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c|net reports Yahoo Mail Scans Your Inbox for Receipts, but its Competitors Don't:
Oath, the Verizon-owned company that runs Yahoo's web properties, is scanning your inbox for commercial emails, according to a report Tuesday from The Wall Street Journal. Verizon bought Yahoo last year.
The emails would appear to include order confirmations and other such messages from online retailers. Oath uses the information to put you into interest groups and then help advertisers show you ads based on those interests, the Journal reported.
The practice isn't new for Yahoo, and users noticed that Oath gave itself the right to read your emails in its updated privacy policy in April. What makes it remarkable now is that Oath is marketing this ability to advertisers at a time when competitors in email don't do the same thing.
In 2017, Google said it would no longer scan users' consumer email accounts for advertising purposes. Microsoft said it's never done so, and it even famously called out Google in 2013 for the practice in an ad warning email users not to get "Scroogled."
I've watched many e-mail providers rise to the top in popularity over the years. (Remember Hotmail, AOL, Prodigy, and Lycos?)
Who is your current e-mail provider? Why did you select them and/or stick with them?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 29 2018, @11:29AM
I've got in mind some actual code, but Just For Now I'll proclaim /etc/hosts from the rooftops.
But haven't ad blockers already been done?
Yes Indeedy! But PixelBeGone the actual code will _not_ be an ad blocker.
It will be a Web and Mobile Analytics blocker. That's quite a different thing.
While online ads will continue to track you of their own accord they'll be far-less targeted as well as I hope far-less effective than they are now.
My hope is to bring back Direct Mail. Yes, RLY: what most knew as "Junk Mail".
It happens that I was in the early nineties quite heavily into Direct Mail. My code for Working Software was nothing more than a vehicle to drive Working Software's Direct Mail marketing, in much the same way as neither Oracle nor IBM are database vendors.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]