iChat safe again? AOL seems to be listening
Over the weekend, everyone suddenly realized that AIM’s
current Terms of Service agreement strips users of privacy.
I posted about it, as did a lot of other
people. Now, however, it looks like the collective power of blogs complaining about the bad wording of the TOS
may actually be having positive effects.
News.com reports that AOL intends to unveil a new TOS tomorrow eliminating the nasty phrase at the root of the problem: ”You waive any right to privacy.” Anne Mitchell, president of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, called AIM’s policy a ”complete waiver of privacy” and says ”It’s great that they said they’ll alter the terms of service so it’s not that nightmarish. But until I see it, I won’t be satisfied.”
I guess tomorrow we’ll find out if our chats are our chats again.
UPDATE: I found an article that provides an actual lawyer’s take on the TOS.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Steve M said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
While I was happy to hear that AOL is revising the TOS, my company has decided to stop using AIM, and in fact is taking the stance of blocking AIM ports on our corporate firewall to avoid it's inadvertent usage by employees. We wouldn't use it for proprietary information, but this legal mis-step by AOL has caused us to take a deeper look at the problem, and drop AIM altogether as a means of communications.
Anyone have a better solution to offer instead?
Reply
Melissa said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/tech/blog/3082956
about the AIM privacy thing..hope this helps clear things up =)
Reply