I AM COPYING AND PASTING THIS FROM ONE OF THE MSN BOARDS. I CHECKED MY ACCT AND I DID HAVE THE THINGS CHECKED THAT THEY STATED, SO I TURNED THEM OFF. I HAVE BEEN GETTING A GAWDAWFUL AMOUNT OF PORN AND JUNK MAIL THRU MY HOTMAIL ACCT, HOPEFULLY THIS WILL STOP!!!!
Microsoft Releases Your Personal Hotmail Info
If you have a Hotmail account - or if you've used
Microsoft Passport - for more than a month, there's
something you need to check. Or, more accurately,
uncheck. Quickly.
A small publication known as The Eastside Journal,
based in Bellevue, Washington
http://www.eastsidejournal.com/sited/story/html/92308
, reports that Microsoft has taken, uh, liberties with
your confidential information.
A bit of history. Microsoft bought Hotmail in January
1998. It's still the number-one location for free email:
log on to www.hotmail.com and you can send and
receive email messages at no charge.
Almost 120,000,000 people use the system, worldwide.
A couple of years ago, Microsoft hooked up Hotmail to
its Passport system. Variously known as Microsoft
Passport, Windows Passport, MSN Passport, and/or
.NET Passport, all of the names refer to Microsoft's
giant central database of customer information.
If you want to use Hotmail, you have to sign up for a
Passport - and in so doing you're added to the
Passport database. Microsoft Messenger requires a
Passport, too. Windows XP nags mercilessly, offering
all sorts of goodies to get you to divulge your name,
address, age, phone number, and the like, as grist for
the Passport maw.
If you signed up for Hotmail - or anything else that
uses Passport - more than a couple of months ago,
you may be in for a big surprise. It seems that
Microsoft changed the rules while you weren't looking.
Unilaterally, Microsoft may have granted itself
permission to pass along your personal information to
other companies that use Passport on their Web sites.
The personal information includes your email address,
your birthday, your country and zip code, your gender
and occupation.
Has Microsoft taken liberties with your data? There's
an easy way to check. Go into Hotmail. Click Options
(to the right of the tab that says "Address Book"). Click
Personal Profile (in the upper left corner). Scroll down
to the bottom of the screen and see whether the boxes
marked "Share my e-mail address" and "Share my
other registration information" have been checked.
Those boxes didn't exist when I signed up for Hotmail,
and chances are pretty good they didn't exist when
you signed up for it, either. I certainly never gave
Microsoft permission to hand out my email address -
or my birthday, gender or occupation. I'd rather be
dipped in oil. Yet both of those boxes on my personal
profile were checked. I bet they're checked on your
personal profile, too.
Details are still murky, but it looks like Microsoft added
those two check boxes a couple of months ago, and
did itself a big favor by checking both of them for all of
the Passport holders at the time.
When did Microsoft implement this new policy? Hard
to say. Details should be in the MS privacy statement,
but I couldn't find anything. If you'd like to wade
through Microsoft's privacy statement
http://privacy.msn.com/default.asp#MSNMAIL , strap
on your hip waders - it's 520 lines of dense legalese.
The last two lines of the statement say:
Updated December 2001
(c) 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved
