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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."

3 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. 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. 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?