Time to quit Yahoo? Site reportedly spied on emails for US government
Is it time to ditch your Yahoo account? Yahoo reportedly has been spying on its users emails and even wrote a special program for the u.s. government to scan through messages. That alarming report
comes from Reuters, warning people to aware of the email scanning program. The report says, Yahoo built this spy software last year and it was designed to search all incoming emails for specific information at the request of the national security agency or the FBI. If this is true, this will be the first time an Internet company agreed to such a request from an intelligence agency by building a program to scan all incoming
mail in real time as opposed to just looking at stored messages or scanning select accounts.
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| Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer |
Yahoo is not confirming or denying the report, only saying that it complies with the law. Reuters reports that when Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer chose to obey the request instead of fighting it, her chief information security officer quit the company. Of course, this is in contrast to Apples fight with FBI earlier this year when it refused a request to create a program to break into an encrypted iphone. So why didn't Yahoo who fight back? Well, back in 2007, Yahoo did fight back against the government's request and lost. Reuters reported that, Yahoo thought it would lose again and it wasn't worth the fight.
Representatives from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple all said, they never received such a request from US intelligence and if they did, they would fight it. Microsoft also said it never scanned emails in this manner. A problem is that these government requests have gag orders prohibiting the companies involved from revealing to the public that they got the request. So if this Reuters report is accurate, it is likely that the government did ask other tech companies to scan user messages.
Yahoo is still recovering from the world's largest data breach, losing info on half a billion Yahoo users. It happened in 2014, but it was just revealed this month and between the hack and this unsettling surveillance news, hard to imagine Verizon still wants to buy Yahoo with all that baggage and hard to imagine how anyone can still trust Yahoo with their privacy.
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