Why Yahoo Should Abandon Email Scanning 94
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."
Re:And GMail gets a pass? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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BMO