Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) said on Monday it was trying to determine if Yahoo! Inc’s decision to scan clients’ email accounts at the behest of the U.S. authorities last year broke European law. Evidently this is a serious case so the DPC is investigating the recent situation with yahoo email scanning. Privacy is obviously a matter that is important to many individuals so with the DPC getting to the bottom of email scanning, it will establish solutions to this issue.
The program has had access to all incoming email and may have been able to access outgoing mail as well. When it was found by a security team it was terminated.
Sources have reported that Yahoo used a software program to filter through millions of emails for specific information related to national security.
At the time last month, the DPC believed it was seeking more information from Yahoo. Now it has begun actively investigating the case.
A DPC spokeswoman announced that she was in regular contact with Yahoo! EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) in clarifying certain facts of this case and will then proceed to take appropriate next steps.
Last month, it declined to confirm whether Europeans’ emails were intercepted as part of the program. Yahoo said it complied with the laws of the United States. In addition, Lawyers said mass surveillance of EU citizens email would be against incoming European Union data rules.
The DPC, the lead European regulator on privacy issues for Yahoo because its European headquarters are in Dublin, is trying to ascertain what exactly Yahoo did and whether it breached the privacy rules that prevailed last year.
A Spokeswoman claimed that they were receiving active and engaged responses to their queries.
Analysts also proclaimed that the email scanning could prompt Verizon (VZ.N) Communications to rethink the terms of a planned $4.8 billion takeover of Yahoo.
It is unfortunate that there has been this case with Yahoo as it is a reputable company and many use Yahoo for email and claim that it is great for email. To end things off here are some facts by Feedmaza about Yahoo that are compelling and that represent it’s positive standpoints. Jerry Yang and David Filo first started Yahoo in February 1994. It did not start as a search engine. In fact, they started it to keep track of their own interests online. Later it turned into a simple catalog, which contained the site links in the Internet.
From there, it developed into a web directory, where only web page information are collated and divided into subcategories. In autumn 1994 the catalog contained more than 1 million of requests and about 100.000 thousand of users. Yahoo began as a project created by two individuals and has grown to employ estimated 13,000 full time individuals. The project was initially named as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. In April the name of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was changed to Yahoo. Yahoo is actually an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
At that time “Yahoo” was already trademarked by a company that produced barbecue (BBQ) sauce, knives and human propelled watercraft. For this reason Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo!
