In addition to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo will add extra layers of personal data protection to all its services in the coming months in an effort to safeguard the privacy of its customers, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced in a blog post. Mayer reminded users that Yahoo Mail will get HTTPS (SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key by January 8th, 2014 and revealed that all other Yahoo services will get the same treatment by the end of March 2014.
Specifically, Yahoo will encrypt information between its servers, let users encrypt all data flow to and from Yahoo, and work with its existing Mail partners to make sure that co-branded Mail accounts will also get HTTPS protection.
The announcement comes as a direct response to the many reports that have detailed the National Security Agency’s practices of secretly accessing user data stored by companies offering Internet services. Mayer said that the company has never offered the agency access to its data centers and further added that “there is nothing more important” to Yahoo than protecting the privacy of its users.
Similarly, Google has recently announced that it will encrypt the data flow between its data centers continuing the work it started last year, with some Google engineers expressing in public posts their increased anger with the NSA spying. Comparatively, Microsoft has yet to take action even though the Windows giant has recently acknowledged that its data centers are vulnerable to NSA spying.
