Yahoo! has a long, convoluted history. I know, I worked there. Yahoo is now part of Verizon, and hundreds of millions of people still use Yahoo for their personal email. I’ve had a Yahoo email address for what must be coming up on 20 years. Yahoo email generally does a really good job at what it’s intended for and, of course, its free to use. Free? Wondering how can they do this? First off, it’s ad supported and as with most free services online – keep this in mind – if the product is free, YOU are the product. This essentially means, that you are trading a bit of your privacy for their service so Yahoo can serve you target advertisements and sell your data to others.
Yahoo email may allow access to third parties that provide additional capabilities or services to you through your email account. These additional services often come at a price – your privacy. That’s not to say they are all necessarily bad or malicious, but it is important to understand what services beyond Yahoo might have access to your personal information. Equipped with that knowledge, you can decide which of those to allow or cut off the ones you are not aware or not comfortable with.
To see the services or applications that can access your Yahoo mail, follow these steps (from a web browser).
Login to your Yahoo mail account.
Click your name and select Account Info.
On the account page, click Recent Activity. Here you’ll see a list of apps or services that have access to your Yahoo mail – meaning these apps can see what’s in your mailbox.
If you are comfortable with those apps and understand what they do, you can leave everything as is. If you don’t want the app connected to your mail or have no idea how it got there, click Remove to revoke access.
It’s best to check this setting periodically to ensure that only apps that you have approved have access to your email.
And while you’re there, you should consider changing your password and enabling Two-step verification to make your email account even more secure.
