multiple lawsuits would run their losses into billions in damages – That would be ludicrous for anyone to undertake to do such a mind-numbingly numb-minded operation.

Whilst I appreciate your security concerns I do detect a smidgen of paranoia creeping in. Yes it could be said if looking at it from a worst-case scenario vantage-point that there may be a minutely-miniscule possibility that there may be a security-risk; but the only people who take no risks in life are the dead, and even they once did.

As Windows Live Messenger>Hotmail, Yahoo Messenger>Yahoo Mail etc. are linked (i.e. same password to both messenger client and email) you’re basically saying it’s OK to hand over your email password to a company for the sake of ease and accessibility. I’m sorry, but I expected more from a self-confessed ‘geekette’ who builds PC’s for a living.

The idea of handing over your email user name and password for the sheer simplicity of having all your feeds and accounts in one place is absolutely ludicrous. And the fact that tech bloggers would promote and/or approve of it is exactly the same.

Only my 2 cents mind you, but bad form.