By using the Services, you consent to allow Yahoo!’s automated systems to scan and analyze all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account…

I’d not known about this, really not known. Not until the day after Labor Day when my email account was suspended.

I searched around online and found references to Yahoo’s doing this – that they scan emails – all emails. In fact, if you are not a yahoo member and post to someone who is, Yahoo looks at it.

I found references to people who had jokingly said they’d take the lugnuts off their wife’s car. For that, suspended. Forever.

For my suspension, I racked my brain to try to figure out what I’d sent. I’d just made a joke about “fart cans” (those silly exhaust party favors that teens (and people with teen brains) think are so cool). I’d posted that to a group I really didn’t know well (a friend had included me in the chain). Had one of them, some sort of prissy little fusspot, fingered me to the Yah-cops? Had their Agent Smiths caught it? Was it deemed offensive?

Folks, in a different form, I write occasionally erotica which I sell to online sources, and which is posted to those sources via Yahoo. Haven’t in a while – too busy. But, like,  if THAT didn’t trigger their klaxons, what had?

Worst, if you are going to be a police state (like Yahoo), and you are tapping people’s lines, then why show weakness in actually acting like a software company that cares? For example, don’t go soft and send a reason code with the suspension message so the guilty party actually knows what they did wrong. And don’t provide contact information or case numbers or anything, so your users can inquire about why they were busted. Don’t do any of that stuff. You don’t have to. So don’t. Be like the Bush Administration with Gitmo.

Anyway, it turns out that we recently bundled our AT&T services and not only did I need to replace my rather new modem I’d bought from them with a new modem I also bought from them, they combined our bills and somehow got the old, hacked (and closed) credit card rather then the new one on file. A month later, they run the card, it’s denied, and now I’m Buttle in Brazil, arrested, sacked, and sent to Information Retrieval for processing.

But the bottom line – I’m locked on AT&T/Yahoo for now. But I’m aware that every email I post, and every email I get, is scanned. And according to the net, some of the information gained is used by “market research” to place better, more effective ads. All of this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Remember, when the revolution comes, don’t use email. Big Yahoo is listening.