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March 12, 2005
I'll take Eavesdrop & Stealing your conversation for $200 Alex
Thrashing Through Cyberspace has an entry regarding a change in AOL's Instant Messanger (AIM) terms of service that now includes this gem of a paragraph.
Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.
Emphasis mine.
The interesting thing is AOL is one of the approved methods to contact outside customers via our internal instant messaging software. I'm going to bring this up to our IT department because our corporation has one of the most well regarded privacy policies on the Web and I hope that they will react to something this bad.
So why is this also posted in the Apple Bits category?
Because of iChat. It currently uses AOL's service in order for it to work and doesn't offer connection to any other system. Though there is a light at the end of the tunnel (and it's not a train) in Mac OS X 'Tiger' or 10.4. iChat AV will be updated with lots of features, but the most important one is listed as:
Of course, iChat AV is also a versatile instant text messaging application, supporting AOL Instant Messenger and Jabber Instant Messenger clients
So with the support of Jabber you can avoid using AIM all together now.
Now the trick will be to get someone else besides me to use it, what fun is IM if you can't talk to anyone.
Posted by trekkie at March 12, 2005 1:36 PM
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