[will_brown]

>this might be something your social circle claims to want,

Professionally I practice law so yes, myself and my colleagues are concerned about government entities violating not just privacy but the attorney client-privilege...though I digress and this is not what I am talking about, but it does happen.

>but if you look at the "average" person, they have next to zero concern for their privacy.

The "average" person isn't using Yahoo, that's why it would be a niche. I'll leave you with a interesting quote: "A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine."[1]

[1]http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

[spydum]

It's an interesting thought for sure, I just don't see how you sell it to shareholders. If I had to make a baseless assumption, I'd say the bulk of yahoos users are seniors who moved on from AOL, and don't know any difference.

I would be really interesting to see yahoos audience demographics to confirm or deny that though.. Perhaps they have a larger international audience I'm not aware of.