Why Yahoo Should Abandon Email Scanning

twoheadedboy writes "Yahoo has come under fire for updating its terms and conditions so it can scan user emails. The move has attracted the attention of notable privacy group Big Brother Watch, which has called on the email provider to scrap the feature altogether. Yahoo says it is only doing the scanning to identify spam and better target ads, but that still hasn't put people off from criticizing the firm."

Comments

And GMail gets a pass?

[rekoil]

Is this the same scanning that Google does with GMail? If so, why no outcry there?

Re:And GMail gets a pass?

[girlintraining]

Is this the same scanning that Google does with GMail? If so, why no outcry there?

But everyone loves Google, and we all know Yahoo is a washed up has-been looking for any way to turn a profit to keep its zombie brain-eating existance alive. /snark

Re:And GMail gets a pass?

[bmo]

Because they've always done it.

I have a gmail account. it's only a couple of years old. I've moved everything to it because of convenience, and I have not been spammed to hell-and-back with Google Ads over the years on other sites.

Also....

If you tend toward tinfoil, you have no excuse not using gpg or other encryption for your messages. Plaintext is plaintext and sending email across half the planet is nearly literally sending a postcard and anyone along the way can read it. If you value your email privacy that much to not use Gmail because of scanning for ad serving, then you should be encrypting everything.

Phil Zimmerman nearly went to jail so you could use encryption. If you don't want people looking at your stuff, friggin' get off your ass and use it.

Which brings me to the Cloud and the privacy concerns with that. If you're going to upload sensitive stuff to Dropbox and other providers, without encrypting, you're a complete idiot. With encryption I can put shit up on a public FTP or anywhere that shares files with the public as a "poor man's offsite backup" (you'd have to be really poor, but hey) and nobody can see /anything/ unless they have the key.

So in that light...

Yes, Google gets a pass because the nature of the beast is a known quantity.

>Pretending that Hotmail protects your privacy or that any public email provider does.

No. You cannot trust this shit blindly. There are privacy policies that are written up to say "we can change this at any time" and unless you check these things daily, they can change under your nose and you'd never know. Don't trust 'em. Treat them like you would treat Google. Treat them all the same.

I could go on a rant about FB paranoia, but that is a digression too far.

--
BMO

Re:And GMail gets a pass?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not actually anonymous.

Cheers,

Google

Some people care, some don't.

[pavon]

There was a lot of complaining about this when GMail was launched. Some people (myself included) refuse to use it to this day because of that reason. Until now many of these people found Yahoo to be a better alternative to GMail because it had a better privacy policy. Now they have lost that choice, and are understandably upset.

Another big difference is that GMail had this "feature" since the day it was launched. You knew exactly what you were getting into by signing up for a GMail account. Many of the folks that are complaining have been using their Yahoo account for years or decades, and will have a difficult time transitioning to another address.

Of course, it is a free service, and you get what you pay for. But at the least they could agree to not scan emails that are being forwarded or accessed via POP for advertisement purposes. They already offer these connection options, and they won't be showing any targeted ads to folks that don't use webmail anyway, so why waste cycles scanning that mail?