In spite of news reports to the contrary, Yahoo’s CEO claimed that “Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever.” On November 18, 2013 Marissa Mayer (Yahoo CEO) blogged that by January 8, 2014, Yahoo Mail will have “(SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network.” Specifically she blogged that Yahoo will:
- Encrypt all information that moves between our data centers by the end of Q1 2014;
- Offer users an option to encrypt all data flow to/from Yahoo by the end of Q1 2014;
- Work closely with our international Mail partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded Mail accounts are https-enabled.
Ms. Mayer’s blog was in response to a recent Washington Post report “that the National Security Agency has been hacking into the communications lines of the data centers run by Yahoo and Google Inc. to intercept information about what people do and say online.”
It will be interesting to see if Google and other major Internet website follow Yahoo’s lead.