While many popular email providers used to scan users’ emails to provide data to advertisers, quite a few of them have moved away from this, but it appears that Yahoo Mail hasn’t. A new report claims that Yahoo Mail continues to scan emails for data that it will sell to advertisers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Oath, the company that owns Yahoo now, is in talks with advertisers on a new service which would scan more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes to provide them with consumer data.
What Oath did confirm to the scribe is that Yahoo Mail does perform email scans but pointed out that only promotional emails, which are usually sent by retailers, are scanned. Algorithms are used to scan those emails and cookies are placed to show users similar ads in the future. Advertisers will thus be able to target these users when purchasing ads with Oath.
The company told the scribe that the scanning system ignores personal emails and all personally identifiable information is hidden from the data given to advertisers. Moreover, users are given the ability to opt out of this. This holds true for users of Yahoo’s $3.49 per month premium email service as well who have to opt out too.
That can be done by heading over to the Ad Interest Manager in Yahoo Mail and selecting the relevant option. This page isn’t located in the Settings menu so it’s a bit difficult to locate it.
Filed in . Read more about Yahoo.