Yahoo Account Policy Hurts Iranians' Free Speech, Activists Say

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Image: Mashable Composite. Wikimedia Commons

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-05-01 20:57:31 UTC

Internet users in Iran haven't been able to register for new Yahoo accounts since September 2013, when the company started requiring phone numbers in the registration process as a security measure. On Wednesday, two pro-Iranian organizations urged Yahoo to change the policy to help protect Iranian's free speech rights.

When Yahoo started requiring mobile phone numbers from new users, Iran, as well as a series of other countries like Syria, Cuba, Libya, and Myanmar, was not included in the drop-down menu for country codes. That effectively means people with phone numbers in those countries can't successfully sign up for an account.

For activists, this is notable because of Yahoo's extreme popularity in Iran. 63% of its netizens use it as their primary email service, according to a recent survey.

Digital rights advocates are concerned because in countries like Iran, "sometimes the only way you can have either relative security or privacy from the government, or the ability to speak out against the government, is by having an outside platform such as one located in the United States — and an email account is certainly key to that," Eva Galperin, the Global Policy Analyst at the digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation told Mashable.

"If Yahoo wants to behave like competitors like Google, it has to respect access to Iran," Collin Anderson, an independent researcher who focuses on Iran, told Mashable. "This is extremely dangerous to freedom of expression."

See also: Why the Revolutionary Guard Targeted Iran's Gadget Bloggers

The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) accused Yahoo of being "unintentionally complicit in helping deny Iranians access to online communications," in a blog post on Wednesday. The NIAC, as well as Berim, another pro-Iranian organizations, have launched two petitions to urge Yahoo to allow Iranians to use their own cellphone numbers to register, and to enable the resulting two-step authentication to those who already have an account.

Jamal Abdi, the Policy Director at NIAC, told Mashable that the two petitions have accumulated more than 15,000 signatures in just two days.

Yahoo declined to answer specific questions about the issue, but sent Mashable a statement.

"At Yahoo, we’re committed to ensuring that all of our users around the world can freely express themselves on our platform. We are aware that a technical issue prevents Iranians from using SMS to verify new accounts and we are looking into the issue."

NIAC, Berim and a group of other organizations have already complained about this issue to Yahoo. In November, the groups, which also included Human Rights Watch and the New American Foundation, among others, sent a letter to Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, urging her to solve the problem. Yahoo never responded to the letter, according to both Anderson and Abdi.

The action, if intentional, is not unprecedented for Yahoo. In 2007, both Yahoo and Microsoft removed Iran from their country lists amid a U.S. ramp-up of sanctions against the country. But today, tech companies no longer have to adhere to those kinds of diplomatic restrictions.

In 2010, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in an attempt to boost Internet communications in Iran, Sudan and Cuba, issued new guidelines authorizing the exportation of online services "such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking," it announced in a press release at the time.

Later, in May 2013, the U.S. government loosened the sanctions even more, which paved the way for Google, for example, to make the Play Store available in Iran.

But Gmail, for example, has long been available to Iranians, and Yahoo had more recently been available without any restrictions, so it's unclear if this is related to a diplomatic issue.

"This has been long legal under the U.S sanctions' regime. So if they're interpreting it that way, then their interpretation is just flat wrong," Anderson told Mashable.

A Treasury Department spokesperson declined to comment on this specific case.

Meanwhile, Iranian activists are befuddled. Amin Sabeti, an Iranian researcher based in London who focuses on media and Internet freedom, told Mashable that this will probably just encourage people to switch to Gmail, but, he added: "In general, it's ridiculous."

Nariman Gharib, another Iranian researcher based in London, said he has heard of a few people inside Iran complaining about this issue. A few weeks ago, for example, he had to open a Yahoo account on behalf of a friend, who couldn't do it because of this restriction.

Some Iranian netizens even created a script to get around the restriction and still be able to register an account, but this is not a solution for everyone. And Anderson says Yahoo's restriction could ultimately play into the Iranian government's interests, forcing people to sign up for government sponsored email services.

"[Iranian officials'] intent is to force users into national services that are subject to the jurisdiction of the government, so that they can gain access to user's data, which they cannot from international providers," he said.

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Topics: Internet freedom, iran, US & World, World, Yahoo