Greg's Corner

Is there even any point to keep using Yahoo?

Here we are again, discussing the Rasputin of the internet. No matter how many times someone tries to kill Yahoo, it’s still here. Once again the former king of the internet has announced that it’s discovered a new hack. Along with the 2014 hack that disclosed over 500 million user accounts, there has been an additional hack that took place in 2013, and exposed more than one billion accounts. That’s right, billion with a b.

So why are we still using the services of a long dying brand? From most reports, the only services that Yahoo still excels at are stock reports and fantasy football. Yet hundreds of millions of people continue to use Yahoo mail even though they’ve been hacked multiple times. Both Google and Microsoft offer superior products in GMail and Outlook.com and neither service has fallen victim to major hacks like this.

The reality is that while we see many people talk about privacy on the internet, but for the most part we don’t really care about security and privacy. What we really want is ease of use, which is why so many of us have passwords like ‘password’ and ‘123456’. Not only that, but one could imagine that the majority of Yahoo users are legacy users since Yahoo has been such a huge player on the internet even before Google.

However Yahoo’s problems are really their own fault. They’ve failed to evolve in an ever-changing tech world with new threats emerging everyday. With security not being a priority for Yahoo they continue to be the butt of many jokes in tech circles. However, user complacency and apathy continues to keep this tech Titanic afloat.