Which is in stark contrast against other major tech companies strategy of instead deny direct involvement, launch marketing campaigns promoting users privacy as their top priority and go as far as launching anti-privacy campaigns criticizing the privacy policies of their competitors, whilst simultaneously providing an indiscriminate fire-hose of private user data directly to the NSA.
However, I have to say this news gives me a strong reason to reevaluate yahoo. And my own feelings about this makes it clear to me there is a market in customers who are interested in having their rights respected. I'm looking forward to the new wave of strong security, and corporate user rights policies as a feature.
Like much of this sort of thing, I think its brand hating for the hates's sake.
I have never "liked" yahoo or been a "fan", but I know I use it, I know it works, and I know it has been grief free. It just works.
Technically I've had a lot of trouble with Yahoo mail, and those types of problems have been typical for me with every service of theirs I've ever tried in the past.
For example, I often have trouble emailing people who have yahoo accounts due to bizarre spam filtering policies, some of which have no resolution path. I also have a Yahoo email account, and my mail client complains almost daily that it can't connect or my password is wrong.
It's just my personal taste but aesthetically, I can't tolerate their interface design. I'd be willing to bet Godaddy recruited their web designers from Yahoo.
I started noticing them as a 'brand only' company when I was in Japan in 2003. A local telecom was marketing a Yahoo branded DSL services. I suppose they where trying an AOL play (at least they had a focused business goal, and they've updated their design sense this century), but the combination of all this product noise (i.e. unrelated service offerings), combined with bad UX make the Yahoo brand ephemeral to me. Other then an email service, for the life of me, I can't put my finger on what they do. Crawl around the web and put a yahoo sticker on anything they think is cool?
Now however, maybe their brand can start to represent something I care about, but they'll have to actually do some useful things too.
And then there's this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email_address
I suspect that the backlash from those actions may have led the company to appeal the FISC orders, fearing similar potential future liabilities.
Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/11/yahoo-calls-withh...
In America there are appeals processes, so Yahoo could avail themselves of those.
So Yahoo may well have had a consistent "fight for the users" policy, but were constrained differently in different jurisdictions.
But of course this is only about the Big Bad Government.
It's an interesting cultural difference how privacy suddenly becomes in issue in the US now that it's about the government, and totally fine when people were being tracked an profiled for profit.
When it's the government, there's a chance a big black van will pull up next to you and haul you away for the rest of your life.
A corp is likely just trying to manipulate you into buying their worthless junk. Not good, but at least you're not dead or imprisoned.
Good for them, but also perhaps motivated from poor PR resulting from this episode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_C...
People who learn from their mistakes deserve at least as much praise as the ones who got it right from the beginning (the list of which seems to be exceptionally short in this case).
They had this sort of issue in France a while back didn't they?
Why? and how vulnerable to Eve, not using HTTPS?
I'm not sure who to believe that this point. This whole thing is messier than cold war politics and it was probably orchestrated that way.
It kind of reminds me of how a certain president received a nobel peace prize yet the actions conducted under his policies (or rule) are in contradiction to the ideals of what the prize is named after, but I digress.
There is always a choice to be made…
Department of Homeland Security - Department of State Security
Public Safety - Police
Department of Defense - Department of War
Enhanced interrogation techniques - Torture
