Yahoo still feeling the effects of the data breach which saw more than 500 million accounts hacked into. The breach was believed to have taken place years before that but was only revealed this year. And now, the Internet giant is now losing their search engine partner StartPage.
The CEO of the search engine firm said that they could not have any more confidence in the company, hence their decision to move out.
StartPage is a European based search engine which is able to focus on the user privacy aspect. After the revelations of the Yahoo hack of over half a billion accounts which revealed several of the clients personal data, the company has now decided to cancel their partnership with Yahoo. In their announcement of the decision, the company also said that they would start to drop the aggregate results of Yahoo from the metasearch platform, lxquick.eu at the end of the month.
Robert Beens, the CEO of StartPage commented on the news of the breakup and said that the company was not the only company which was affected and disturbed by news of the hack and the lack of openness about some privacy violations on Yahoo’s part. He also said that regardless of the fact that the lxquick.eu can’t be affected by the Yahoo and government ties because of the strict privacy protection plans and because the company is also situated outside of the US jurisdiction, they still can’t be comfortable with partnering with the Yahoo business. He also added that they did not have confidence in Yahoo either.
Beens believes that even though StartPage was the first company to severe ties with Yahoo, other companies will likely follow suit and leave Yahoo.
Yahoo revealed back in September that they had discovered that there was a breach in relation to their email addresses. Passwords and birth dates were also leaked part of them. The hacking incident is believed to have taken place in 2014 and showed that there had been more than a billion email accounts which were compromised. Yahoo was also confronted earlier after they had helped the US government to install one of the programs on the servers to scan the emails of various users just so that they can gauge whether they have done wrong or not.
Yahoo is already in the middle of a $4.83 billion Verizon sale, but rumors and reports are said to be having second thoughts with the transaction. Digital rights group, Fight for the Future, has also launched a new campaign deriding Yahoo and urging users of the company, to delete the Yahoo accounts and stop using it. Beens said that Yahoo made the decision for people to walk away very easy. He also noted that its users had already started their private search engine for some superior search results.
