AOL: We're Not Spying on AIM Users 310
The Llama King writes "America Online tells the Houston Chronicle's TechBlog that, despite a recent Slashdot posting to the contrary, AOL Instant Messenger's terms of service do not imply that the company has the right to use private IM communications, and the section quoted in the Slashdot article applies only to posts in public forums -- a common provision in most online publishers' terms of service. AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein says flatly: 'AOL does not read person-to-person communications.' He also says AIM communiques are never stored on AOL's hard drives. The original Slashdot item was linked throughout the blogosphere -- it will be interesting to see if AOL can extinguish this fire." (Read more below.)
It could be that they don't actually take advantage of its terms, but the Terms of Service seem to broadly favor AIM's right to do exactly what they say they're not doing; rather than drawing any distinction between IM services and public forum posts, the actual terms seem clearly to apply to all AIM products. Here's how they put it:
AOL could probably erase many of the worries about conversation snooping if they would provide a definition of the words "post" and "submit" as used in the following paragraph of their ToS (which says it applies to "any AIM Product"), and explicitly disclaimed an "irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote" the contents of online conversations:For purposes of these Terms of Service, the term "AIM Products" shall mean AIM software (whether preinstalled, on a medium or offered by download), AIM services, AIM websites (including, without limitation, AIM.COM and AIMTODAY.COM) and all other software, features, tools, web sites and services provided by or through AIM from America Online, Inc. and its business divisions (e.g., Netscape) (collectively "AOL") and AOL's third-party vendors.
You may only post Content that you created or which the owner of the Content has given you. You may not post or distribute Content that is illegal or that violates these Terms of Service. By posting or submitting Content on any AIM Product, you represent and warrant that (i) you own all the rights to this Content or are authorized to use and distribute this Content on the AIM Product and (ii) this Content does not and will not infringe any copyright or any other third-party right nor violate any applicable law or regulation.
Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally use AIM but that doesn't mean that I'm going to trust any communications I want private with a giant multi-billion company.
too late.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Their PR parrots and Legals should have collaborated BEFORE they opened their big mouths on this matter. Now they are having to play catchup, in a BIG way.
Bad timing aoHell. In this day and age, that kind of legal play can lose you a couple of million users as fast as your CSRs (customer service reps) can field them.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
No fire extinquishing here... (Score:3, Insightful)
RTFM (Score:0, Insightful)
Of course, if it's on SlashDot, it must be true!
Lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies have no morals (Score:2, Insightful)
If they have the authority to do something, and it becomes in the company's best interest to do it, they will do it, without hesitation.
Translating what they are saying now, it just means "it's not currently in AOL's overall best interest to monitor instant messaging traffic, so right now we're (probably) not doing it. But we can change our minds at any time, without notice."
"Free" not as in Beer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is what people are surprised about -- that AOL would have the gall to allow themselves something like that.
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
This issue relates to the main central servers eavesdropping on EVERYONEs conversations.
Encrypting the conversation should prevent eavesdropping on route, but won't prevent logging in the client.
How to put the fire out. (Score:2, Insightful)
I would think it would be fairly easy to put out the fire. Instead of making the assurances below in public, put them in the TOS in an invariant section.
"AOL Instant Messenger's terms of service do not imply that the company has the right to use private IM communications, and the section quoted in the Slashdot article applies only to posts in public forums -- a common provision in most online publishers' terms of service. AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein says flatly: 'AOL does not read person-to-person communications.' He also says AIM communiques are never stored on AOL's hard drives."
all the best,
drew
Re:Maybe there should be an edit... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that they now say they're not monitoring, does not covince me that the TOS weren't intentionally vague.
Re:Surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, if i'm sending lyric clips to a friend of mine who lives 100+Km away, I don't want them selling the chorus to someone else.
And to add to that. How many people use an IM program of some sort for work? Should aoHell own their ideas too?
