Yahoo Ordered to Explain How It Recovered a Convict’s Deleted Email

When we delete our emails we expect them to be, well, deleted, but there’s an old saying that says “once you put it on the internet, it’s there forever.” It looks like this saying still has some weight in our present days, and even though this particular case doesn’t relate to any embarrassing photos or videos, it just goes to show that our emails are really not deleted just because we click on a button in our inbox. A judge has recently partially passed a motion that orders Yahoo to explain how it managed to recover deleted email belonging to a UK drug trafficking convict name Russell Knaggs.

It’s worth noting that the company will only need to explain how it handled this particular account, but it definitely won’t be easy to justify recovering six months of message drafts, especially since Yahoo’s policies suggest that this should not have been possible in the first place. For now, Yahoo has stated that it used a “proprietary tool” to unearth auto-saved drafts, and it denies that it used any government surveillance in order to obtain the information. The company needs to show a series of relevant documents by August 31, and it also needs to come up with a credible witness by then.