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While Yahoo’s record on data privacy may be dubious, Google has also had its own issues with Gmail over the past year, despite ending targeted advertisement last year, citing users’ privacy concerns.

While Yahoo Mail remains popular in those aged 65 and older, only 19 percent of those aged 18–29 still use it compared to 61 percent who prefer Gmail. In 2017, in a survey of 2,500 US adults, Statista found that 44 percent of people used Gmail compared to 29 percent that used Yahoo Mail. Every single Yahoo account (3 billion users) was hacked in 2013. Yahoo has also struggled with a series of data breaches that have marred its reputation. Even if Oath provided data from 200 million accounts, only a few of those users would have bought specific items. Still, in these meetings, advertisers expressed doubt if Yahoo Mail was even big enough to send highly targeted ads. Anonymous sources told the WSJ that Oath representatives know many people use Yahoo Mail as their spam account that collects unwanted emails from retailers, and that’s precisely what advertisers could capitalize on. The move looks like Oath is scraping the bottom of the barrel with its mail service as it struggles to combat the more popular Gmail.

As we reported in April, Oath’s privacy policy allows it to read AOL and Yahoo emails to tailor ads, and that includes human readers, not just machines. The process of reviewing these emails requires human readers as well as algorithm sorting. It’s spelled out in Oath’s privacy policy Now, wedding invitations are also ignored, Oath told the WSJ. Invitations to traditional Indian weddings that can be sent to a large number of recipients and take place over several days, were mistakenly labeled as commercial emails, which Oath then had to correct. The algorithm has made mistakes before, though. Personal emails are ignored and personally identifiable information is hidden from the data that’s given to advertisers, Oath told the WSJ. Those who receive emails inviting them to drive for Lyft are sorted as “self-employed.” Advertisers can then target these groups of users when taking out ads with Oath. For instance, users who often buy plane tickets are labeled frequent flyers by Oath’s algorithms. Oath uses algorithms to sort Yahoo emails by different consumer preferences and places cookies that will show users similar advertising in the future. To opt out, you have to specifically head into the Ad Interest Manager here and select “opt out.” The page is not located in Settings, which makes it hard to find. Even the emails in Yahoo’s premium email service, which costs $3.49 a month, are subject to the analysis, unless users opt out.