Useless Paranoia (Score:1, Insightful)
(insert conspiracy nuts claiming that they can install monitor programs for the FBI/NSA/PETA. Also include the people who will claim that this is the first rights infringement on the path to a corporate controlled world where Pepsi can recruit you into slavery and Bed Bath and Beyond owns your house because you "Just had to have that towel rack")
whatever. (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, I doubt AOL employees really care about your fucking IMs.
xXx-@DeathBecomesME@-xXx: LOL
supertard: heh
xXx-@DeathBecomesME@-xXx:dude, did you see that one show? LOL
supertard: yeah lollerz!1
*rolleyes* who fucking cares if they read your chat logs?
It isn't security through obscurity, it's security through absurdity.
Re:bah (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot.org's TOS are no diff... (Score:2, Insightful)
"In each such case, the submitting user grants OSDN the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license." - Thus go the TOS of slashdot.org. Surprize, surprize!
I tried to submit this story to ./ sometime back [slashdot.org] but of course, they wont accept it :-)
Re:Right... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
And his complaint targeting a private company was perfectly valid. Corporate entities have shown an amazing lack of common sense, appropriate discretion, self restraint, and moral clarity in the time they've existed. Whereas an individual citizen has little or nothing to gain from spying on your point to point communications, a coporation most certainly has everything to gain. They exist for the sole purpose of making money, and in a capitalist system such as the one AOL exists in, moral fiber has no place. If they intercept valuable data, as a corporation, the only thing stopping them from taking it and using it for their own purposes are laws. They're effectively saying here that they refuse to be bound by any laws, so it can only be assumed that the intent is to glean valuable data and reuse it for, perhaps, marketing research.
The conclusion here is quite simple. If a corporation refuses to be bound to appropriate, decent behavior by the law, it won't act appropriately or decently. Individuals have no such problem in most cases because, unlike corporations, they have little or no need for the sorts of things that would require them to be bound.
His jab at a company for being a company was perfectly legitimate, even if he wasn't sure why that was so.
Re:Companies have no morals (Score:3, Insightful)
Never forget that companies are made up of people. While I agree that if it is in a company's interest to do something and they are able to, they will, don't think that they'll do it "without hesitation". The person making the decision may well hesitate; the people implementing it may well hesitate; but ultimately it'll happen, I agree with that.
Re:Surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would happen if the phone company did that? How about your ISP for anything you ever sent? Oh, I'm sure that you probably don't mind yourself, as you haven't written anything that's truely astounding to the world of Men. However, it's the rare gems, the potential for abuse, that should be, at all times, limited. The ability to usurp someone else's writings is one such potential that should be curtailed, no matter if it's likely or not.
After all, if it's this today, what will happen tomorrow after we're used to this little abuse?
Gaim-Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
This message brought to you by the letter Q and the number 8.
Re:No fire extinquishing here... (Score:2, Insightful)
Very much in theory. I mean, how can an organisation be answerable to a group of people who cannot legally find out what the organistaion is up to?
At least there isn't a law preventing the press reporting corporations' misdeeds - yet. (Though whether they'd dare report them is another matter entirely...)
Re:Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
So my reply to this situation is, "AIM's free, you have no right to complain. If you don't like it, use something else."
Maybe I'm growing older or something, but doesn't it seem like almost every Slashdot story now is "whine whine whine" over some stupid inconsequential detail? Especially the "your rights online" stories... OH NOES! PEOPLE LOOKING AT TRAFFIC CAMERAS CAN SEE IF YOU'RE PICKING YOUR NOSE! Christ.
Re:Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Do you really believe a company that generates billions of dollars is going to assign someone to just read your IMs? Are you afraid of an ad hominem attack or something? It sounds really unreasonable to me."
It's not valid to say one shouldn't worry just because it's numerically unlikely that something will happen. Sure, most communications will be trivial, and it will be financially unsound to sort through those without some major technology like carnivore. This is not the point. The company in question took the time to pay lawyers to hash out that part of the contract, which means they've put even more time into having research/marketing/development look into it. That's a lot of man power, which means they expct to do SOMETHING with the information.. one whatever scale. Sooo.. think about it this way. Seeing as how this deals with communications (speech), how would you adjust your opinion if you removed yourself from reality, and just pretended for a second that the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights was written on a system like this first, then moved to public domain. Who would own it? Even if the people did, the company would have the right to lease and sell those words. Now.. removed yourself from this fictional land. Isn't it possible that someone on the AOL system will have communications just as sensitive, important, or personal as these huge documents? Shouldn't we be allowed a reasonable expectation of privacy and ownership of our own words? I mean.. we are PAYING them for this service.. should we have to pay them, AND work for them? (by work, I mean they may profit from our most personal creations, our thoughts/words)
enough of that.. I think you can see my point.
