Your Privacy: “De-Publicizing” Your Profiles

At the tail end of 2008 and into 2009 there have been some minor and major changes with the “big three” (that being Windows Live, Yahoo and AIM) concerning online profiles.

Here’s what has changed and what you can do to de-publicize your presence if you use one or more of the above.

AIM

AIM, as in AOL Instant Messenger, no longer hosts their own profiles but has moved them over to Bebo. As such, if you use AIM you may have a Bebo profile but didn’t even know it.

You can see if you have a Bebo profile by using the following web address:

http://profiles.aim.com/YOUR-AIM-USERNAME

If a Bebo profile shows up, login with your AIM user/pass and disable it. If not, then you don’t have to worry about it.

Yahoo

Profiles in Yahoo have changed drastically and now look completely different. Fortunately it’s very easy to make your Yahoo profile 100% private.

To see if you have a public profile, use the following web address:

http://profiles.yahoo.com/YOUR-YAHOO-ID

If you see a profile that shows nothing, you don’t have to go any further.

If you do see personal information about you, do the following to make it private:

1. Go to http://profiles.yahoo.com
2. Login with your Yahoo ID and password
3. Click on Settings at top right

You will be able to make your profile 100% from there.

Important note: Setting your Yahoo profile to private does decrease spam, both in the messenger and email.

Windows Live

The way Windows Live does profiles is absolutely ridiculous because it is so unbelievably difficult to make it 100% private.

This is how it’s done. And it takes a while.

1. Go to http://profiles.live.com
2. Login with your Windows Live ID (i.e. username@hotmail.com) and password.
3. Click Permissions near the top.

Here’s where it gets very frustrating because there’s a mountain of choices here.

Go through each one of the listings here, such as “Name”, “Contact Info” and so on by clicking the Permissions link next to each.

Uncheck all public permissions.

This will take time and involves a lot of pages and a lot of checkbox clicking. Periodically you will have to load profiles.live.com again, possibly several times.

Yes, it is very infuriating and frustrating to go thru all this crap. But once done you’re all set.