Take that, NSA: Yahoo lays out plan for even more encryption by early 2014

Yahoo
Yahoo on lockdown

Marissa Mayer is laying out new plans today on how Yahoo plans to keep the NSA and other spying eyes from seeing user data by early next year.

The Yahoo CEO made her announcement on the company's Tumblr, and she outlined three specific measures to protect user data.

The first prong of the policy is the already-announced plan to encrypt all emails in a 2048-bit key across the Yahoo network by January 8, 2014.

Newly announced today is Yahoo's plan to encrypt all information that moves between its data centers by the end of Q1 2014. Last month, documents from Edward Snowden revealed the NSA and Britain's GCHQ breached the links between data centers operated by both Google and Yahoo to access user info.

Mayer also said Yahoo plans to work with international Mail partners to make all co-branded Mail accounts https-enabled.

Finally, Yahoo plans to give users the option to encrypt all data flowing through its servers by the end of the first four months of next year.

Keeping your secrets

The announcement is no doubt a reaction to the recent climate of NSA spying and recent information-tapping policies. In fact, Mayer gave a direct proclamation that "Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever."

As of late, services that handle data have been revamping privacy policies to uphold the sanctity of internet conversations and data transfers. Instead of focusing on just giving file sharers more gigabytes, webhosting services have been racing to provide users with secure and private web channels.

Kim Dotcom's Mega came out of Beta to offer users a secure cloud storage service and encrypted messaging as well as secure audio/video calls. Google similarly started offering encrypted Cloud Storage earlier this summer.

Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.