The idea of privacy and social exposure is now a situation in which Yahoo! users have to face based on how the company is linked with US intelligence officials.
It’s hard to believe such a well respected company such as Yahoo! would be under the investigation of blackmailing its users email for government stipulations.
Without question, Yahoo! has been one of the biggest names for many years when it comes to the amount of users who use and work with their program.
According to the New York Times, Yahoo! secretly began to develop a custom software program that would provide service to search all of its user’s incoming emails which was provided to US intelligence officials.
This breaks the barrier when it comes to invasion of privacy especially in regards to someone’s own personal information. The intelligence officials, however, continue to prosper from it.
“Yahoo! is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” said Yahoo! in regards to the outburst of how they are dealing with the rules of invasion of privacy.
It’s still unclear which intelligence agency is working alongside Yahoo! to perform these acts of intercepting personal information. It’s beginning an uproar among users as well as the company’s main leaders.
There are hundreds of millions of people or more who have had their emails passed on to the US government for further documentation. This number can grow even bigger if nothing is done to prevent it.
The safety of our privacy is at stake, especially if intelligence agencies start reaching out to more companies that could hop on board with spying on their users.
According to the Washington Post, this isn’t the first time Yahoo! has faced the request for data by the government.
The company has such a huge reputation, which makes it easy to believe they were a vessel for the software that intelligence officials could feed off.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Yahoo! Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, made the decision to work with the government to help develop the software and left a bad taste in the mouth of some people, such as Alex Stamos.
Stamos was the former chief of information security who never liked the idea of merging with the government, which soon led to his departure of the company.
Stamos was asked recently about his thoughts on the company intercepting their users email for the government and he responded with “I’m not commenting at all.”
There have been rumors intelligence agencies such as the NSA or the FBI were also going after other internet companies with the same demand but continued to come up short. Many internet companies were not on board with the idea.
As consumers of the media and internet world, we shouldn’t be in the situation where we have to worry about the government reading and blackmailing our personal information on a daily basis.
Yahoo! has not only sparked a huge headline, but also put out the realization to users that you don’t know who’s reading your personal information at any time.
The future of invasion of privacy still remains to be a factor now and will be in the future, unless restrictions against intelligence agencies are made based on who they can operate with.