I've had my yahoo mail account since High School. I rarely use it these days. I think it's just too crowded with alerts from the various social media I have. I can still view yahoo mail through my gmail account.
Nothing on the internet is private. Yahoo are probably getting desperate because of their relative decline. I find the yahoo search engine to be fairly good but I use Google and Bing more these days.
Ye, they are desperate, and Google is getting there too with their deal with Matercard.