Yahoo Receives Special Recognition For Fighting For User Data Privacy 58
An anonymous reader writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Yahoo a gold star for its diligence in fighting for user privacy in courts. From the release: 'In 2007, Yahoo received an order to produce user data under the Protect America Act (the predecessor statute to the FISA Amendments Act, the law on which the NSA’s recently disclosed Prism program relies). Instead of blindly accepting the government’s constitutionally questionable order, Yahoo fought back. The company challenged the legality of the order in the FISC, the secret surveillance court that grants government applications for surveillance. And when the order was upheld by the FISC, Yahoo didn’t stop fighting: it appealed the decision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a three-judge appellate court established to review decisions of the FISC. ... Yahoo went to bat for its users – not because it had to, and not because of a possible PR benefit – but because it was the right move for its users and the company. It’s precisely this type of fight – a secret fight for user privacy – that should serve as the gold standard for companies, and such a fight must be commended. While Yahoo still has a way to go in the other Who Has Your Back categories (and they remain the last major email carrier not using HTTPS encryption by default), Yahoo leads the pack in fighting for its users under seal and in secret.'"
Although they did end up losing, and were forbidden from even mentioning the existence of the case until recently.
Ain't it nice (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just like Kafkas "Der Prozess".
You got secret laws that people/companies are ordered by a secret court to be followed, and they are not even allowed to tell anybody about it.
Land of the free.
Re:So um... Yay? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, the good fight. How about they put up a good fight and fix their auth cookie vulnerabilities that lead to infected ads stealing user credentials and sending spam as authenticated Yahoo users? That's been going on for quite a while and still happens daily.
The brains of the Yahoo board aren't enough to be appetizers for zombies.
Re:If they want to be heroes (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't a "show trial" if is entirely secret.
As for risking jail - they already risked jail doing what they did.
The CEO of QWEST resisted warrantless wiretapping and they found a way to send him to jail for shareholder fraud - by canceling all of QWEST's classified contracts and thus making him into an inside trader for having sold shares when he thought the contracts were still good.
A possible, bold, new direction (Score:5, Interesting)
If Mayer really wanted to skate to where the puck is going, she'd make a massive push to retool Yahoo into a privacy-centric company.
Move as much of Yahoo out of the USA as possible so they can speak to their users freely. Very publicly and loudly proclaim that they will not play ball with government spy agencies, and back it up with real and demonstrable steps toward that end. Encrypt everything. Set up their services to make it cryptographically impossible for them to turn over plaintext to anyone. Keep the absolute minimum logs required by law. Don't collect any information that isn't absolutely necessary. Alert everyone to all government requests for data whenever possible, and give every user a status in their account which says, "Your information has NOT been requested by a government or intelligence agency" which disappears when this statement is no longer true. Provide a deadman's switch to automatically delete data according to some user-defined criteria. Open their infrastructure to community audits from trusted security experts. Have bug bounties for security flaws. Do all this and more. These are all legal and many could be implemented immediately.
Done sincerely, this could earn them respect, users, customers, and profits. They'd keep their old users of course (if they're still with Yahoo nothing is going to get them to budge) but they'd be set up to grow into a huge new sector. Privacy is going to be big in the coming years, and the technology exists to nearly completely, and legally, nullify most of the efforts of the surveillance state. They could steal all of the users who are wary of Google and Microsoft but don't see any decent alternatives. The companies which set themselves in this direction now are going to be the leaders that everyone else is chasing in 5-10 years. Kim Dotcom's Mega was arguably the first, putting privacy as the number one priority in their mission statement. Yahoo has the resources to be a big player in the this space.
What else can they do to save a dying brand? What better way to really set themselves apart? So much of what the NSA et al do is predicated on the complacency and collusion of private enterprise. Yahoo could stand head and shoulders above the rest by saying no when they come asking. Sorry, come back with a warrant. Got a warrant? OK, here's your encrypted pseudo-random noise--and its in dead-tree format. We are still at the point where government needs private business to cooperate. Business still has a choice in a lot of this. They can still choose to be on the side of privacy and liberty, and they could be greatly rewarded for it.