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Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data To Sell Advertisers (wsj.com)
The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine. From a report: Yahoo's owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath's presentations as well as current and former employees of the company. Oath said the practice extends to AOL Mail, which it also owns. Together, they constitute the only major U.S. email provider that scans user inboxes for marketing purposes.
Together, they constitute the only major U.S. email provider that [admits that it] scans user inboxes for marketing purposes.
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Yet another reason to avoid Yahoo (and, by extension, Verizon).
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
More fake news from a semi-official propaganda outlet. EVERYONE knows that Google and Facebook datamine your inbox, your browsing habits, and absolutely anything else they can find. And sell that data to repressive gover... er, I mean, advertisers.
to poison the well of email scanning.
It wouldn't take much to dump some emails with personal or financial lies into your inbox.
Extra points for references to non-existent medical conditions or upcoming illegal transactions.
You'll scan people's private email for gun control text and sell the NRA that advert.
You'll scan people's private emails for political discussion and sell that to Russian trolls.
You'll scan people's private email discussions for Net Neutrality and sell them to.... *Verizon*, i.e. you, so you can use the content of their discussions for your anti- NN bullshit.
The contents of people private emails are there to be scanned for keyphrases and sold to advertisers, because every private conversation needs to be sold to whoever will pay for data on it according to Verizon.
I'm sure Ajit Pai will step in an regulate his former (and future) employer.....not!
Verizon: sociopathy!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Many people in Europe have Yahoo adresses. Some will even have Yahoo.com and not e.g. Yahoo.fr or Yahoo.co.uk adresses.
So what is 4% of their annual turnover? (Hint: GDPR)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Violating my policy of not responding to AC's:
Perhaps more importantly, is there some way I can poison the data first (including the email, but presumably other personal data, too)?
Unless you want to spew feces at your correspondents, there's no easy means I can see to fuckerize their data. Even at that, there are surely ostensibly smart people anticipating it anyway. The naive and perhaps effective approach for them is to discount data obtained from those who've radically changed their habits shortly after the article was published. Since most of their users are in the IDGAF column this would be sufficient for most purposes. The hot ticket is just to bolt and accept that what's already known is already known.
The broader problem is the general public's willingness to equate no-or-few-dollars-surrendered to some-greater-efficiency. There's no way to prove that Googod and/or others aren't conducting industrial espionage and/or hostile mass surveillance, and given that they're offering a no-dollar-cost solution in a commercial market there's no reason to assume that they're not doing so. People like to think that they'll be lost in the noise, most of them completely unaware of the means by which they can be discriminated. So it goes.
Professional paranoia is one of my marketable skills, so take from this what you will.
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I use ProtonMail.com. what do you good Slashdot readers recommend?
*** Don't be dull.***
I was so early to the Yahoo Mail game that I was able to get firstname.lastname as an address. It was great for the better part of a decade. I even upgraded to the "Mail Plus" package to get some extra features and to naively show my support for their great product.
Over the past couple of years, they've made some business decisions that have driven me away inch by inch.
- They moved all of the features of the paid-tier to the free-tier, except for ads. Now the only reason to pay is to remove ads.
- The webmail interface has gone through 2-3 updates that make it slower and more difficult to use with each revision.
- Your reward now for having an empty inbox is "watch this random video!". It actually incentivizes me to keep mail in my inbox so I don't have to see it.
I decided that it was time to abandon free email providers and bought my own domain. Now I can jump ship if my current provider (Fastmail) ever disappoints me and not have to go through the headache of changing email addresses.
Ironically, the only e-mail messages that come into my (largely defunct) Yahoo account are from... ummm... advertisers. That is to say, that's the address I give out to websites and/or companies that I never actually want to hear from again. So, did I buy something from those companies? Maybe... but just as likely not. So sure, Verizon; knock yourself out -- though, I have little faith that you're going to get much real value out of scraping my inbox.
(Also... it baffles my mind that there are people who still use legacy AOL accounts.)
