When we were still checking if our Yahoo account was hacked and was included in the publicly distributed lists with the personal data of over 500 million accounts fed to anyone, here is another bad news about this company now completely adrift. Yahoo, in fact, according to a report by Reuters (which was not denied by the company), provided the personal data of all its customers to the United States Intelligence unit, even creating customized software programmed to scan all emails received from users so they can easily intercept information you know United States Secret Service officials.
The tool was developed in 2015, at the request of the U.S. government, respecting a secret order to check hundreds of millions of Yahoo mail accounts.
According to some experts, this would be the first time for an American company working on the internet to accept the government's request for espionage.
The email search tool was so secret that even the Yahoo security team was unaware of it.
Only CEO Marissa Mayer and a few others have decided to comply with the directive rather than reject it.
And now the reason for the resignation of Yahoo security chief, Alex Stamos, is clear after discovering that Mayer had authorized the surveillance program.
Yahoo's response to these allegations has been lapidary and are a clear confirmation: " Yahoo is a law-abiding company, and is compliant with the laws of the United States. "
Other companies including Apple and Google, questioned on the subject, instead denied having received similar requests from the American government.
This type of news is objectively shocking.
It is one thing to know that in case of suspicion, the authorities can request access to the emails sent by me to check (which is not nice the same but you can fly over if you do not have a criminal life), another account instead is that all emails are checked regardless, which is more than annoying, inadmissible.
For this reason, also for a matter of principle and as recommended by the authoritative Edward Snowden (former NSA IT technician), it is time to unsubscribe from Yahoo and all its services, including Flickr (and Tumblr if this is the account was created by Yahoo Mail).
Deleting the e-mail address from Yahoo Mail and deleting the account forever is quite simple, even if it takes a period of 3 months before it is final.
To cancel the Yahoo account and close it forever just go to this page, enter the password and confirm.
The problem, for those who use Yahoo Mail, may be to recover all the messages and transfer them elsewhere .
Fortunately, this operation is quite easy and we have two possibilities:
- Import Yahoo Mail into Outlook.com
- transfer the Yahoo account to Gmail
my advice, however, is not to close the Yahoo account immediately, but to leave it active for some time, using the automatic forwarding of messages received on Gmail or Outlook, at least until you are sure that you will not lose any message important
Another problem that can arise from the closure of an Email account is that related to access to other sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, if it is currently done with a Yahoo Mail account.
In this case it will be necessary to manually change, one by one, the main email address in the account settings of each site to which you are registered.
This operation cannot be done automatically.
