Standing next to Google in its fight against data spying and hacking activities, Yahoo has promised its 273 million Yahoo Mail users of a well encrypted and secured email system as soon as next year.
Yahoo Chief information officer Alex Stamos, at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, on Thursday announced that the company is planning to develop an end-to-end encrypted email system probably by next year that would make it impossible for hackers and government spies to access users’ private data.
The encryption would allow for sending emails with coded and scrambled content readable only by the sender and the receiver.
Supporting the same cause, Google has already altered its Gmail service to become more secure by using an encrypted HTTPS connection for its 425 million users. The company recently added a Chrome plug-in, called “End-to-End,” to secure its web-based email services. Email content secured by end-to-end encryption will be much harder to access by any intermediary, including the webmail provider itself, the company claimed.
Google is also encouraging website developers to make their sites safer and secure for visitors and has announced that websites opting for site encryption will have better chances of appearing in its search results.
Yahoo’s latest move comes in the wake of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations related to the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs that aimed at hacking into user’s private data. Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Facebook have already opted for internal traffic encryption after it was found that their overseas connections was hacked by the spy agency.
