
Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data to Sell Advertisers - hemancuso
https://www.wsj.com/articles/yahoo-bucking-industry-scans-emails-for-data-to-sell-advertisers-1535466959
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my_usernam3
From the article - Rob Griffin, chief technology officer of digital-ad
consultancy Tovo Labs, “is how do you monetize it without the icky factor?”

Uhhhhh how about don't read emails? If I have a fantasy football team, please
sell me football stuff. If I click on an article relating to health concerns,
sell me organic whole foods stuff.

Can you imagine someone 20 years ago throwing all your mail into a scanner and
saying, "don't worry I'm only checking for keywords and receipts"?

~~~
Joeri
This is the thing I find really weird about online advertising. Every other
medium has ads based on the content or demographic that most likely reads that
content. Those ads are always contextually relevant, sufficiently diverse
(rarely will you see the same ad repeated everywhere) and few people find them
invasive. Online, however, ads are tailored to you as a person. They chase you
around the web, even for products you already decided you didn’t want, and are
always vaguely creepy. Why is it that way? Is it really more profitable, or is
personalized advertising google’s long con?

~~~
barbegal
Did you know that most Google ads have a button you can click in order to tell
Google that you don't want to see the ad again. Even advertising videos on
YouTube have this option. You can tell them when an advert is not relevant or
you've seen it too many times. Oddly Google doesn't publicise this much even
though its probably a feature which improves their profitability.

~~~
about_help
Do you realize that is tangential to the discussion? They shouldn't be
invading privacy in the first place!

And what do you mean not publicizing it? It is quite visible on the ads they
show it for.

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fancyfish
This is a big business for hedge funds too, not just advertisers. Every Uber
receipt, every Amazon purchase, every receipt that hits your email inbox.
Aggregated and tracked at the product SKU level. That is pure gold for
investment research. Few sources of data can match what email inboxes provide.

E.g. Superfly Insights [1], Return Path [2]

[1] [https://alternativedata.org/data_provider/superfly-
insights/](https://alternativedata.org/data_provider/superfly-insights/)

[2] [https://returnpath.com/downloads/know-email-
data/](https://returnpath.com/downloads/know-email-data/)

~~~
1024core
This is why Amazon no longer lists all of your purchases in your email
receipt. It just says "your order of XXX and N more items".

~~~
Scoundreller
Huh. I guess Facebook’s move away from including someone’s update or message
in their notification emails had to do with more than getting you to go to
their site...

~~~
toomanybeersies
Facebook still does notification emails?

I've been filtering them straight into the trash for the best part of a
decade. It seems so backwards to send them when most people check their
Facebook more often than their email.

~~~
hutattedonmyarm
> I've been filtering them straight into the trash for the best part of a
> decade.

Why not just turn them off? I haven't received a single notification email
from then in years

~~~
toomanybeersies
Maybe I have, I'm not sure. Whatever I did to stop my inbox being flooded with
emails from Facebook, I did almost a decade ago and I haven't touched it
since.

~~~
83
Probably filtering them. Before I deleted my FB I remember it being a struggle
to not have my inbox flooded. I would disable all the notifications and every
few months when they updated their policies or changed the site those
notifications would helpfully get turned back on.

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stevecalifornia
Try deleting your Yahoo account. It doesn't work. They say they delete your
account but then it wills till be there getting emails. It's impossible to
delete your account.

~~~
ballenf
Honest question: is it better to delete the account or leave it as a
placeholder to prevent the name being taken by someone else? I have an ancient
yahoo address that gets a lot of spam and a few newsletters, but I'm 99% sure
that there are some website credentials out there that still use the address
and dozens of contacts who still have it their address book.

I started to (try to) delete the account several times and always hesitated
out of fear. And when I ask myself "what's the harm in leaving it there?" I
can't really come up with a good answer.

Also interesting aside, Yahoo/Oath nag me every couple weeks to agree to the
new Verizon draconian privacy forfeiture terms. I wonder if they'll eventually
block logins and cutoff email forwarding if I never click through. My cynical
hunch is that they'll equate logins with consent after updating the TOS to
explain this.

~~~
drharby
It is risk averse to keep it and functionally useless. Yahoo recycles unused
handlrs after a timeout of a few years and scammers find these and still all
accounts associated with them.

Usecase: friend dies, years later some turkey kid stole his facebook bv his
login was yahoo email based and BOOM has access to a lot of social media data.

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vermooten
Does anyone still use yahoo for email? It's a place where spam goes to die.

