How to Block Yahoo Mail from Scanning, Collecting, and Selling Your Data

Believe it or not, there still are millions of users out there using a Yahoo Mail account, and according to the Wall Street Journal (August 28, 2018) Yahoo Mail is still scanning, collecting, and selling users’ data to advertisers, and according to people familiar with the matter, some 200 million inboxes are being involved.

Officials working for Oath, the company that the new Yahoo owner Verizon created last year, say this is by no means unexpected behavior. An email service “is an expensive system,” Doug Sharp, Oath’s vice president of data, measurements and insights, said, so it makes sense for the company to try to generate some money using your data.

You can opt-out of this scanning of your e-mail (although Yahoo could scan your e-mail, regardless of your preference). Opting out isn’t a very straightforward thing to do because Yahoo has decided to hide the settings in this regard deep in its account information and not in the Yahoo Mail settings screen.

To opt-out you need to do is to open the Ad Interest Manager page where all the options are grouped. Needless to say, you need to be logged in with the Yahoo account that you want to update.

In the Your Advertising Choices, there are two different tabs called Across the web and On Yahoo. Both of them need to be changed – make sure you do this because disabling just one leaves the data scanning active.

Open each tab manually and click the button that reads Opt Out. Once you do this, the page should refresh automatically and the button should switch to Opt In, letting you know that the personalized ads have been blocked.

As you can see, the method is by no means intuitive, and the average person is unlikely to discover it unless reading about Yahoo’s questionable practices in the media. For the time being, however, Yahoo has no intention to change the way users can opt out of the email scanning.
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