Yahoo, the once-mighty search-engine company, executed some remarkably graceless legal pirouettes as it tried to defend its invasive email scanning practices — scanning of emails not sent by Yahoo Mail customers who had signed off on the terms of service, but the emails of people who had sent email to Yahoo users. All to no avail. Last week (May 26), a federal judge approved a class-action lawsuit against Yahoo. But a review of the arguments that Yahoo tried in court is rather entertaining.

A group of consumers who are not subscribers to Yahoo email are suing Yahoo, accusing it of analyzing their emails. Yahoo “extracts keywords from the body of the email, reviews and extracts links and attachments, and classifies the email based on its content,” according to the filed lawsuit. “Yahoo also subjects the copied email and extracted information to additional analysis to create targeted advertising for its subscribers, and stores it for later use.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…