This is Ok with me as I use a Yahoo address for my "you want my email?", here it is response.
Passionately Indifferent
Considering the majority of email will be spam for Viagara, does this mean Yahoo will finaly admit their part in spams enablement?
It's been my long held belief that email providers themselves intentionally facilitate spam because it perpetuates their scummy business model. What I'd LOVE is some way to say "this email {domain | address} cannot be routed through nor used by the following providers" - of which Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Micrsoft and Amazon would all be at the top. I 've used domains I knew were blacklisted smply because they stood a very low chance of being archived. Prety ironic.
More I think of this.. hmm. I know Microshaft and Google have domain signing and some companies use it for IDP AM's (Adobe for example), what I those were intentionally bogus. Or, even better, any mx /spf dns records to those providers..
Yes indeed, Thats what ProtonMail is set up to do,
I cannot fathom why this thing still exists. They were famous years ago for screwing up everything they touched.
How does ReverendGreen's baseless claim that the WSJ is a propaganda outlet get 4 point mod up? It's probably the best and fairest news source out there.
Gently reply
Article was silent on this point, but it would be a far greater portion of email traffic if they are scanning INCOMING and REPLIED-TO emails to sell to marketers (and would make Gmail, MS and others who ceased that activity somewhat toothless in their guarantee). [and as the one who made this WSJ submission, who is MSMASH and why do all submissions come from MSMASH today?)
Gently reply
1.
Violating my policy of not responding to asackett:
Your policy of not responding to AC's is stupid, and pointing it out like that is pretentious. When AC posts are just racist tripe, it makes sense to ignore them and nobody deserves a medal for it. When AC posts are meaningfully contributory to a conversation, it makes sense to respond to them, and there is nothing noble about a policy that would block such a response.
They're nothing short of that.
In related news, AOL mail was rehosted to the Yahoo mail platform quite some time ago.
Kriston
This might be a good opportunity to legislate the difference between "sell your information" and "make money by letting marketers ask us to target ads to you based on what we know about you - without revealing that information".
People (and, apparently, a lot of Slashdot posters) think Google does the former, when they only do the latter. Facebook does both (or at least at the time of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco they did). It sounds like Yahoo is planning to follow the Google model, which might not be so bad. But there's no reason Congress can't pass a law that makes it illegal to sell your information directly - without your granting explicit permission (in writing, perhaps - as opposed to clicking some "I Agree" box). That kind of law would put some reasonable constraints on internet services and define some consistent rules that users could understand and, more importantly, assume are being followed by all the services they use.
Instead we have Trump tweeting that he wants a low to require that search engines return links to 'both sides' of an issue, regardless of what's actually out there as determined by popularity (or whatever their algorithm is these days).
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Even more surprising is that Yahoo is still even around.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Is it a wrong perspective, or just a different facet? Of course all mail should be encrypted, but I've never had any luck convincing any significant number of correspondents to do so. I, personally, do not trust any encryption to keep my garbage permanently safe. I see it as the means by which I try to keep my data safe for long enough that it's no longer of value when it's discovered.
The problem I see in the use of the monopolistic providers' services is that it makes surveillance even easier than it already is. We don't have any choice in the matter when it's a state actor, but we do when it's a corporation whose services we can choose or not. Whether my garbage is encrypted or not, the longer I can deny access to $BAD_GUY the longer my garbage stays safe. If it takes $BAD_GUY a week to decrypt my garbage but I keep it out of his hands for a few years, I get a few years and a week. If I instead hand it over to $BAD_GUY because I'm too trusting, I get only a week. If $BAD_GUY can never get it, then the encryption, though prudent, is superfluous. (No, I don't believe there's a reliable way to ensure that $BAD_GUY can never get my garbage.)
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He didn't respond to an AC, he responded to the people doing the data mining in the email, now they know all the good tricks...
Google, AOL, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Um, get out of the basement once in a while, and you'd see it in many people's mail. AOL too.
Just another day in Paradise