By Margenett Moore-Roberts, Global Head of Inclusive Diversity
Pay equity is a critical and inextricable component of Yahoo’s mission to build an inclusive and diverse workplace. I am incredibly proud that we have joined more than 100 other companies in signing The White House Equal Pay Pledge.
Last month, Yahoo awarded nearly $4 million in grants to 110 nonprofits across the country from our Yahoo Employee Foundation (YEF), an employee-funded, philanthropic organization. As part of that grant cycle, $75,000 was awarded to the DC Central Kitchen (DCCK). Located just a few blocks from Yahoo’s Washington, D.C. office, the DCCK can seem worlds away. Also located only a few blocks from the Capitol, it presents a stark contrast between the powerful and the powerless within a very short distance. This week, I took the short walk from our office to DCCK to check in ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday and to give thanks for all the work they do to help those in need.
DCCK is housed in the basement of DC’s largest homeless shelter, where you’ll find hundreds of homeless Washingtonians. DCCK specifically is not a shelter, but a kitchen – an enormous industrial kitchen with multiple ovens, 100-gallon kettles used for preparing massive quantities of food, its own bakery and so much more. It’s a kitchen that feeds the downtrodden and disadvantaged of D.C.
Every day DCCK prepares thousands of meals for distribution to nearly 100 social services agencies including shelters and halfway houses, using foods donated by farms, grocery stores and warehouse clubs. At Thanksgiving, DCCK’s need for donated food becomes most evident, as they will need at least 400 whole turkeys to complete the 5,000 meals they’ll prepare on Thanksgiving Day alone. Any donated turkeys that go unused for Thanksgiving will be frozen so they can be used later on to prepare more healthy meals.
DCCK’s mission is not just to fill the stomachs of people in need with fresh, healthy meals but also to help them fulfill their potential by providing culinary arts training that will lead to gainful employment. The culinary arts training program lasts 14 weeks. Within three months after graduating, 90 percent of graduates are employed. Some of those are employed by DCCK, which provides health care benefits, a 401K plan and a living wage of more than $14 per hour.
Because Yahoo values DCCK’s mission, we have adopted DCCK as the charity that we support on an ongoing basis, both by donating our volunteer hours and by providing financial support via the YEF. In addition to this year’s funding, last year I championed a YEF Impact Grant and DCCK was awarded $20,000 in support of their mission.
‘Tis the season to give thanks and to give back. At Yahoo, we’re doing just that, and we look forward to continuing to support the DCCK.
At Yahoo, our technical innovators are complemented by our creative talent. The arts and creative thinking are valuable to our business and to innovation. This symbiotic relationship between art and science helps drive development of products that are both powerful for our users and beautiful. With that, we recently welcomed with open arms an opportunity to help grow creative talent right in our backyard. Yahoo Omaha invited the the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha to compete in our first-annual Yahoo Advertising Knock-out Challenge. This was a unique opportunity to match university programs with our marketing needs for talent development.
At our Dodge Street office in Omaha, we hosted university students who workshopped solutions to our Yahoo Advertising Knock-out, a marketing challenge that tested the public relations, social media, campaign strategy, budget planning and media buying acumen of 12 teams of six students. The challenge:
Yahoo Sports has been an undeniable force in the Fantasy Sports game for 20 years with millions of users coming every year to play their favorite sports, including the most revered, Fantasy Football.
With major competitors including ESPN.com, NFL.com and CBSSports.com, Yahoo Sports is looking to maintain it’s dominance across the desktop and mobile app and continue driving new users to play on Yahoo Fantasy Football.
With a $2M budget, your team’s challenge is to identify belief-based audiences and create a full-funnel marketing plan to engage those users. The plan should strive to be ROI positive and tackle multiple strategies to reach and engage the target audience. Belief-based audiences examples include:
People with not enough time
People who chose the fantasy platform all their friends use
People who aren’t interested in football
People who are already in too many leagues
Three ‘Hoos, Hobson Powell, Bre Phelan, and Jillian Droge judged the innovative student proposals. Students’ solutions included the following tactics:
The first place winners employed numerous innovative tactics across social media, including a partnership with Amazon’s Alexa and encouraged families to participate in the Yahoo Fantasy Football app with the tagline “Who Said Draft Time Can’t Be Family Time”.
The second place winners proposed “taking Yahoo fantasy to the office” to promote inter-office collaboration and camaraderie.
Other teams’ tactics included:
Leveraging prominent social media influencers to recruit new Yahoo Fantasy Football users;
Using the Yahoo Blitz bot to make the Fantasy Football experience approachable and enjoyable to target audiences, experts and beginners; and
Deploying Yahoo campus representatives to evangelize Fantasy Football.
First place winners: Joe Franco (UNO), Elizabeth Stevens (UNO), Megan Nelson (UNL), and Hannah Paxton (UNL)
Second place winners: April Knipp (UNO), Amy Nielsen (UNO), Haley Schepers (UNL), and Linsey Armstrong (UNL).
