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Yahoo Mail Moves From Passwords To Push Notification Sign-Ins (tumblr.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A revamp of Yahoo Mail includes a new feature which eliminates the password from the sign-in process on mobile platforms, instead relying on the user's phone number as a token of authenticity. Notification-based sign-ins are a network-heavy commitment used with less frequency during some online banking authentication procedures, and by Google and others in specific events such as the need for a password reset. But Yahoo is well-motivated to improve security after a 2014 data breach led to a mass-reset of passwords for affected users.
I have a mobile data plan in the USA. How would this work when I go out of the country? Does it work on WiFi?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Think of all the benefits.
1) Your phone number indicates your country unambiguously, so they can separate that legally pesky US data from free-for-the-hoovering foreign intel.
2) Your phone number ties into credit identities somewhere along the line, unless you paid cash for a burner. But most targets won't have that kind of foresight. This makes your PRISM strong-selector even stronger (and Yahoo is a partner in the PRISM consortium, so you get all the advantages that cooperation offers)!
3) You won't want to jump through the login hoops often, so you'll stay logged in to Yahoo in your browser and won't clear your cookies, supercookies, etc. That makes it easier for Yahoo to track your progress through the web via tracking beacons.