gbulmash's Journal: Is Yahoo! Reading Your Mail?

In Friday's edition of "Dear Margo" (an advice column written by the daughter of Ann Landers), a reader asked if Yahoo! employees were reading her Yahoo! mail. Margo addressed the question with a quote from her boss, a Yahoo! News VP. He not only answered the question with doublespeak, but used it as an opportunity to disparage Google's Gmail.

Safe Assumption

[zgregoryg]

Any data which you do not control is being read by anyone. Since you do not control your data on Yahoo servers; your safest assumption is yes, your mail is being read by humans and machines; just like Gmail. The only way to realistically attempt to prevent your email from being read is via GPG encryption, where you encrypt and decrypt your data on your own hardware, preferable within a local encrypted volume. The main key word to understand here however is *Attempt* There are no guarantees...