Attn: Hotmail Users!!

[shais_mom]

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

[Fuzzy317]

I checked mine, and they were turned on also, but they are off now. I seemed to be getting lots of emails about life insurance and asking if I want a new mortgage on my house.

[krazyaboutkatz]

I'm very thankful that I don't use hotmail. Someone told me a while ago that if you had a hotmail address that you used for your e-mail that anyone can read your e-mail. I still don't know much about computers but how could that be. If that was true no one would use hotmail.

[Ann]

I read through the privacy statement, and to me this just seems like one of those typical spam hoaxes. I don't used hotmail though so I don't know for sure.

But I do know one thing. If you have received spam in the past, it will ONLY get worse. If you are receiving spam today, unchecking some box won't do crap. My boyfriend had an hotmail account, and he started out by getting one or two spams a day, and now he gets about 100 spams a day. Yes, I meant to write 100.

The internet is going so utterly commercialized that it's pathetic.

hey , mine were checked too !! Now I get it why I got so many weird e-mails lately !!!
How do they dare touch my personal profile !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ann]

Originally posted by lut
How do they dare touch my personal profile !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's a free service you know. They gotta make their money somehow

[Gio]

I was wondering why the number of unwanted emails increased drammaticaly over recent months! I've been wanting to change email accounts (I have others I hardly use) for a while but thinking of letting everyone know put me off from doing it. I will see how it goes now that I have unchecked the boxes.

Thanks for pointing this out Staci.

[Randi]

Even though we have a paid account, we get junk mail too. As soon as you've been out on a few different webpages, you're in their database. I delete cookies once or twice a week and never open anything we're not sure of - still we get the odd mail from some advertising idiots.

These advertising people have no scruples whatsoever, they phone you and they fax you ..... years ago, a friend of ours once sent a fax back with one word on each page, so when they arrived the next morning, the whole roll of paper was all over the floor! He never recieved another fax from them!

of course , I know Ann , that this is a free service ! But I did NOT give the authorisation to CHANGE my personal profile , so I to me this feels like abuse of personal things !!!

I un-checked that info as soon as I spotted it !!!!

[Ann]

lut, I was being sarcastic. I'm sorry you misunderstood me, I didn't mean to offend you. My point was that this is Micro$oft we are talking about, the super rich company. They hardly need more money.

[Tubby & Peanut's Mom]

In my opinion, email accounts from hotmail, yahoo and any other such web-based, "free" email accounts should only be what I consider a "superficial" account. It's hard to explain what I mean by this, but I never reveal my "real" email address to anyone over the internet, unless I personally know them, have met them and know that I can explicitly trust them with it, and even after all that, I still get spam mail in my "real" account, and my "real" account is one I pay for so there should be no sharing of information by the company itself. You can get as many Hotmail (or similar) accounts as you want, so if one starts getting a lot of spam, get a new one. When that starts getting a lot of spam, get another new one. Maybe Hotmail will be so inundated with new accounts someday that they will get the hint and leave our information alone. I have my junk mail filter on the highest setting it can be (but not exclusive) and I still get about 10 spams that make it throught he filter everyday.

If you buy something online, sign up for a Hotmail account and give the retailer that email address, not your "real" one. Seems once you give your address out online, the whole world will soon know it. Also, most everything you sign up for, or if you buy something online, there is the little box asking if you want your information to be shared. It will always be checked yes, you want your information shared, and it is up to you to uncheck it. This is how a lot of these companies make their money and unfortunately there aren't enough laws out there, or being enforced to prevent them from doing this. It's really kind of sad, but at this point in time, this is what we hav to deal with if we want to use the internet and have an email account.

Popcornbird, I agree 100% that some of this spam, ok, most of it, is absolutely, totally inappropriate for childrens' inboxes. Hell, it's even inappropriate for my inbox and I'm 40 years old!!! I don't know what can be done about this, or really how to fight it, but I do know that something has to be done because it has gone beyond the point of being ridiculous.

[Albea]

Before I say anything else I must confess that I'm a "Mac addict" and would not touch anything made by Microsoft with a ten foot pole
Although the Microsoft browser came installed in my Mac, I use Netscape instead. You may want to downloaded and try it. I can't say it's better or worse but it works very well for me and it's not in any way part of Microsoft

[anna_66]

Well, that explains why I've been getting an email from Brooke:and her hot friends!!! For the life of me I couldn't figure it out! So far that is the only SPAM I've gotten in my hotmail acct..
I totally agree with Tubby & Peanuts Mom, I have a REAL email meant only for my closest friends and family also, so I never get any spam. Hey, thanks for letting us all know about this so we could uncheck it!!! I don't really want anymore emails from Brooke!!!

[Cincy'sMom]

Thanks for the heads up Stacy! maybe now I'll stop getting all the Spam...or at least some of it!

It's okay Ann ! Apolagies accepted ; I am not 100 % familiar with this language (is my 3th) so sometimes I misunderstand things ..
SORRY !!