The amount of personal information held by firms like Google and Facebook has made them ripe targets for data-hungry governments and intelligence agencies. But the bull’s-eye on Yahoo’s back may be losing its appeal.Government data requests served on Yahoo have been falling. The firm received about 18,000 requests for user data from governments worldwide during the first six months of 2014, the company revealed Thursday in its third report on such matters. The highest number of requests, which generally deal with criminal investigations, came from the U.S. at around 6,700.The requests may include content like emails, Flickr photos, Yahoo address book entries, even posts on Yahoo Answers. “Non-content data,” meanwhile, includes information that is just as sensitive such as IP addresses, billing information, and the “to”, “from” and date fields in email headers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Continue reading at 'PC World'
[ PC World | 2014-09-26 00:00:00 UTC ]