Douglas MacMillan, Sarah Krouse and Keach Hagey report:
The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.
Read more on WSJ.
Shannon Liao also reports on this over on The Verge:
Yahoo still scans users’ emails for data to sell to advertisers, a practice that many tech companies have moved away from, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Yahoo’s owner, Oath, is in talks with advertisers to provide a service that would analyze over 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes for consumer data, sources told WSJ. Oath did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Oath confirmed to the WSJ that it performs email scannings and said that it only scans promotional emails, usually from retailers. Users have the ability to opt out, it said. Oath’s argument is that email is an expensive system, and people can’t expect a free service without some value exchanged.
Read more on The Verge.
h/t, Joe Cadillic