MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Reuters reported on Tuesday that Yahoo Inc. built secretly last year software to scan all emails of their users for information at the request of US intelligence officials and conducted the surveillance after receiving a classified demand from the National Security Agency or the FBI. The article cited three former Yahoo employees and another unidentified person familiar with the matter.
"The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems," the statement said.
On September 22, Yahoo announced that a state-sponsored actor hacked its networks in late 2014, stealing information about some 500 million users including contact information, passwords and birth dates.
Yahoo! Inc. is a US Internet corporation based in Sunnyvale, California. Well-known for its search engine, the company offers a number of online services, including e-mail service Yahoo mail.