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Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

b0ing.me

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#23
post #15

Wow imagine this scenario: I sign up for a service using my Yahoo email account. I don't use my Yahoo account for a year. Someone gains access to my email address. That person enters my email address into a forgot password field. Boom They now have access to my service. As another poster stated, the mind boggles.

I just reactivated my old Yahoo email account to prevent this scenario.

I was hoping they had retained all my old emails so I could go trough and find any exposures. Unfortunately, once an account is deactivated, the emails are gone - even if you log back in with the same password. Deleting the emails from the dormant account is probably the right thing to do, but it makes it impossible to see what sites I may have used the Yahoo email account to register with.

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#24
post #5
post #3

I clicked on the link expecting it be alarmism, but this legitimately boggles the mind.

I definitely did a little title baiting, but I think it's justified in this case. This is a monumental cock-up.

Looking at it, fuck, I dont think you really link baited enough. What are they thinking!?!?!?!?!? I can almost no benefit to this. Start a new domain if you want to free up usernames.

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#25
Yahoo could append a text header in the mail body reminding it's a recycled email so caution has to be taken and it should not be trusting it upfront. It adds it to the first 10000 mails sent or the first 6 month whichever comes _last_

That will sufficiently annoying so that only people that really wants back their email and commit to it will stay.

It's not without flaws but it's a tad better than their current plan.

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#26
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because for better or worse, email has become the defacto identity identifier on the web. If you allow people to grab emails that used to be owned by someone else, you effectively allow them to own their identity on every website where they registered with that email in the past. And while some other email providers do the same, it's particularly bad with yahoo because they are such a huge and longstanding provider,…

Still, we can't blame Yahoo for that, right? We can't blame them for peoples Internet incompetence. We can't blame them for the limited scope most service developers have. As I user, I have to update my email address I use and other services should delete inactive accounts, too. Or at least notify inactive users. I know, especially the latter option is more or less inexistent. But although think of all the data that…

You can't blame Yahoo as-in "they are technically and legally allowed to do that".

But on the other hand, Yahoo is a falling behemoth that is trying to earn itself a new image; and doing such a stupid move can and will earn them the mark that they still "don't get it", and rightly so.

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#27
post #25

Yahoo could append a text header in the mail body reminding it's a recycled email so caution has to be taken and it should not be trusting it upfront. It adds it to the first 10000 mails sent or the first 6 month whichever comes _last_ That will sufficiently annoying so that only people that really wants back their email and commit to it will stay. It's not without flaws but it's a tad better than their current plan.

While it could be somewhat a little better (or would it ? people tend to not pay attention to warnings like that) for emails sent from the "claimed" account, it wouldn't help at all alleviate the issue of email sent to the account.

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#29

The freaking problem with that is that I couldn't retrieve in time my lost password to my old yahoo account I used for flickr. Don't care that much about the yahoo account but I don't know what'll happen to my flickr pics and contact I use once in a year. And yes, I still use it. The daisy-chaining of email addresses that may or may not be active anymore (some due to ISP going out of business) and stupid security que…

As far as I know logging into Flicker will keep your account activated.

Problem is: I can't login into Flickr because I don't have the credentials to the yahoo account that I need to sign in to Flickr.

Re: Thanks For The Identity Theft, Yahoo

#30
Am I missing something? You only lose accounts which you are not using, correct? It is easy enough to avoid losing the account by logging into it once. If you have lost access to the account, you can go ahead and reclaim the same account back through this scheme, if I am not mistaken. Could someone please explain why people are getting so worked up about this issue?
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