Yahoo has come under fire after accusations that it secretly scanned user emails on behalf of the U.S. government.
On Wednesday, information surfaced accusing Yahoo Inc. of having developed a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails on behalf of U.S. intelligence officials.
According to reports by Reuters quoting former employees of the tech giant, Yahoo ceded requests for information by the National Security Agency and the FBI, scanning all arriving messages in hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in response to Reuters’ investigation into the issue before declining further comment.
U.S. phone and internet providers have previously been accosted for their users’ data, however experts agree that they had seen neither a sweep of web information of this scale nor the creation of a program expressly for this purpose. It is not known what specifically the government agencies were searching for; all that is known is that the program was designed to scan for a specific set of characters. It is also unclear whether or not other web mail providers had been approached to participate in the information grab, but Google and Microsoft declined that they had been contacted.
