CEO Marissa Meyer has pledged that Yahoo! is going to start encrypting its intra-data-center traffic. The service will be offered to webmail users by next year.

"I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever," she said.

"There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL - Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8, 2014."

By the first quarter of next year, the Yahoo! data center streams will be encrypted. Yahoo! Mail users will have the option to encrypt at that time.

"As we have said before, we will continue to evaluate how we can protect our users’ privacy and their data. We appreciate, and certainly do not take for granted, the trust our users place in us," Mayer concluded.