[resoluteteeth]

The idea that Yahoo is covering for a government surveillance program is entertaining, but it hardly seems difficult to believe that they aren't actually deleting what they say they are deleting. Of course, keeping copies of everything forever in violation of their own policy is not exactly going to make law enforcement unhappy.

I suspect that yahoo and other companies haven't yet taken the issue of failing to delete data that should be deleted as seriously as that of losing data that shouldn't be deleted, but this has the potential to become a significant privacy issue.