Yahoo formally getting into the data-reaping your email game.

Looks like it, anyway: “If you’ve been using Yahoo or AOL to avoid Google’s email scanning practices — or if you just plain use those services because you prefer them — there’s news from Oath, the parent company of both, that you’ll want to be aware of. A recent tweak to the company’s privacy policy gives it the right to scan all incoming and outgoing email, for the explicit purpose of delivering “content, advertising, and services.””  I’d be more exasperated by this if I ever used my Yahoo account for anything meaningful; as it is, I only keep it around because some of my relatives only know that one, and it’s a pain to switch everybody over. I figure that eventually either they, or I, will die of old age, which will handily solve the problem either way*.

Still. This is a bad time to get explicitly in the business of data harvesting. There is a backlash coming.  But further comment on my part would drift us too close to certain lines.

Moe Lane

*It’s amazing how often, and how well, this trick works.

If you’re still using Yahoo mail for anything important, yeah, reconsider that.

Because it got hacked. It all got hacked.

Verizon revised the number of breached accounts to three billion after receiving new information.

“The company recently obtained new intelligence and now believes, following an investigation with the assistance of outside forensic experts, that all Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,” Verizon said in a statement.

If there is any ‘good’ news here, it’s that your Yahoo account either got security updates at the time, or else nobody actually used your data against you.  Or they did, but you didn’t notice… no, wait, that last bit’s not good news at all.  Sorry, I’m just trying to be nice about the situation. Anyway, Yahoo is probably not the best place to do anything secure with your email. If, indeed, it ever was.

So Yahoo had a 500 million account security breach…

…and now Yahoo has come up with a new way to effectively lock up my email. First it warns you that your account information may be compromised; and then, when you click on the link to fix the problem, it times out and doesn’t load the page.  …And now you can see why I only keep that particular email account around for throwaway or family stuff.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen…

Moe Lane

PS: It really is just Yahoo messing up, by the way.  They had 500 million accounts raided for info.  which would be freaking me out, except that I stopped using Yahoo for anything sensitive a decade ago.