Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is promising that its users will be protected from the prying eyes of government snoops. CEO Marissa Mayer announced on the company's official Tumblr page that it will offer the widely used Secure Sockets Layer encryption protocol for all of its offerings by the end of Q1 2014. All information flowing between its data centers will be protected by the encryption, and users will have the option to utilize it in all data flow between themselves and Yahoo!'s services.
In the Tumblr post, Mayer pledged that these efforts will be part of the company's operations going forward. She wrote, "As we have said before, we will continue to evaluate how we can protect our users' privacy and their data. We appreciate, and certainly do not take for granted, the trust our users place in us."
The move comes on the heels of revelations earlier this year that certain telecoms and tech companies have been complicit in providing branches of the government with access to their user data.
Mayer emphasized that Yahoo! has never provided access to its data centers for any government agency.
