I want to start this post by saying "im the type of person that is really big on data privacy"
I joined yahoo.com in 2009, which I think was the date that they officially were made public, as a matter of fact yahoo was my first email account that I ever made, unbeknownst to me that 13 years down the line I would be forced to take them on.
Yahoo is a company that I put my trust in, people need to understand that once you signup with an email service you're putting your trust in them, they get to know you personally on so many levels that even you don't understand, handling all your data, communication with family, friends, businesses basically everything that you connect to it, so how do they use this data? and why don't they fully disclose the full extent to which they use it.
Just last week I decided to check my email for new mail, then I realised I couldn't login, so I went through the usual forgot password process and got an "uh oh we couldn't find your account online contact us" pop up, I couldn't reach them via phone calls so I decided why not hit them up on twitter and so I did that.
The conversation was smooth at first with their customer service, but as the conversation grew longer and longer I realised they weren't going to recover my account, as a matter of fact they directed me to their official link where I was asked to subscribe to a monthly premium membership fee before I could get my account back. I couldn't believe what was going on because to me yahoo for 13 years had always been a free service and never required its customers to pay a subscription fee to access their own data.
In the heat of the moment I shot back that I didn't need to pay anything just to get my account back because it's my data and it wasn't like I lost my account password or anything, but customer service came with a strong resistance and insisted that I pay for premium, so I sucked it up and decided I was going to pay only to realise I had to call them to make this transaction.
So suspicious, I called them but couldn't reach them so I went back to twitter to let customer care know that it couldn't happen and then bluntly they told me they couldn't help me unless I could pay upfront and as I thought about it I started to realise what was happening, so I went online to search for people similar with issues and I found a ton, it became apparent to me that yahoo is perpetrating a pay wall scheme to extort some of its users out of their money by intentionally locking them out of their accounts, asking them to reach out and then forcing them to subscribe to a yearly premium service in order to get back access to their accounts.
So I decided I no longer wanted to use their service and requested that my data be sent to me and removed from all their servers including deleting my account, I was met with a cold, silent and empty reply, yahoo customer care begun to ignore my messages and continued to do so with so many people around the world using the service, denying us of our right to control and claim our data, a company that big thinks regular people don't have the resources to take them on legally and that's why they act like that, but I have started a private campaign gathering all the people with similar issues with yahoo, on the internet to take them on as a united front against these unscrupulous and money grabbing acts by a company that promised to protect our data and give us free control over if we share it with them, I was naive to trust a company like that.
With the increase of crypto concept in internet, too many fake applications and phishing methods are being developed. I get hundreds of fake phishing messages on Discord every day. The same situation is the same for twitter, when you type certain keywords under your tweet, many bots start making requests through fake accounts. Especially in this period when Web3.0 develops, we should pay more attention to security and privacy issues.
I completely agree with you on that, so many bots on the internet its hard to do anything safely
So that's what happened! I had the same experience around 2007. Yahoo was my most used email and one day i can no longer access it and forgot password doesn't work. But at time no email is too important in there. So i just create another email with gmail.and never went back to yahoo ever since.
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I had my bank account and everything attached to it, I had to change everything to gmail, i'm never using them again