Yahoo Has Convincing Legal Arguments for Breaching Users’ Privacy

Yahoo Inc. can win the class action lawsuit by subscribers who claim it illegally seized information from their e-mail accounts, Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien told Sputnik.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Tien said Yahoo can argue that it did not intercept e-mails, because they were already stored on the server when their contents were processed for advertising purposes.

“Through Turn's cookie syncing program the re-identification affects dozens of other sites and ad networks. According to Mayer's research, many ad networks and high profile sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, BlueKai, AppNexus, Walmart and WebMD, receive copies of the respawned cookie,”

© Flickr / Kenya Allmond

“Yahoo has a lot of legal arguments that might win later,” Tien said on Thursday.

On Tuesday, US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California ordered Yahoo to face a nationwide class-action lawsuit for illegally intercepting subscriber e-mails sent from non-Yahoo accounts, and then using the information to boost advertising revenue.

In 2014, Yahoo generated 79 percent of its revenue from search and display advertising, according to media reports.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world, according to its website.