I talked about IM Usage Policies in my E-Pro newsletters, but...
Tags :Announcement
This
article at Geek.com was more
tuned to a blog entry than the previous articles I wrote here, here and
here (ok the E-Pro site for the newsletters is down and I can't grab those
links right this second). But to boldly go forth
In the past few days
AOL has updated the Terms of Service for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users.
The changes have been met with raised eyebrows and anger, as AOL has included
clauses that remove all privacy from the user. As part of the new terms
AOL reserves the right to record all content posted through the AIM service
and use it as it sees fit in the future without any communication with
users.
If you read through this article, plus
a handful of comments, you will see that AOL has decided that if you use
it's products, including chat, they may at any time use portions of your
chats as they see fit. Now, one would presume they could not go through
everything line by line. But what about keyword type searches of
the IM chatter on their network? This is easily done and also can
be found in at least one of the Sametime monitoring packages that are available
for your enterprise.
This all jumps back to the IM Usage Policy.
AOL is stating it in a well defined policy, no matter how much we
agree or disagree.
To agree says yes, this is a free
public usage system, that I cannot even expect any privacy. It goes
across networks I do not know or own, into servers that are owned by AOL
and then into other sites of systems I do not know or own. This traffic
could be captured in numerous places along the way.
To disagree says I expect some form of
privacy. AOL offers encrypted traffic ability in the recent versions,
right? Well yes they do, but does that still change the rights they
have to the actual chat traffic across their servers? No, not since
they are announcing it to you in a EULA type arrangement. I would
expect some of your own companies have not issues that type of agreement
with the users. But I bet you have an Internet usage and e-mail usage
policy don't you?
Reading around shows that Microsoft has
only stated it does nothing and does with your chat data at all. I
didn't have time to check Yahoo, but ICQ I can imagine will the same as
AOL since they are one in the same.
blog comments powered by Disqus
On Monday, March 14th, 2005 by Chris Miller
