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 The commitment announced Monday by Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer
follows a recent Washington Post report that the National Security
Agency has been hacking into the communications lines of the data
centers run by Yahoo and Google Inc. to intercept information about
what people do and say online.
Yahoo had previously promised to encrypt its email service by early
January. Now, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company plans to have all data
encrypted by the end of March to make it more difficult for
unauthorized parties to decipher the information.
Google began to encrypt its Gmail service in 2010 and has since
introduced the security measure on many other services. The Mountain
View, Calif., company has promised to encrypt the links to its data
centers, too. A Google engineer said that task had been completed in
a post on his Google Plus account earlier this month, but the
company hasn't yet confirmed all the encryption work is done.
Other documents leaked to various media outlets by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden this year have revealed that Yahoo, Google
and several other prominent technology companies, including
Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., have been feeding the
U.S. government some information about their international users
under a court-monitored program called PRISM. The companies maintain
they have only surrendered data about a very small number of users,
and have only cooperated when legally required.
The NSA says its online surveillance programs have played an
instrumental role in thwarting terrorism.
The increased use of encryption technology is aimed at stymieing
government surveillance that may be occurring without the companies'
knowledge. Even when it's encrypted, online data can still be
heisted, but the information looks like gibberish without the
decoding keys.
"I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never
given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other
government agency," Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wrote in a Monday post
on the company's Tumblr blog.
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Facebook also has said it's cloaking its social networking network
with greater encryption, but hasn't publicly set a timetable for
getting all the added protection in place.
Debunking the perception that the NSA and other U.S. government
agencies can easily vacuum up potentially sensitive information
about people's online lives is important to Yahoo, Google and other
Internet companies because they need Web surfers to regularly use
their services so they can sell more of the digital ads that bring
in most of their revenue.
The companies fear the government spying revelations eventually will
drive some people away from their services and make it more
difficult to attract more users outside the U.S. If that were to
happen, it could slow the companies' financial growth and undercut
their stock prices.
Yahoo has been struggling to boost its revenue for years, making it
even more important for the company to reassure its 800 million
users worldwide about the sanctity of their personal information.
[Associated
Press MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer]
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