Yahoo spying price list draws a takedown notice

I always assumed that Yahoo kept tabs on everyone who uses their service.

I didn’t realize that requests for spying information from Yahoo are so commonplace (particularly from Law Enforcement authorities) that there’s a price list for their spying services.

Wired just posted a fascinating article by Kim Zetter that talks about Yahoo’s published spying guidelines, how a copy was posted on the Cryptome site, and how Yahoo’s lawyers are trying to force Cryptome to take the page down.

Here’s what surprised me:

Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash file… the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

Chats conducted through the company’s Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo’s server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not have the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.

Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder’s friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.

And all of that information is available for $30 or so from your friendly local law enforcement authorities.