Yahoo has taken the fight to the National Security Agency (NSA), by announcing it will make all traffic that flows between its data centers encrypted by Q1 2014 to protect users from online snooping and thwart NSA spies.
Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer announced the new privacy initiative via an official Tumblr post. Yahoo's move follows those by companies like Google after recent revelations that NSA has been secretly gathering data.
"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 U.S. government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo" said Mayer. "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. We will continue to evaluate how we can protect our users' privacy and their data."
Mayer promised that by end March 2014, all data that moves between Yahoo's servers internally will be encrypted with 1048-bit SSL. Users will have the option of encrypting all data that is sent between their computers and Yahoo servers.
In October, Yahoo announced that its Yahoo Mail would be encrypted with 2048-bit key SSL by January 8, 2014.
Yahoo's move comes after the recent NSA spying. Government documents that Edward Snowden got hold of and the same were exposed by The Washington Post revealed that the NSA-GCHQ's joint MUSCULAR project also targeted Yahoo.
"According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA's acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency's headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records - including "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video," per The Washington Post report at the time.
Yahoo has revealed that it will work with its co-branded Mail partners to make sure that the basic HTTPS protocols are enabled.
