NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Yahoo unveiled changes to its e-mail service on Tuesday that will make it easier for users to follow the social network activity of people in their address books.
Yahoo Mail users will be able to follow the status updates of anyone in their contact list, including updates posted on third-party social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Yelp that are linked to the poster's Yahoo accounts. That feature has been available to Yahoo Messenger users for about two years, but users previously had to agree to let someone else follow their status updates.
The changes are fairly subtle, but the intense scrutiny that has recently surrounded Facebook and Google has heightened concerns about users' online privacy. When Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) unveiled its similar Buzz social network in February, it made users' Gmail contact lists public by default. Google later changed the feature to give users clearer privacy controls.
Like Google's Buzz, Yahoo's new service -- which is unrelated to its own Yahoo Buzz content recommendation tool -- automatically signs users up, requiring them to opt out if they don't want the new features. But unlike Google, Yahoo chose not to make its users' contact lists public with the Yahoo Mail changes.
When users log into Yahoo Mail, they will be shown a news feed of their contacts' social network updates in the "updates" section. Above that section, a box will prompt users to enter their own status updates, asking, "What are you doing right now?" similar to Twitter and Facebook. The new features are expected to be rolled out to Yahoo's 280 million e-mail users over the next several weeks, starting June 7.
Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) said it announced the new features prior to their launch because it wants to educate users ahead of time about the changes and the privacy choices they can make.
"We take privacy extremely seriously, and we make sure we're building a product that always has users' privacy in mind -- not as an afterthought," said a Yahoo spokeswoman. "We're turning up the volume on some existing features, but they're easy to change if you choose to do so." 
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