I have read about this before and I didn’t want to believe it then. I still don’t believe it, to be honest, but it is apparently happening.
Yahoo will recycle inactive user IDs. That is, if you don’t log on to Yahoo for a period of 12 months, your old user ID will be up for grabs by whoever happens to be interested.
Like your friendly neighborhood identity thief.
Yahoo claims that they are going to extraordinary lengths to prevent identity theft. But that is an insanely stupid thing to say. How can Yahoo prevent, say, a financial institution from sending a password confirmation e-mail to a hapless user’s old Yahoo ID if said user happened to use that ID to establish the account years ago?
That is just one of many scenarios that I can think about for Yahoo’s bone-headed decision to backfire.
And I can’t think of a single sensible reason as to why Yahoo wants to do this in the first place. They will piss off a great many users and likely please no one.
I hope they will change their mind before it’s too late. I hope that if they don’t change their mind, something nasty happens soon and someone sues their pants off.