Posted on 10/06/2016 7:40:14 PM PDT by Lorianne
There’s no good reason to have a Yahoo account these days. But after Tuesday’s bombshell report by Reuters, indicating the enormous, faltering web company designed a bespoke email-wiretap service for the U.S. government, we now know that a Yahoo account is a toxic surveillance liability.
Reuters’s Joseph Menn is reporting that just last year, Yahoo chose to comply with a classified “directive” to build “a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials” — the NSA in particular.
[UPDATE at 10:08 a.m., Oct. 5, 2016: Yahoo has issued a labored non-denial denial, insisting that the Reuters story is “misleading.” See our new story.]
It’s still unknown what the “specific information” here was — or is — but Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision not to put up any fight against the extremely broad request apparently prompted the departure of then-Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, now head of security at Facebook.
Reached via Twitter DM, Stamos told The Intercept that he’s “not commenting at all on Yahoo.” When asked if Facebook had ever received a similar government directive, Stamos replied that he would “pass that to Facebook comms.”
A Facebook spokesperson told The Intercept, “Facebook has never received a request like the one described in these news reports from any government, and if we did we would fight it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theintercept.com ...
The question is, what kind of people based communication system can we develop or use to circumvent these colluding companies? Ham radio?
Sounds like an act by Google.
Meh. Nobody should be using Yahoo Mail (or like email freebies) for important matters, anyway. It’s just a throwaway email where you don’t give them any real personal info.
Got a Yahoo account many years ago because they had Yahoo Briefcase, which allowed you to share some fairly large files that sometimes couldn’t be sent by email. But they did away with that, so I don’t have much reason to use it now except for a backup.
Yahoo email is good for garbage mail like when companies ask for your email address. It’s all SPAM garbage.
“Got a Yahoo account many years ago because they had Yahoo Briefcase”
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When Yahoo was the go to web portal, back in it’s heyday, it had a lot of good features. Then they made one bad decision after another and lost most of their user base. The dotcom bust didn’t help a whole heckuva lot either.
Exactly. A throwaway dump-all email addy.
There used to be a yahoo group that was a backup for Free Republic. We could go there and get info when the servers were down.
Fortunately, we have Google. Which everyone knows we can trust.
Do I really need a sarcasm tag?
“It’s just a throwaway email where you don’t give them any real personal info.”
Especially your name. Remember, aliases are not illegal (yet).
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Yahoo mail has become unusable due to their aggressive advertising on the composition page.
Snowden said ALL the major email sites have similar deals with the NSA — every email is scanned and saved.
Not all Yahoo email accounts are free.
I haven’t logged onto my yahoo account in years. However , just to be diligent about it I’ll check my password files and see if I can still get into my Yahoo account so I can delete it.
I have an old yahoo account that i haven’t gone to in years. The only time I ever use it is as a filler for sites/surveys that require an email address....
Does anybody know of a good alternative to Yahoo email? I’ve had a Yahoo email for years and would love to get rid of it.
bookmark
Does that include encrypted email services?
How do you transfer email files from yahoo to a different email system?
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