This is silly. If I'm a shareholder in Y!, I don't want them wasting time/money on something like this right now. Honestly, the majority of the population doesn't care about the government email tracking or what-have-you. A very vocal minority seems to care, for now, but your average accountant / builder probably didn't spend 5 minutes caring. If Y! did do something like this, I doubt it would last--just not enough people care to make it profitable.
You are right. General population doesn't care. But the vocal minority includes some of the best minds in engineering. Yahoo gain's their respect. Some of them will join Yahoo and go on to make products for the general population. I'm a shareholder and I like this move.
"Honestly, the majority of the population doesn't care about the government email tracking or what-have-you. A very vocal minority seems to care"
I keep hearing it's supposedly a minority, but everyone I speak to has concerns about the general issue. While my circles are biased I actually haven't met a "think of the children/terrorists" person in my life, only pundits in national papers and a seeming (biased sample again) minority of people on the Internet support the anti-privacy position.
With regard to more concrete evidence there is a much larger group in the opinion polls that see Snowden and his actions favourably than otherwise.[1] I also highly doubt the recent vote on limiting the NSA would have been only narrowly in favour of the status quo, 205 to 217, if it was a minority concern.[2] Congress members are well aware of public opinion, or alternatively the opinion of their backers.[3]
I genuinely don't care about US / UK government agencies slurping my data. I wish it actually did something to lower crime[1], and I wish it wasn't so expensive, and I wish the money went to other places, but I don't care about the privacy violation of my email being on more than one cache.
I am much more concerned about other privacy breaches that I'm subjected to.
People talk about the "decrypt your data or go to jail" parts of RIPA, and while that is worrying I'm a lot more worried about the other sections of RIPA which have been abused and caused actual harm to people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...)
Right now the publicity--the "Yahoo! is doing something new and interesting and helpful" is exactly what I'd want to see as a shareholder. And as an employee. And as someone with a Yahoo! login. Keep in mind that Yahoo's old enemy at this point is the idea that they are doing nothing new, nothing interesting. This feeling is what necessitates the acqui-hires and leads to new CEOs and low stock prices.
What would be truly awesome would be for the general population to login into their webmail account and the entire thing works just the same, they have the same "email address" but somehow as if by magic it isn't using email anymore, but the new protocol. Seriously easy and effective on-boarding.
But then why the heck would anyone use it / switch to it? Aside from the very technical crowd, which is a tiny portion of Y! users. It'd have nothing tangible to offer to new users--just invisible promises.
