Yahoo! Prices Member Privacy at $60, Army Advancing Armor Research

West Palm Beach, FL (AHN) - For some, it is a comfort to know that Yahoo will work with law enforcement if necessary to catch criminals, rifling through their private messages to get the job done. However, the cost for such an invasion -- $60.

For $20, Yahoo will turn over to authorities basic user ID information. Between $30 and $40, they will give contents of subscriber accounts, including e-mail. And for $60, authorities can obtain access to all the contents to an account, including logs of Yahoo Groups.

But Yahoo is not the only company cooperating with authorities in this manner. In 2008, government officials made 8 million requests for to Sprint to turn over GPS information.

Matthew Sullivan, Sprint Nextel, in a letter to All Headline News explains that figure:

"The '8 million' figure does not represent the number of customers whose location information was provided to law enforcement, nor does it represent the instances or cases in which law enforcement contacted Sprint seeking customer location information.

Instead, the figure represents the number of individual automated requests, or "pings", for specific location information, made to the Sprint network as part of a series of law enforcement investigations and public safety assistance requests during the past year.

The critical point is that a single case or investigation may generate thousands of individual requests to the network as the law enforcement or public safety agency attempts to track or locate an individual over the course of days or weeks.

As a result, the 8 million automated requests or pings were generated by thousands (not millions) of instances in which law enforcement or public safety agencies sought customer location information.

Several thousand instances over the course of a year should not be shocking given that Sprint has more than 47 million customers and requests from law enforcement and public safety agencies are due to a variety of circumstances: exigent or emergency situations (missing person cases), criminal investigations, or cases where a Sprint customer consents to sharing location information (car is stolen and owner realizes his phone is in the car so he allows law enforcement to track his phone).

In all cases Sprint requires a valid legal request appropriate for the circumstances, meaning the request must be accompanied by either a subpoena, court order or customer consent. In all cases, Sprint complies with applicable state and federal laws."