~~~
oaththrowaway
Oath (Yahoo) doesn't even use Yahoo Mail. We're all on GApps.

~~~
Nightshaxx
What exactly is Verizon's plan with your company if I may ask? Are they just
looking to make money off of existing customers and the few good products they
have, or are they going to try and make a move to become a serious silicon
valley competitor?

~~~
oaththrowaway
I can't say what Verizon's plans on for sure, they are pretty hands off from
what I can tell.

Oath's goal is to be the premier "AdTech" company. According to leadership
we're only behind Google and FB. But the division I work in doesn't touch ads
so I'm not the best person to talk to.

~~~
Nightshaxx
Hmm that's pretty interesting. Makes sense that they are trying to get in on
the ad game, but I would expect them to rebrand to get the revenue on the
search/mail ads and such since Yahoo has the infrastructure already for it.

I assume that if Verizon is being hands off Yahoo must be doing decently well.
Otherwise I'd imagine they would be trying to move it in a new direction.

~~~
empath75
Verizon was fairly hands off with aol as well when I worked there. I think
they just don’t know what the fuck to do with those companies now that they
bought them, to be honest.

~~~
oaththrowaway
When the company I work for was bought out by Verizon they gave it to AOL for
that reason.

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Animats
Doesn't gmail scan your mail for data to target ads?

~~~
joefkelley
In the past. We (I worked on gmail ads during this time) stopped doing it
about a year ago.

[https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-
enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/)

~~~
ianwalter
Thats good, but something tells me I still shouldn't fully trust Google/Gmail
with things like this.

~~~
markovbot
You shouldn't trust anyone. There's nothing stopping them from doing it again,
or continuing to do it and publishing that nice writeup. Of course when your
data is on a 3rd party server, that 3rd party has access to it. Why do we keep
pretending like anything else is the case?

~~~
derefr
> Of course when your data is on a 3rd party server, that 3rd party has access
> to it.

You realize that oblivious third-party storage can exist, right? For example,
Tarsnap. It's the the durable-storage equivalent of end-to-end encrypted
messaging. The client does all the encrypting; and the client is open-source;
so you don't have to trust the third-party at all.

This is a bit more challenging when you want clients to be able to operate
over an index of the data, rather than just the raw data (i.e. you want them
to be able to search through their stored email)—but it's fully possible to
architect a service such that all indexing happens on the client (perhaps
distributed between many connected clients in the case of a shared data-source
like a Slack workspace), where the backend is just obliviously storing and
returning E2E-encrypted copies of generated index chunks, in the same way it
obliviously stores and returns E2E-encrypted copies of the data itself.

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unit91
No great surprise. The only people still using Yahoo aren't very tech savvy
and don't know about the data breach, plaintext passwords, etc.. My guess is
Yahoo can get away with this and they know it.

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maxxxxx
It's just a matter of time until all companies that sit on a ton of data start
using it to make money. There is just no way around it unless they are being
forced by law not to do it.

~~~
Barrin92
it's not just a matter of time. As stated in the article, Google actually
_reverted_ its policy on the issue and has since stopped collecting data from
user email content.

There's nothing inevitable about this. Even apart from law employees can steer
the direction of companies, especially in tech where businesses are so
dependent on a relatively small number of them. If you think privacy practises
at your place of work are bad, bring it up.

~~~
ballenf
Are you suggesting that Google took a stand on principle and voluntarily gave
up gathering more data on users of its free services out of respect for
privacy?

Or is it perhaps more likely that Google gets enough info from users via
others means that it simply wasn't getting enough value out of email scanning?
Or maybe starting a trend against email scanning hurts competitors more than
it hurts themselves?

~~~
Barrin92
It is probably all of those things at the same time, and nothing stops
employees from wielding considerable power when it comes to influencing
decision making on any of those issues.

Google was, only a few months ago, forced by its employees to turn down
lucrative defence contracts, and has since committed to not participate in
them.

