Yahoo Calls Reuters Article About Email Scanning ‘Misleading,’ EU Gets Involved

Reuters recently published an article accusing Yahoo Inc. of helping the U.S. government spy on its users by scanning hundreds of millions of emails. The online entity has since responded to the allegations, saying that the report was “misleading,” though it didn’t actually deny doing the deed. In the meantime, the EU is now looking into the matter to see if any of its citizens were affected by the email scanning.

In an attempt to downplay the issue without giving an outright denial of the illicit activities it is being accused of, Yahoo is saying that Reuter’s report does not paint the whole picture, BBC reports. Yahoo is denying that it did not design a unique program to specifically scan all of the incoming emails of all of its users, however.

"We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimise disclosure,” the online company says. “The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems."

Given the circumstances that Yahoo finds itself in, it’s understandable that it wants to divert the negative attention that it’s been getting in order to preserve the deal that it’s working on with Verizon. The online company is set to sell for $4.8 billion and this scandal could completely derail that arrangement if it gets any worse. Based on another report by Reuters regarding an EU inquiry into the matter, this could very well be possible.

EU leaders are already asking the European Commission and other EU watchdogs to making their own investigations. One of the groups making an inquiry into the email scanning scandal is Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner.

"Any form of mass surveillance infringing on the fundamental privacy rights of EU citizens would be viewed as a matter of considerable concern," the agency said in a statement.

So far, Yahoo’s only other response to the report is to say that it is a law-abiding company. This does very little to boost confidence in the company’s innocence.