Yahoo! 360° away from clear

I just got this email from Yahoo.

Yahoo! Alerts Yahoo! 360° – My Alerts – Edit Alert
Yahoo! 360°

Steve P,
Your Yahoo! Messenger contact wants to add you as a Friend in Yahoo! 360°. As Yahoo! 360° friends, you and can stay in touch through blogs, photos and much more.

On Yahoo! 360°, you always control who sees your content. If you do not accept the invitation, nothing happens, and can only see your public content.

Accept or decline the invitation by going to:
http://360.yahoo.com/friends/waiting_room.html

I use Yahoo! Messenger, but I don’t use 360. I’ve never used it, as far as I know. So this message is very cryptic and frankly seemed like a phishing expedition.

When I went to the Yahoo page, I see a whole bunch of my Yahoo “buddies” and I’m asked to accept or decline them as friends. But what triggered this email? The email suggests that someone actively pinged me on Yahoo and Yahoo is coming to me to verify that. But the site suggests that they are just trying to link on 360 those that they know are linked on Messenger.
Their email doesn’t even tell me which contact is trying to add me as a friend; just that one of them is — “your contact.” It’s badly written, not helpful, not wanted.

Further investigation reveals that this is a Yahoo 360 Alert. I absolutely never created this alert. Did Yahoo just turn on some alert default and automatically pinged me because of some accumulated set of events?

This is the kind of bullshit that Yahoo! pulls that I can’t stand. Don’t manipulate me into services or features I’m not interested in. Make it clear what Yahoo is doing and what my contacts are doing. Be honest, be clear. Use defaults that benefit me, not you. And so on!

Yikes! Yuck!

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