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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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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.
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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If you correspond with users of ESP's it doesn't much matter what you use on your end of it. Therein lies the rub.
I recommend encrypted email, for all things, all the time. Your mail might still be scanned, but at least they'll have to work for it.
No, this isn't a workable solution in a world of people who don't give a fuck. But it's what I recommend.
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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
Not a moron here and still using Yahoo mail. Not as a primary email but simply due to momentum. The account existed long before gmail did and the number of accounts tied to it are countless. Gmail became my personal email while Yahoo became the one I gave out to 3rd parties for account creation purposes.
How does one even start to unwind a 15+ year old account tied to hundreds of services? The moment I saw their privacy policy change I wanted to cut and run but unless I am going to scour every forum/business/etc that I ever signed up with, I'm stuck.
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.