Yahoo selling your email accounts $30

How true this information is I do not know but I ran across it and the article is dated Dec 5th 2009.

Here is the original story

Article/Reporting

and a link to Yahoo's Compliance policy which is shocking!

Compliance policy

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, the photo sharing and storage site which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other U.S. "social networking" sites are at minimum providing information in similar fashion to U.S. agencies, and in some cases have also received substantial funding by U.S. government related entities as a most efficient and cost-effective means of spying on their users around the world.

Essentially this is like them paying whoever distributes your mail to open it up to take a look. Be it UPS DHL or whoever. Disgusts me I hope this is not true and is a made up fabrication. I will research more, but will post this for now to see what everyone else comes up with...

-Kdial1

[edit on 8-12-2009 by kdial1]

I wouldn't dismiss this possibility considering societies increasing surveillance technology and methods.

I thought with homeland security running rampage everywhere this was ALREADY happening???

Wonder how much bank they are making off of this. No way to escape anything anymore it seems.

Its funny with my GMAIL Account - I tried to sign in one time, and when I signed in it booted me out and said my account was under review??.. I have never sent anything outrageous that I can remember, but I was still pretty scared for like 10 minutes until I could sign back in again. I wonder what was going on with that anyway...

Either way I am careful what I write anymore in email, so while disgusting, it does not surprise me.

"Gov Gone Wild" does not suprise me anymore. They don't care about the people anymore..just the multi-million dollar club.

It says in what you quoted that those sales were to the government -- not Walmart, UPS, etc. It's possible that this is just a spin on something Yahoo, as well as other companies, have done in response to Homeland Security subpoenas. Rather than have to eat the cost of a court enforced turnover of information, they may include a service charge for the employees involved in gathering and sending the information.

In reading the article, this appears to be exactly what they're doing. Seeing that they can't really say no to a court ordered search warrant without massive legal battles they would lose in the end, they may as well not lose money complying with the law...

seems right to me. i have opened email accounts that ive never used for anything "and i mean nothing" just to have and they are always flooded with all kinds of spam and phishing emails. how did they get those address' if ive never used them?

I couldn't find more on this story but will keep updating it, aparantly yahoo is trying to get thisw document off the web.

-Kdial1