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AOL Changing IM Terms of Service

Posted by Zonk on from the at-least-they're-trying dept.

gpmac writes "AOL has responded to the recent slashdot attention. America Online Inc. plans to make three small but significant modifications to the terms of service for its AIM instant messaging product to head off a firestorm of privacy-related criticisms. The tweaks to the terms of service will be made in the section titled "Content You Post" and will explicitly exclude user-to-user chat sessions from the privacy rights an AIM user gives up to AOL."

7 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. They came, they saw.... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and they fixed. Kudos to AOL for this one. Now, if only they could do more about the spammers on their network...

  2. From TFA... by leonmergen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "We're not making any policy changes. We're making some linguistic changes to clarify certain things and explain it a little better to our users," AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein told eWEEK.com.

    Hmmm, is it just me or does this look like making things look better ? From my experience, lawyers usually pay a lot of attention on the things they write, and especially these kind of mistakes are the ones that plainly don't happen in published legal documents...

    ... unless they wanted to trick you into it, ofcourse.

    --
    - Leon Mergen
    http://www.solatis.com
    1. Re:From TFA... by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 5, Insightful
      From my experience, lawyers usually pay a lot of attention on the things they write, and especially these kind of mistakes are the ones that plainly don't happen in published legal documents... ... unless they wanted to trick you into it, ofcourse.
      No, you are full of crap. If a lawyer says, "Sign this document, and we'll execute contract A," and then has you sign a document actually only authorizing contract B, the signed document would be thrown out in court. If the lawyer knew about it, he might be liable, and he might be guilty of fraud.

      Once AOL publically said, "No, we have not and will not read AIM chats," it better have been the truth, otherwise they could get turned inside out in court. No matter what their privacy policy said.
      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
    2. Re:From TFA... by 91degrees · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It seems that legal and marketing simply didn't talk to each other.

      The legal department wanted to be sure they had the right to do everything they might do, even if they're not remotely likely to do so. Their only concern is that they don't get sued.

      Unfortunately they didn't consider what the response public would be is someone actually read the legalese. Considering that isn;t their job. The public image of AOL is a marketting matter. Not a legal matter.

      As is often the case in large companies, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.

  3. So does AOL listen? by jcm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully folks will appreciate the amount of sway that a good argument does have at AOL. If it wasn't for public discussion the TOS probably would not have been changed. But the public discussion happened and there will now be a more specific TOS statements. I wish folks would always give AOL a chance instead of immediately bashing. Was this enough to buy some good will from folks for the future?

  4. very costly by trb · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Uberti explained on his Weblog that the amount of IM traffic on the AIM network "is on the order of hundreds of gigabytes a day."

    "It would be very costly, and we have no desire to record all IM traffic. We don't do it," Uberti wrote.

    Ooh, hundreds of gigabytes a day, it would be very costly to record all that traffic. Gee, Dr. Evil, what does a 100 Gigabyte storage device cost? One Million Dollars?

  5. No changes, just re-formatting. by Transcendent · · Score: 4, Insightful

    America Online Inc. plans to make three small but significant modifications to the terms of service for its AIM instant messaging product to head off a firestorm of privacy-related criticisms.

    In an earlier slashdot article (too lazy to get the link), it was mentioned that the terms of service was misinterpreted by someone, and that it was *never implied* that private IM conversations were to be snooped upon, saved, or so forth.

    We never lost out privacy, some idiot just misread it and this most recent change is in an attempt to make it "idiot-proof" for the future.