Puppet Masters

Yahoo! reads! your! emails!

John Oates
The Register
Mon, 11 Jul 2011 01:23 UTC

And it's your job to warn all your mates

Yahoo! is being criticised for the new Ts & Cs for its webmail service, which give it the right to scan your emails as well as making you responsible for telling anyone who might be emailing you, but the ICO has no problem with the changes.

Such scanning has been common for some time; Google was the first to scan all messages. But this led some to choose Yahoo! on the basis that it did not carry out such snooping.

Even more controversially, Yahoo! suggests it is the users' job to warn anyone who emails them that their messages will also be scanned.

Consumer lobby group Which?'s in-house lawyer Georgina Nelson said: "The obligation to notify those who email you that their message will be scanned is nonsensical and unrealistic. When exactly are you supposed to do this?"

The changes come as part of Yahoo!'s email upgrade. The company said all users will see a pop-up when they make the change.

Yahoo told PC Advisor that anyone who didn't like the changes should simply keep using their old account. But Yahoo! did say it would continue to scan old-school accounts for spam.

An ICO spokeswoman said: "We've spoken to Yahoo about their email scanning feature. As with any business or organisation that changes the way its customer data is used, Yahoo has an obligation to be upfront with their users to make sure their information is being processed fairly. This includes making sure they have clear and accessible privacy notices which will allow users to make informed decisions in relation to privacy and other aspects of the service."

Comment: Yahoo has been rejecting Sott.net's E-mail Edition for months now.

The error message on returned mails sent to Yahoo e-mail addresses is "Content not allowed". After contacting them and pointing out that the E-mail Edition typically gets a SpamAssassin score of 0.1 (6 or above is usually considered spam), we never heard back from them.

Perhaps everyone should vote with their clicks and ditch Yahoo completely.

Reader Comments

Rabelais · 2011-07-12T06:02:31Z

For spam? Mua ha ha...

"But Yahoo! did say it would continue to scan old-school accounts for spam."

Right... the viagra/cialis spams have been hitting my yahoo account every couple of hours for the past 3 months. almost every one of them has the same subject line, and you can't block that. They come 3 and 4 at a time. I report every one of them to yahoo. They do nothing. I probably have 300 of them in the spam folder at present. Time to kiss yahoo goodbye.

We might as well resign ourselves to the fact that every keystroke can be monitored - and communicate with extreme discretion.

Gosh · 2011-07-12T14:07:07Z

Ditching it today

Done.

Raccoon · 2011-07-13T01:36:18Z

Hey, any recommendations...

for less creepy email providers? Thanks.

Finch · 2011-07-13T04:17:39Z

ISPs now too

AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, and CenturyLink (plus maybe others?) are now scanning ALL activity .. no matter which email provider you use ... as part of a new "pilot test." The intent in this initial phase is to protect defense contractors (ironic given other SOTT headlines, including 58% of US discretionary spending is going to this one sector). THEN, it will be deployed to protect our nation's infrastructure (oil, gas, BP and Exxon) and others. This was announced in the past month. So even if you use a friendly "cloud" email provider, so long as your ISP is part of this mass experiment, everything you email, and everything you view online (at a minimum) is defacto public information. So much for our constitution. Oh well, our government is saying it is passe anyway. (read with sarcasm)

Highland Fleet Lute · 2011-07-13T04:25:06Z

"We might as well resign ourselves to the fact that every keystroke can be monitored - and communicate with extreme discretion."

Most people have done that from the very first, and perhaps that issue deserves a much wider thought. I tend to think monitoring is the smaller purpose of surveillance, the larger purpose being: to influence behaviour. So, aware to-whatever-degree of being watched, the subject of surveillance edits self, inhibits self, thwarts expression of self, and in turn, influences others to do the same.

You don't have to look too far to be reminded of how much the surveillance effect of the internet has decimated human communication and expression. One instance: where have all the raconteurs, bulls*itters and bricklayer-philosophers that used to frequent London pubs gone? They're nowhere. Consigned to the dustbin of history with hardly anyone noticing or even remembering they were there in the first place. These days, a visit to a London pub is a pretty sterile affair: patrons editing self, inhibiting self, thwarting expression of self, and in turn, influencing others to do the same.

Yahoo!'s consumer-profiling can't be up to much or I wouldn't be persistently bombarded with mobile phone commercials every time I open my mail box (frankly, I'd prefer the spam).