13 November

Yahoo's terms for Taiwan name a company with a Taipei address as the provider of Yahoo Mail and apply Republic of China law, yet its privacy policy there says information may be processed and stored outside your country of residence and disclosed in response to lawful government requests, without naming the countries or governments involved (both read on 8 November 2026). On 13 November 2007, Yahoo announced that it had settled a US lawsuit brought by the families of two people jailed in China, a journalist and a dissident, with the terms kept confidential and no amount made public at the time (Yahoo announced in 2021 that its services would no longer be accessible from mainland China from 1 November, according to a Reuters report carried by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre). The families argued that the data Yahoo gave Chinese authorities directly led to the two arrests and convictions, according to MIT Technology Review, while Yahoo argued that Chinese law required it to hand over the data and its lawyers said it was unclear what role, if any, the data had played. A US House Foreign Affairs Committee press release lists the account data Chinese authorities requested on the journalist as the IP address (a network number that can be used to trace where a connection came from), login history and several weeks of email content, and gives the journalist's sentence as 10 years for divulging state secrets. Wherever you live, you can open your own provider's terms of service and privacy policy to check which company provides your mailbox and which law applies (our suggestion).