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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

We will share ... your account registration information (such as your user ID, gender, name, email address, postcode & age), your content and advertising interests, content associated with your account, the types of services you use and how you engage with them, cookie and device IDs, IP addresses, geolocation information and activity information from across our websites, apps, software and other services. All of the information that we collect about you may be shared across the various Oath brands and within our Verizon family of companies.

To delete your Yahoo account, click here:

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2044.html

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A fun test would be to post the data sharing policy of various services/apps and see how often someone posts a comment like this. Someone always posts a comment like this and it always feels, to me, like a knee-jerk reaction.

They've had your data for years (and were previously not only irresponsible but likely shared it with countless other partners), what has changed now?

Just because Yahoo is forthecoming about that they're sharing data, rather than selling it and not telling, thats grounds to close your account? I'm not saying you shouldn't, just odd to always see this comment.

> They've had your data for years (and were previously not only irresponsible but likely shared it with countless other partners), what has changed now?

To be honest, it's already in the wild when they where hacked and everything was stolen. 3 billion accounts. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/how-the-yahoo-hack-stacks-up...

You could almost argue your data is safer with verizon than with the old yahoo! (Safer, with a hard R. Not safe, just less not-safe)

The parent comment you're replying to is not telling people they should close their account, or even making a fuss about the data sharing. She's just giving people information that people might find helpful. Services like this often have labyrinthine processes for closing accounts, so it's nice to have a quick link for how to do it.

> They've had your data for years (and were previously not only irresponsible but likely shared it with countless other partners), what has changed now?

This seems like it cuts both ways.

To be sure, Yahoo's data handling was reprehensible before the acquisition also. But if this reminds some people to pay attention to that, it's all to the good - I don't actually expect things to get better. Deleting or restricting your Yahoo presence was probably the right decision 1 or 3 or 5 years ago, but that doesn't mean it's wrong now.

More broadly, there's normally an argument for distrusting ISPs and mobile carriers even more than internet companies; they can correlate with physical presence, have a history of shockingly immoral behavior, and have repeatedly colluded with state surveillance far beyond what they were compelled to do.

I'm not sure how relevant any of that is in Yahoo's case, though, since they've basically alternated between handing user data to the government and handing it to literally everyone in the world. You're certainly right that anyone who only lost faith in their data security now has been in trouble for a long, long time.

Note that Yahoo's account integration is weak and weird so you may wish to manually delete things linked to your account first.

For example, if you have any Yahoo Groups you own, you should either delete them or transfer ownership first, as Yahoo has basically left that area on life support only and won't even promote a member to a moderator, let alone owner after a poll anymore -- so there are groups basically accumulating spam, with public posts that need to be deleted, or just unable to get new members.

Take care though, they allow email address reuse.

How do they avoid HIPAA violations in that case? Or is that not at issue somehow?

HIPAA only applies to medical information. I didn't see any mention of that, so I'm assuming it doesn't apply here. Wish it did.

I have no idea. I know that my providers avoid sending covered information to my email, they send me a notification to log into their messaging system.

Why would HIPAA apply to Yahoo?

Um... Yahoo has nothing to do with HIPAA since they don't deal with medical information at all.

You don't email medical records or information in the first place, you "secure message" them through an encrypted channel. An example of such a service is RelayHealth.

> We will also delete or anonymize your account data and settings across the Yahoo network. This includes the contents of your Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Contacts, Business Mail services provided with your Aabaco Small Business account, My Yahoo settings and more, including your Flickr photos and the statistics for your Flickr account, if applicable.

The degree to which the Yahoo acquisition was purely negative for Flickr users still astounds me.

It's terrible. Do you know any site similar to it that's as good as flickr used to be (i.e: being able to view/download original size pictures, and all the EXIF data galore)?

Flickr also has a search by CC license, which is good to have.

If you didn't know by now, assume it on all services. They promise the moon and then change the Privacy Policy when Wall Street demands 30% q2q growth.

Thank you for this link. Worked well and quickly. I haven't maintained my yahoo account for years, it's good to actually get rid of it.

Apparently doesn't work if you don't have a yahoo mail account.

Reboot and try again.

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