Yahoo denies report of mass email surveillance

Washington

YAHOO on Wednesday rejected allegations of mass email surveillance amid an outcry from privacy activists over a report that it created a special scanning program at the behest of US intelligence.

The report, which said the US Internet giant secretly scanned hundreds of millions of email accounts to help American intelligence, was "misleading", Yahoo said.

"We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimise disclosure," the company said in a statement to AFP. "The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems."

A report on Tuesday by Reuters news agency, citing former employees of the Internet firm as sou…