Some web company decisions just make no sense at all.

Yahoo, which generally has a pretty good history for web innovation both for their own products or from using their deep pockets to acquire promising technology (e.g Yahoo pipes, Konfabulator). Yahoo used to be one of the savvy companies. One of the Yahoo groups that I  use (Slide Rules actually) just sent out a notice that Yahoo is seriously changing its privacy policies:
If you belong to ANY Yahoo Groups – be aware that Yahoo is now using “Web Beacons” to track every Yahoo Group user. It’s similar to cookies, but allows Yahoo to record every website and every group you visit, even when you’re not connected to Yahoo. Look at their updated privacy statement at http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/details.html
You can also go to their web beacon page at http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webbeacons/ for their take on it.

Sure, I’m going to opt out but I may end up just dropping the three or four Yahoo groups that I belong to since you have to according to Yahoo opt out each time from each browser and each computer that you use to access the groups – that means in my case, probably a dozen or more opt-out notices that I would be required to send Yahoo – its probably not worth the effort.

So why would they do this? What’s the benefit to them? Who knows – but it doesn’t bode well for their future existence in my opinion you need to treat your customers as more than just”eyeballs” to be “monetized”.