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Title: Glitch sends Yahoo Calendar data to wrong people By Paul Festa Staff Writer, CNET News.com May 17, 2000, 9:20 a.m. PT

Yahoo account holders this week experienced an unusual bout of scheduling confusion--and a potentially serious privacy violation--when they found themselves the recipients of other people's calendar reminders.

"I received email reminders from the calendars of four other Yahoo users," one puzzled Yahoo Calendar user wrote in an email to CNET News.com. "This information included reminders of dental appointments, meetings and lunch appointments. This is a serious compromise of users' privacy!

"I store rather private information about bill payment due dates/amounts and other personal information in my calendar and am concerned that other people are receiving reminders from my calendar as well."

Yahoo acknowledged that a technical gaffe created the privacy fiasco over the weekend, sending electronic reminders of events marked in its calendar service to the wrong people.

"Yahoo Calendar experienced a technical problem that caused a very small number of reminders to be redirected," Thad White, producer of Yahoo Calendar, said in an interview. "We take privacy very seriously. We do everything in our power to comply with our privacy policy. We implemented measures to make sure this never happens again."

White estimated that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Yahoo Calendar users were affected. He declined to say many people use the service.

The calendar glitch comes on the heels of a Yahoo Mail email imbroglio in which a few hundred new sign-ups were piled into two accounts.

White stressed that the calendar glitch did not compromise passwords and said the account holders' email addresses were only distributed if their usernames and email addresses were the same.

http://www.news.com/news/0-1005-200-1888143.html?tag=st.ne.1005.thed.ni

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), May 17, 2000