Of course they do. It is one way they make money for their site. They sell lists of their emaill addresses.
Yahoo! does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or non-affiliated companies except to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:
- We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with Yahoo! under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help Yahoo! communicate with you about offers from Yahoo! and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.
- We have a parent's permission to share the information if the user is a child under age 13. Parents have the option of allowing Yahoo! to collect and use their child's information without consenting to Yahoo! sharing of this information with people and companies who may use this information for their own purposes.
- We respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims.
- We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of Yahoo!'s terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.
- We transfer information about you if Yahoo! is acquired by or merged with another company. In this event, Yahoo! will notify you before information about you is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
No, Yahoo! doesn't sell a list of their customers e-mail addresses to spammers. It's against the law, it's morally wrong, and they have an extensively long terms & conditions that if you ever read through it, you'd understand that they do not follow the practice of selling e-mail lists.Of course they do. It is one way they make money for their site. They sell lists of their emaill addresses.
Nighthawk if you would have read more than just that response from me you would see i explained myself about this answer. I said it could have jsut been 1 person in there that did it to get money. Please do not come by with this after reading just my first answer and not the rest i have posted as i explained myself on this. I know how email works i know the tools as i have them myself. Please i ask you to read all my responses next time. Thank you.No, Yahoo! doesn't sell a list of their customers e-mail addresses to spammers. It's against the law, it's morally wrong, and they have an extensively long terms & conditions that if you ever read through it, you'd understand that they do not follow the practice of selling e-mail lists.
Yes, Yahoo! has tools that can see what your date of birth and your security question/answer are, they can see when you created your account, but there's no way that they aggregate every single e-mail username in the database for sale. I've seen the tools, I've seen how Yahoo! works. Period.
Spammers simply generate username combinations and fire off mass e-mails to every single combination, when it hits an e-mail inbox that doesn't bounce back as invalid it more than likely logs it in a database for future spamming purposes. It has nothing to do with the companies selling your information.
@mak, ali: Brute force only takes one success.
Once they try aligator925@yahoo.com, aligator926@yahoo.com and the latter doesn't bounce, it's added to their list of "OK" addresses. 99% of spam is pharmaceutical or money-making anyway, and then the email harvesters sell the email that they found to spam lists.
Reason @yahoo.com might get more spam than @gmail.com is because the probability of a successful email via brute-force on yahoo is higher than on gmail, et. al.
Brute force takes *time* but only once; so as soon as that initial period is over, it's done. You're email is gone, it doesn't matter how hard to guess it is.
ah... well there's a difference between saying "a morally-bankrupt employee at Yahoo! might have sold a couple of email addresses at some point" verses "Yahoo! regularly engages in the trade of private information in exchange for money"
But, yeah, I get what you're saying![]()