Yahoo Settles Email Scanning Class Action Lawsuit

Top Class Actions’s website and social media posts use affiliate links. If you make a purchase using such links, we may receive a commission, but it will not result in any additional charges to you. Please review our Affiliate Link Disclosure for more information.

Yahoo has agreed to make several changes to its email servers and its website to settle a class action lawsuit accusing it of illegally scanning users’ emails while they were in transit.

On Jan. 7, the Class plaintiffs asked the court for preliminary approval of the proposed settlement, saying that “Plaintiffs have achieved their principal goal in this litigation through this settlement.”

The Yahoo email scanning class action plaintiffs state that this settlement was reached through arms-length negotiations, and only after significant litigation, including defeating a motion to dismiss in 2014 and winning Class certification in June of 2015.

Specifically, Yahoo has agreed to make technical changes to its email servers, so that incoming or outgoing “email content will be retrieved from the servers from which email is accessible by Yahoo Mail users, and only sent to servers for analysis for advertising purposes after a Yahoo Mail user can access the email in his or her” inbox or sent mail folders, respectively.

In addition, to settle the email scanning class action lawsuit, Yahoo will make several changes to its website, including adding disclaimers that “Yahoo analyzes and stores all communications content, including email content from incoming and outgoing mail” and that “Yahoo may share keywords, package tracking and product identification numbers with third parties in order to enhance your user experience and provide targeted ads.”

Finally, Yahoo will certify that it did not collect or store any email content of any Class Members, which the class action lawsuit stated was in violation of federal law.

If the preliminary settlement is approved, Yahoo will be required to keep these changes for three years, though the Class plaintiffs’ motion claims that “Yahoo has no intention of eliminating these changes to its email architecture after the term of the injunction expires.”

In exchange for this settlement, Class Members will release all claims for other injunctive relief, but not for monetary damages, according to court documents. Restitution was not part of the Yahoo email scanning class action, so Class Members will still be able to file their own lawsuit if they were damaged by Yahoo’s email scanning practices.

The Yahoo email scanning Class Members include “all persons in the United States who are not Yahoo Mail subscribers and who have sent emails to or received emails from a Yahoo mail subscriber from October 2, 2011 to the present, or who will send emails to or receive emails from a Yahoo Mail subscriber in the future.”

If this proposed settlement is approved by the court, the parties will provide notice to the Class of the settlement through internet advertising and a hosted website. Class Members will then have 90 days to object to the preliminary settlement.

The Class is represented by Daniel C. Girard, Amanda M. Steiner, and Ashley Tveit of Girard Gibbs LLP and Laurence D. King, Frederic S. Fox, and David A. Straite of Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer LLP.

The Yahoo Email Scanning Class Action Lawsuit is In re: Yahoo Mail Litigation, Case No. 5:13-cv-04980, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division.