Yahoo is to introduce encryption across its services in a bid to prevent intelligence services, such as the NSA, from snooping on its users.
The decision to encrypt communications was announced in a blog post by the firm's CEO Marissa Mayer. She said the web portal remained committed to protecting its users' privacy and data.
"There have been a number of reports over the last six months about the US government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo. I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centres to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever," she said.
"There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users' privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL - Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8, 2014. Today we are announcing that we will extend that effort across all Yahoo products."
This means all information passing through Yahoo's servers and data centres will now be encrypted and Yahoo email clients will use HTTPS. It plans to complete the process by the first quarter of 2014.
We've worked hard over the years to earn our users' trust and we fight hard to preserve it," said Mayer.
"As we have said before, we will continue to evaluate how we can protect our users' privacy and their data. We appreciate, and certainly do not take for granted, the trust our users place in us."
The move to encrypt data comes after the highly embarrassing revelations that US and UK spy agencies collected data from a number of tech companies. The news came to light after leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden that claimed the NSA had been secretly monitoring data passing between Yahoo and Google.
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