Gadgetory

yahoo has a message for the thousands of users who haven't used their yahoo email or id's in the past 12 months use it or lose it you can imagine how many user names have been created over the last you know decade or two and so there's a significant number of accounts that have just become inactive but the best thing to do for users is just make these available again on July 15th at midnight Pacific time Yahoo will cancel accounts of these inactive users and invite people to try to claim these newly available user names so let's say my current email address is Carra one two three four five six at yahoo.com but I've always wanted just Carr at Yahoo I can go to Yahoo request Carra or carroty at Yahoo and then hope that my request is one of those recycled names Yahoo says they'll inform people in mid-august if they're awarded the username they've requested but recycling usernames is bringing up privacy and security concerns with so many online logins and passwords linked to our emails Yahoo says it is working to ensure users information will be protected if they lose their yahoo ID and others claim it will go through and and do some cleanup work to ensure that you know data doesn't end up in the wrong places and unsubscribe that particular ID from any newsletters we're working with a handful of our partners and peers in the space collaboratively on a program that will basically help them understand if account has been recycled and potentially has a new owner so that they can do the right thing for the user on that property so for example if you're you know if this is a user on Amazon who's trying to recover their password we'll help them understand if the account has been recycled the password information won't get sent to the new user of that account while yahoo says they're confident in their cleanup process experts say you should take security measures into your own hands I think it's a very good idea to go through accounts that you may have associated that yahoo email with and associate them yourselves use Yahoo's plan to do cleanup for you as a last line of defense not as your first line of defense if you want to keep your yahoo ID and email just make sure to sign in to Yahoo or into your yahoo email by July 14th 11:59 p.m. Pacific time in San Francisco I'm Kara Tsuboi cnet.com for CBS News