The Yahoo judges were extremely impressed with the student presentations and were blown away by the caliber of their unique and well-thought-out ideas.
Through partnerships like this, we’re doing the important job of helping to grow the workforce of tomorrow and to build a stronger more prosperous future for our local economies.
By Kathleen Lefstad, Policy Manager, Trust & Safety
Yahoo’s “train the trainer” Digital Online Safety Course was shared with law enforcement in Quincy, Washington this past week, with school resource officers from Grant County, Warden, Ephrata, Yakima, Moses Lake and Quincy in attendance. With more than 1,000 officers trained to date, Yahoo was proud to bring this course to Quincy, providing the resources and tools to help officers facilitate discussions about online safety and good digital citizenship with their communities.
Police Chief Bob Heimbach was grateful for Yahoo’s commitment to bring the course to Washington saying, “With the world interconnected in this electronic age, this safety training, and providing us the ability to support our community members in digital safety, is invaluable. Yahoo has demonstrated their intent and commitment to being a good partner and community member here in Quincy.”
It was nearly eight years ago that the course was first created, when Officer Holly Lawrence approached Yahoo to create presentations for School Resource Officers to give about safety and citizenship in a digital world. The training has been successful due to it’s focus on education of the material, sharing of available resources and, specifically, how to present the material effectively for different audiences.
With an emphasis on communication, these presentations open the door to talk about online trends and safety issues, and identify workable solutions and preparedness together. “The old adage about ‘it takes a village’ is still true, but maybe we should start saying ‘it takes an ivillage,’” said Officer Holly Lawrence, Ret., a law enforcement partner of Yahoo, who helps run these courses nationwide. “As more communities develop and thrive in the digital space, kids and their trusted adults need the tools to be able to speak one-to-one (if not face-to-face) about the challenges and opportunities of life online.”
By Brett Illers, Senior Manager, Sustainability and Energy Strategy
For 15 years the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has evaluated companies on their efforts to address climate change. From gauging greenhouse gas emissions and water use, to assessing investment in sustainable products, the CDP and its reporting of company environmental performance is fostering transparency and further investment in the global effort to help preserve our natural resources. This year’s CDP report included environmental disclosures from more than 1,000 companies representing 12% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
With great pride, we’re pleased to announce that the CDP has awarded Yahoo a “Leadership” level score on our efforts to run an environmentally sustainable company. According to CDP’s summary statement of Yahoo, “This excellent result indicates Yahoo! Inc. has implemented a range of actions to manage climate change, both in its own operations and beyond. Companies at Leadership level show evidence of at least one of the following: meaningful targets and emissions reduction activities and verified or assured emissions data.” We couldn’t agree more and humbly accept the CDP’s assessment of our business.
At Yahoo, we are committed to being an environmentally responsible company. On our network, in the cloud, in our offices, and in our daily lives, we make it a daily habit to protect and improve our world. Our users’ expectations of environmentally-friendly products and socially responsible practices help drive our efforts, exemplified by innovations like our patented “chicken coop” technology that delivers unprecedented efficiency to our data centers.
But the proof is the the pudding. Across all of CDP’s assessment categories – Emissions Management, Governance and Strategy and Risk Opportunity and Management – we scored an “A-” or better, ahead of many peer companies across the tech industry.
We believe environmentally sustainable business is smart business, and our mission continues. We actively engage with a number of non-profit organizations like the CDP to measure our environmental risk and share information regarding our carbon footprint with our users around the world. Together, we believe we can make a meaningful impact on our climate and to secure our collective future.
Yahoo’s commitment to share information with our users regarding government data requests and government requests for content removal through our transparency report is an important part of our long-standing commitment to transparency, privacy, and free expression. Today, we release the sixth update to Yahoo’s transparency report.
On behalf of our global community of users and all those affected by government demands for user information, we also continue to call for more robust government transparency. We recently sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper to urge the U.S. government to address recent media reports stemming from an October 4, 2016 Reuters article about an alleged classified order from the U.S. government and to share appropriate information with the public to address those allegations. At Yahoo, we have long advocated and fought for increased transparency by governments. In sending that letter, we continue the fight.
Transparency and strict adherence by governments to the rule of law also has important implications for the ability of any company in the information and communications technology sector to earn and preserve the trust of its customers. The erosion of user trust online has undeniable direct implications for the safety and security of people around the world and for the confidence and trust in U.S. businesses at home and beyond our borders.
This update to our transparency report continues to share information about Yahoo’s long-standing principles for handling government demands, including in the national security context. This approach is articulated in our publicly-available Global Principles for Responding to Government Requests and Yahoo! Inc. Law Enforcement Response Guidelines, as well as in our commitments to the Global Network Initiative Principles. We review demands for narrowness, legal sufficiency, duration, and scope, and consider all appropriate options before we comply, including seeking clarification or modification of the demand, or even challenging the demand in court. We also narrowly interpret such demands and minimize disclosure of user data to the extent possible.
