Because, you know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch

Aug 29, 2018 12:25 GMT  ·  By

Believe it or not, there still are millions of users out there owning a Yahoo Mail account, and if you’re here, there’s a chance you do too.

If the recent hacking revelations failed to convince you to make the switch to other email providers, maybe this will. The Wall Street Journal revealed today that Yahoo Mail is still scanning, collecting, and selling users’ data to advertisers, and according to people familiar with the matter, some 200 million inboxes are being involved.

In just a few words, here’s how the whole thing works: Yahoo Mail scans your retail messages (Yahoo swears personal emails aren’t targeted) and then looks for information that could be used by advertisers.

Yahoo Mail groups users in specific categories based on the information that it finds in their emails, such as frequent fliers, investors, and so on, and this way it can deliver more personalized ads to everyone.

Officials working for Oath, the company that the new Yahoo owner Verizon created last year, say this is by no means unexpected behavior. An email service “is an expensive system,” Doug Sharp, Oath’s vice president of data, measurements and insights, said, so it makes sense for the company to try to generate some money using your data.

Settings to opt out aren't really easy to find

How to block the data scanning

If you think otherwise, there’s actually a way to block the whole thing without actually moving to a different email provider, though you should consider this too.

What’s important to know is that the Yahoo Mail scanning and data collection works on both free and premium accounts, so you still need to opt out manually regardless of account type.

The worst thing is that opting out isn’t a very straightforward thing to do because Yahoo has decided to hide the settings in this regard deep in its account information and not in the Yahoo Mail settings screen.

So the first thing you need to do is to open the Ad Interest Manager page where all the options are grouped. Needless to say, you need to be logged in with the Yahoo account that you want to update.

In the Your Advertising Choices, there are two different tabs called Across the web and On Yahoo. Both of them need to be changed – make sure you do this because disabling just one leaves the data scanning active.

As Yahoo explains, the Across the web option “controls Yahoo ads displayed to you on other sites, widgets, and apps. Opting out disables personalization based on your interests.” On the other hand, the On Yahoo option is is there to “control Yahoo ads displayed to you on Yahoo sites, widgets, and apps. Opting out disables personalization based on your interests.”

This is what the button should look like after opting out

Open each tab manually and click the button that reads Opt Out. Once you do this, the page should refresh automatically and the button should switch to Opt In, letting you know that the personalized ads have been blocked.

As you can see, the method is by no means intuitive, and the average Joe is unlikely to discover it unless reading about Yahoo’s questionable practices in the media. For the time being, however, Yahoo has no intention to change the way users can opt out of the email scanning.

In the meantime, there’s a good chance that many users switch to other services, and truth be told, there are several others out there that promise to behave and offer a cleaner experience. Gmail has had its own similar problems in the past, but Google swears it plays fair now. If you’re looking for something else, however, ProtonMail is probably your best option.

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Yahoo says this is normal practice
Settings to opt out aren't really easy to findThis is what the button should look like after opting out
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