Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bacasper]

The leaked Yahoo! document, "meeting your security needs," complete with your email information for sale and price list, is available here.

The good news is that Yahoo! is unable to retrieve emails you have deleted.

Whatever would we do without all these hackers and leakers?

Yahoo Sells All Its Users Private Email Contents to U.S. Agencies for Small Price

Posted: 2009/12/05
From: Mathaba

Yahoo isn�t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides to "law enforcement" and spy agencies has leaked onto the web.

After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA release of its "law enforcement and intelligence price list," someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company�s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.org.

The guide, which Yahoo has tried to suppress via legal letters to the Cryptome.org site run by freedom of information champion John Young, describes Yahoo�s policies on keeping the data of Yahoo Email and Groups users, as well as surveillance and spying capabilities it can give to the U.S. government and agencies.

The Yahoo document is a price list for these spying services and has already resulted in many people closing down accounts in protest. However, closing a Yahoo account is not as easy as one might expect: users have reported great difficulty in finding the link to delete their account, and, Yahoo will still keep data for another 90 days.

If you ask Yahoo! to delete your account, in most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from their user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.

Any information copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in active user databases.

Many government leaders and officials are known by Mathaba to widely be using Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail in spite of these services being hosted on U.S. computers and the ease that gives the hosts to access their data. Mathaba has also long been aware of a great many business people, politicians and even Presidents who use Yahoo for their Email communications, thus making it easy for the U.S. and its owners to spy on them with negligible cost.

Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and ISPs.

But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo�s lawyers alone who have been stupid enough to try to issue a "DMCA takedown notice" to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document.

[lifeinkorea]

Going online is like going to a public park. You might think no one can see you in your car, but there are people with binoculars peeping high up in the trees.

Don't confuse the REAL privacy you have in your physical space called "home" with the non-real illusion of privacy called a "home" page.

[visitorq]

Are there any free email services out there that guarantee privacy? I'm thinking of registering an address with "hushmail.com", but it seems they're not perfect either (after reading their wikipedia entry).