Not that many people have much to hide... (Score:2, Insightful)
More information regarding this topic is available on the technology blog "It's Geek to Me" located at http://itsgeektome.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
For Windows users, you can grab GAIM here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gaim/gaim-1.1.
You can get a nice GAIM Encryption Plugin here:
http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I read the TOS, it's just legal ass-covering. (Score:4, Insightful)
So if you write something and send it via AIM, you have given AOL the right to "reproduce" it on their servers, and therefore you cannot sue AOL for copyright infringement, nor can you claim that AOL owes you anything for "distributing" it. (However, this does not *assign* the copyright to AOL.)
IOW, it's just overly-paranoid ass-covering as performed by lawyers, probably due to some asshole having actually sued them for "storing my works on your server and thereby infringing my copyright" (even if that's just for the few seconds as it passes through) without grokking that this is how sending stuff via AIM works.
[I can readily see someone like Harlan Ellison going off the deep end about this natural side effect of transmitting data, thus getting the lawyers in a tizzy.]
The sky is falling, the sky is falling! (Score:2, Insightful)
You have to love the panic mongers. If you have a deep, dark secret, don't shout it in a public place, don't share it on a public network. It just takes a bit of common sense. Yeah, they could monitor me, but is there anything that they'd want to know?
Then there is the logistics of the matter. I know that they could filter out 99% of my conversations. I know many people like myself who just leave their chat clients up as a sort of answering machine or phone replacement. If you have a potentially sleeping baby in the house, or are working on a vexing problem from which you cannot be distracted, ringing the phone for minor things is considered rude. IM is a safe, quiet conversation. I can speak to a friend, and come off as semi-articulate and intelligent, and they can't hear me yelling at my 4 kids in the background.
A typical conversation of mine:
Of course, "pick up bread" is code for pseudo ephedrine, coffee filters, drain cleaner, ether....
People can intercept your email too, so what? The implementation of Martial Law [wikipedia.org], oh, I mean The Patriot Act, has extended the government's wire tap privileges further into the phone system, with less and less of a reason needed. What about the security of cell phones? And how many of these panic mongers don't think twice before using a regular cordless phone at home. I can tell you from experience that these are not secure! I had to quit using a baby monitor, as I was sick of listening to my neighbor's late night drunken sobs to her friends about her husband. Hmm, the things that you learn when you listen to people's private calls. That was a morbid fascination for a short time, but it wore off quickly.
Much of it comes down to the fact that monitoring most people's communication would be a crashing bore. Sure, you could write content filters, as you do for spam detection, but how many false negatives, and how many false positives do you have with that? I'd expect the same level of difficulty monitoring IM's
IM is great for jotting off a few thoughts. It's not for exchanging company secrets. If you want to do that, at least use a private network, or better yet, meet in person. IM is great for multi-tasking. As you sit on hold, or buried in the 7th level of voice mail hell, you can carry on a conversation, or give and get tech support. "What was the command to fix that problem on my machine again?" copy, click, paste, Fixed! "Thanks again!" Do you realize how much easier that former scenario is than saying "Pipe, that straight line, on the key over the enter key, do you see it? It didn't work? Did you hit shift? Is the line vertical, or slanted?...(continue ad infinitum)"
With IM, you can, potentially help multiple people at one time as well. (All while playing a game of whatever keeps you from slitting your wrists on a daily basis.) As your minions actually attempt to execute what you have given them, there is invariably some time wasted. If you were on the phone with them, you'd have to hang on while they check to see if the fix worked. This way, they are still in your que, and yet you can move on to someone else.
There is also another great element to IM on a public server, with public profiles. People can, if they wish, put things in their public profile that would bring together people with like interests from around the world. I have developed many online friends due to one common interest or another listed on a public profile. Sure, for the