In a perfect world, allowing three billion user accounts to be hacked would mean a business is forced to shut down and its assets shared with the victims. In the real world, it means the people in charge of it are able to sell for huge amounts of cash and the new owners can force their way onto your brand new phone. That's exactly what just happened now that Samsung has decided that it needs even more money and is forcing Yahoo! down the throat of Verizon Galaxy S9 buyers. (The deal includes preloading these Oath-branded apps on Verizon-sold Galaxy phones, but it also allows Bixby and other Samsung services to use Oath services like Yahoo! News as sources.)

User data and digital advertising is big money. Sometimes big enough to stop caring for your customers.

In 2013, Yahoo! was hacked and one billion accounts were compromised. In 2014, the same thing happened and another 500 million accounts were affected. The company didn't bother to say anything until 2016. In 2017, they admitted that it was actually three billion accounts compromised — that's every single Yahoo! account that existed at the time.

That didn't seem to bother Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, who said "we all live in an internet world, it's not a question of if you're going to get hacked but when you are going to get hacked," and proceeded to buy the company for $4.5 billion, changing the name to Oath in hopes that you wouldn't realize. Thankfully, Verizon's efforts to dismiss multiple lawsuits and federal investigations into the attacks were shot down and they get to be responsible for the thing they should have never bought.

Fast forward to the here and now, and we find out that Samsung has reached a deal with Verizon to force install four Yahoo! apps onto the Galaxy S9 as system apps in the hopes that you'll use them and feed more data into Yahoo's gaping maw. Reactions are what you would expect: nobody is happy (although the ever-present group that thinks Samsung can do no wrong is alive and well, as is the group that thinks Samsung is some sort of demon rather than a tech company) but nobody seems to care. At least nobody who should care seems to care. User response is also fairly anemic, with "you can disable them" being the usual response even though they are system-level apps that will have already started running before you can do anything about it.