Here are some other highlights from the sixth update to our transparency report:
This reporting period, we received 12,666 global government requests for user data (specifying 20,511 accounts). In the previous reporting period, we received 13,771 government requests for user data (specifying 23,540 accounts).
Yahoo, like our peer companies, receives government demands, both in the national security and law enforcement contexts, that may use criteria other than an account name to identify the accounts about which information is sought. We have added information to explain how we report on the numbers for government demands for user information that don’t specifically identify a particular account as such: “[I]f a Government Data Request demanded information about accounts that satisfy specified criteria (e.g., accounts registered under a particular proper name or accounts associated with a particular phone number) and we determined that it was appropriate to produce data in response to the request, we would report the total number of accounts about which information was produced to the government in connection with that Government Data Request.”
From the inception of our transparency report, we have always counted and reported the number of accounts for all Government Data Requests, including FISA Requests, National Security Letters (NSLs), and Law Enforcement Data Requests, in this way.
We believe this provides the fullest picture we are currently permitted to share regarding the information governments ultimately collect.
In past updates, we’ve provided the number of NSLs that Yahoo received during the reporting period and the number of accounts that were specified in those NSLs. These numbers generally are reported in bands of 500, starting with 0 - 499, as this is the maximum amount of detail that Yahoo may provide under the U.S. law when reporting NSLs in aggregate. However, with the enactment of the USA Freedom Act, the FBI must now periodically assess whether an NSL’s nondisclosure requirement is still appropriate, and to lift it when not. In some instances, the FBI has lifted the nondisclosure requirement with respect to particular NSLs to Yahoo. In such cases, the lower end of the band has been adjusted to reflect the fact that we can now legally disclose having received particular NSLs.
As with past updates, we’ve created downloadable PDF and XLS files detailing the number of government data requests received for this period. In addition, for the first time, we’re also enabling the download of PDF and XLS files detailing the number of government removal requests we received for this period, as well as all prior periods where we received a government removal request.
We remain unwavering in our commitment to pay careful attention to government requests for user data and content removal, and to respond to these requests according to our longstanding policies. And we’ll always remain committed to sharing as much information as we can about these requests.
By Kathleen Lefstad, Policy Manager, Trust and Safety
A longtime partner of Yahoo in combating child sexual abuse imagery, we’re proud to congratulate the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) on 20 years of making the Internet a safer place for all users. Yahoo is part of the IWF’s hash sharing pilot, which expands the volume of hashes we use and is a valuable tool to assist in protecting our network and our users from child abuse material.
Over the last two decades, the IWF has become a gold standard. Knowing all of our united efforts have a real impact on the victimization of children and the prosecution of the individuals who would harm them, with great pride, we Yahoo!
In a letter today to James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Yahoo is formally urging that the U.S. government provide its citizens with clarification around national security orders they issue to internet companies to obtain user data.
While the letter makes specific reference to recent allegations against Yahoo, it is intended to set a stronger precedent of transparency for our users and all citizens who could be affected by government requests for user data. As we’ve said before, recent press reports have been misleading; the mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.
DNI’s mission statement refers to “responsible and secure information sharing.” We therefore trust that the U.S. government recognizes the importance of clarifying the record in this case. On behalf of Yahoo and our global community of users, we request that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence expeditiously clarify this matter.
By Francois-Xavier Dussart, Legal Director for Public Policy, Brussels
The European Commission today presented a proposal to reform European copyright rules. Part of the broader Digital Single Market strategy launched in 2015, the proposal has a goal of striking a balance between the rights and interests of online publishers, and those of users and Internet companies. We welcome the Commission’s attention to this issue.
Our interests at Yahoo span both sides of the debate. We create and publish our own new and original content for our sites, and we help our users find other online content through links to other sites. We believe that the creation, discovery and sharing of information online brings great value to our users and to our key partners, particularly news publishers.
Given our position, we understand the need and desire to have a fair and balanced set of rules that govern the availability and distribution of digital information. Copyright has a role to play and should inspire creativity, incent investment, promote innovation and ensure the availability of diverse content, particularly online. The Commission’s package today falls short of this ideal and would benefit by giving weight to the views of a more diverse body of stakeholders.
In particular, concerns expressed by many stakeholders over language creating new rights for news publishers are not reflected in the Commission’s proposal. Indeed, some key representatives of civil society, news publishers, innovators, and EU citizens warned against the danger of such approach, which will not only diminish European users’ access to news and other content but also decrease traffic to European publisher pages. This has been the case in Germany and Spain where similar attempts dramatically failed.
As the legislative process continues, Yahoo will pursue constructive dialogue with the EU to bring back balance to the proposal and ensure a positive outcome for our users, for rightholders, innovators and publishers.
