Worth checking this out if you use hotmail, seems Micro$oft are at it again....
Andy
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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 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, 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.
Go figure.
