14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has announced it will be adding encryption to all its products by next spring, in a new effort to compensate for the hit the company’s image suffered following the NSA revelations.
“We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it. As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the US government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo,” Marissa Mayer wrote in a blog post.
“I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy,” she said.
So, Yahoo wants to tighten up security around its products. A security upgrade for Yahoo Mail has already been announced for January 2014, when the company will be introducing https encryption with a 2048-bit key across the network.
Now, the company lists a few more things they’ll do over the next few months. By the end of the first quarter of 2014, Yahoo will make it so all information that moves between its data centers is encrypted.
In the same time frame, users will be offered an option to encrypt all data flow to and from Yahoo. Furthermore, the company promises to work with its international Mail partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded Mail accounts are protected by https.
It wasn’t long ago that a new NSA leak actually revealed that the NSA had managed to break into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers from across the globe, something that particularly ticked off some Google engineers who had worked to make that particular link secure.