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AIM's New Terms Of Service
acaben writes "AOL has posted new terms of service for AIM, that include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: '...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.'"
AOL is not any different from a mail carrier service because they do the same thing - deliver messages from one person to another.
You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using it.
Why not? Many people abuse telephone network by tying up lines for hours at a time, so what? It does not allow the phone company to record and sell conversations.
it'll be interesting to see how AOL claims to prove that any non AIM client users can assertively agree to this license. Last time i heard you cant agree to a contract by inaction. And to the best of my knowledge, i dont think any of the 'these terms may change at any time' have been tested in court by 'agreement by inaction'
so it remains to be seen.
Seeing as how these terms were introduced on February 5, 2004, I wouldn't exactly call them "new." In fact, I had already come across these ridiculous terms a few months ago in one of my first forays into the world of 'reading the licensing agreement.' I was a little taken aback at first, but then I realized that most of what I, and most people, say over IM is complete garbage anyway and probably hardly worth the expense of any kind of data mining. Plus, if I ever really wanted to send sensitive information, I'd find a better way. So essentially, I think, this is a non-issue. But I could be wrong.
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
They don't need an irrevocable, perpetual right to do that. A 10-minute right would be plenty.
and probably elsewhere.
Okay, nobody seems to get the point of this change, so let me spell it out for you:
ADVERTISING
They don't care about reading what 12 year olds gossip about, and they don't care about finding criminals, terrorists, or anyone else. They care about *making money* by selling targeted ads to you, and they will figure out what you like by parsing context out of your chat logs. Y'know, like Google does with Gmail and Google Groups. The TOS let them do whatever they want with the data so they can store it, mine it, and sell the results anytime they feel like with no consequences.
Which is why I've always used strong encryption to IM my friends. If AOL wants to break my 4096-bit RSA key to sell my "lol"s, then they're welcome to.
Technology is the solution to the erosion of our rights. If it's mathematically impossible to find out what you said, then... they won't know what you said. (Same for P2P. If you use Freenet you can legally share anything. Why? Because nobody knows (or can ever know) what you're sharing and what you're downloading. Laws don't solve problems!)
My other car is first.
I disagree. I use iChat on a Mac. I have a .mac account. I never signed up for an AIM account nor agreed to their terms of service.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
Isn't AOL considered a "Common Carrier" and therefore immune from prosecution because they claimed that they do not, will not and cannot monitor the content going through their "wires". This was back in the days when ISPs were getting shut down if they allowed child porn through their servers or something like that -- and the bill came through that said that ISPs were responsible for the content of their users, unless they were Common Carriers such as AT&T and AOL (and any other big company that could afford to buy a Senator).
Now here comes along AOL saying that they WILL monitor and so, I have to ask, if we send child porn through IM, doesn't this mean that if AOL lets it go through, AOL can be taken down for allowing trafficing of child porn because they have given up their common carrier status?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I'll say *never*.
base64/uu encoding of messages produces all standard characters. Unless AOL is going to try doing fuzzy-logic dictionary look-ups, and/or statistical analysis on ALL messages, there's no way they would even know the difference between encrypted and unencrypted messages.
The above methods would be impractical, and even if not, they would have to be very, very careful not to accidentally drop an unencrypted (though unintelligable) conversation.
Personally, I think AOL is going to eliminate encryption the same way the NSA did for e-mail... Just wait silently behind the curtain, and when there hasn't been any sign of evesdroping for some time, apathy will kick-in, and encryption will just fade-out on it's own.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, since not everyone IMs in English. Even speakers of non-Latin based languages often use the English alphabet in IMing (ex. Arabic and Hebrew). There is no way to distinguish these from an encrypted message.