I think if employees manage to accomplish that we can all manage to improve
our privacy practises.

~~~
ballenf
I tend to agree, fwiw. Scanning emails prevented Google from taking a stand on
privacy without subjecting itself to easy potshots of hypocrisy, regardless of
how many times they explained the methodology and use of keywords instead of
profile building.

------
bogomipz
So Verizon bought Yahoo a company where every single email account had been
known to have been compromised[1], and now they are seeking to monetize those
same accounts by scanning their their contents and selling that data to third
parties? No wonder the Yahoo hacks and very late disclosure didn't derail the
deal. These two basement brands deserve each other.

[1] [https://www.oath.com/press/yahoo-provides-notice-to-
addition...](https://www.oath.com/press/yahoo-provides-notice-to-additional-
users-affected-by-previously/)

------
martokus
Because they know everyone that would have ever left them has already done so.
Nothing to lose...

~~~
Trochal
Not all users are clued up on whats happening in the tech world, some users
are just users who want an email account.

~~~
lostgame
Sure, and Google is happy to do that, for the layman or the techie.

There's just no need, or space, for Yahoo anymore.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I think the OP's point is that a lot of "legacy" users on Yahoo -- or on
Hotmail[1], or on the free email they got from their ISP when they signed up
fifteen years ago -- aren't inclined to move to Gmail unless they're tech-
savvy enough to understand the case as to why they should. On the surface,
free webmail services seem to be pretty interchangeable.

[1]: While Hotmail doesn't technically exist anymore -- it redirects to
Outlook.com now -- I know more than one person who got their email account
there back when it _was_ Hotmail, still use it, and still refer to it that
way. And at least one of those people is someone younger than I am and who's
tech-savvy enough to be putting together his own PCs. Anecdata, of course, but
I think a good illustration of why services like Yahoo Mail are likely to
exist way, _way_ longer than we might think.

~~~
mrep
Yeah, tech in general and especially email is annoying to switch from. My
parents still use a yahoo email account because they have had it for so long
and don't want to get other people to update their contacts.

------
ForHackernews
Isn't Yahoo gone? Shouldn't headline be "Verizon-Oath"?

~~~
niij
In the same sense that "Google" is gone and we should now be saying Alphabet.
That is the holding company, but the brand remains.

~~~
super-serial
That's different - Yahoo has completely different owners now whose main
business is in a different sector.

Headline should read:

"Verizon after acquiring Yahoo disregards normal tech-company conventions and
snoops on everyone's emails like a scummy ISP."

~~~
rrix2
what's the point of finely tuning semantics when it's functionally identical?

~~~
Dylan16807
Getting people upset with Verizon is a good goal.

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paul7986
They can read all the spam they want ... it's what yahoo email was built for
.. of one your trash email addresses!

------
sleepychu
Today the lost hours maintaining my personal mailserver suddenly don't feel so
lost!

------
mtgx
Didn't Yahoo also promise a few years ago it wouldn't do that (only after they
saw a backlash against scanning the emails, I believe).

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jim_bailie
I hate yahoo and all these evil companies with their personal data collection
fetishes.

~~~
phailhaus
It's because you're not paying for their services.

~~~
gowld
Most companies sell your data even if you pay.

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lostgame
I'm personally shocked Yahoo is still a company.

I personally don't know anyone daft enough to use their services up here in
Canada - even in the US (where I have personally seen the 'average Joe's' tech
knowledge - especially in central and southern states - shockingly much less
than that in Canada) it seemed folks avoided it, except the lowest-of-the-low
in terms of tech knowledge.

They have, for the years since AOL was known universally as the worst tech
company, seemingly fought for that title.

EDIT: Surprised at the downvotes. I'd love to know why.

~~~
ArchTypical
> since AOL was known universally as the worst tech company

When it started to fail, it was lamented, but technically? It was exploitive
and full of dumb subscribers, but the tech was fine.

> except the lowest-of-the-low in terms of tech knowledge.

Used yahoo for decades, since I was around when it started. Still do, for one
email address.

~~~
gaius
_but the tech was fine._

Yep, AOLserver was one of the first “app servers” and it was well regarded.
The other PG built his company around it.

