How to Manage Yahoo! Pulse Privacy Settings

Yahoo! Pulse is Yahoo!'s newest social networking platform. By using your existing Yahoo! account, you can connect with other Yahoo! users. Share status updates, meet new people and connect to your favorite websites using the same account. While Yahoo! Pulse is a great way to stay connected, the feature is available whether you want it or not. However, you can turn off the social networking settings and just use your Yahoo! account for email in just a few steps.

Why Turn Off Social Networking

If you allow people to view and search for you, you may find your inbox full of friend or connection requests on a daily basis. Yahoo! Pulse is more like MySpace, where users have usernames instead of actual names. Not to mention, it's not just your friends searching for you.

For many users, privacy is important. They do not want random people searching for and trying to befriend them. Nor do they want to chat or manage their friends in their email account. Any personal information you entered while creating your email account may be displayed as well for the world to see. Keep life simple and less of your personal life displayed for strangers by changing the Yahoo! Pulse settings to remove yourself from the network.

Change Privacy Settings

Sign in to your Yahoo! Pulse account. This can be done using your existing Yahoo! email login. From the top right of the screen, select Settings. From this screen, you can manage privacy settings, who sees your updates, linked accounts and notifications.

Select Manage privacy settings. If you do not want people to be able to search for you on the Yahoo! Pulse network, uncheck Allow people to find my profile by searching for my name and info. You can also choose which names people can use to find you. To completely remove yourself, delete all names on the list. If you want to hide your profile completely, check Hide my profile. This will prevent anyone from searching for or contacting you.

Changing Who Sees Your Updates

If you want to use Yahoo! Pulse, but would like to limit who sees your updates, select Manage updates from the Settings screen. From this screen, you can also manage who sees your updates from linked accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter. Use the drop down box beside each feature you can share, such as updates, personal information and photos to choose who can view the feature. Choices include Everyone, Connections and No One. By limiting viewers to Connections, only those you approve as friends or connections can view your information.

Staying Safe

The best way to stay safe while using Yahoo! Pulse is by limiting what you post and who can view it. If you don't plan on using the network at all, hide your profile. Limit who can view information by your connections only to prevent complete strangers from seeing any personal updates. Also, never post extremely personal information such as your address, phone number and when you will and won't be at home.