SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo has added more layers of
security in its effort to shield people’s online lives from government
spying and other snooping.
The measures announced Wednesday
include the completion of a system that encrypts all information being
transmitted from one Yahoo data center to another. The technology is
designed to make the emails and other digital information flowing
through data centers indecipherable to outsiders.
Search requests
made from Yahoo’s home page are also now automatically encrypted, and
the Sunnyvale, Calif., company is promising to make it more difficult
for unauthorized intruders to hack into other services, including video
chats, within the next few months. Yahoo strengthened the security of
its email in January.
"Whether or not our users understand it, I
feel it’s our responsibility to keep them safe," Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s
recently hired chief information of security, told a small group of
reporters.
Stamos, a former security consultant, joined Yahoo Inc. less than a month ago as part of the company’s
anti-snooping crusade.
Yahoo
and other major technology companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft
Crop. have made online security a top priority during the last 10 months
amid a series of revelations about U.S. government programs that have
vacuumed up personal information about millions of Web surfers in an
effort to thwart terrorism. The wide-ranging surveillance has been
outlined in documents leaked to the media by former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The technology industry’s
indignant response has been driven by financial self-interest as well as
an aversion to government prying. Most Internet services make money
from ads that could be more difficult to sell if spying fears cause
their audiences to shrink.
Yahoo, which has more than 800 million
worldwide users, vowed late last year to encrypt its data centers by
March 31 after reports that the U.S. government had been secretly
infiltrating the lines that transfer information overseas.
Yahoo
still lags behind Google’s encryption efforts. In an interview
Wednesday, Stamos said Yahoo hasn’t been able to move as fast as it
wants because many of its services rely on content and ads provided by
thousands of other companies, including some that aren’t convinced that
they need to encrypt.
For that reason, Yahoo’s widely used news,
sports and finance sections still aren’t automatically encrypted.
Visitors to those services can trigger an encrypted service by typing in
"https" before the website’s address. Yahoo is confident that it will
be able to persuade its content and advertising partners to take the
steps needed to enable automatic encryption of those services later this
year.
"Some partners already understand this is the way the wind
is blowing," Stamos said. "We are moving to a world where all content is
encrypted all the time."
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