the finger-keyboard synapse

AOL gives privacy back (supposedly)

Due at least in part to the public outcry, AOL has announced that they will be changing their TOS, and explained that the TOS was really just a misunderstanding. I fail to see how any reasonable person at AOL could have read the TOS and not seen the huge problem with its wording, but that's another issue. In any event, here's a small excerpt from the full article news.com:

America Online said late Monday that it plans to revise its user agreement in response to concerns that instant messages sent through the company's service could be monitored. The new policy for AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, will stress that the company does not eavesdrop on customer's conversations except in unusual circumstances such as a court order, an AOL spokesman said.

I think that part of the problem is that when people think of AIM, they think of the instant messenger, and not the myriad of other online services that also fall into the AIM umbrella. The article says that the "You waive the right to privacy" clause only applied to the Rate-a-Buddy feature.

I still suspect that some damage has been done to AOL's reputation, at least among the privary-aware, and I'm sure some will remain skeptical of AOL and AIM. Time will tell.

Side note: if this TOS has been in effect since February 2004, this whole fiasco really exemplifies that nobody actually reads license agreements. That to me signifies a bigger problem, one I'm really not sure at all how to fix. Looking forwards, that's the issue that really merits some serious attention.

Of course nobody reads the license agreements. If I read all the license agreements for everything I installed, I wouldn't get anything done on my computer. They are simply too long, nobody is expected to read them. I once saw an analysis of a license agreement, most of the stuff was rated as "too wordy for the average person to understand" because of the legal terms/words/whatever being used.

Is there a chance I will get screwed over? Maybe. Who knows, one day I might surrender my entire bank account by clicking "I agree to the terms of this agreement".

Kevin, just wondering, do you read license agreements?

I don't. I think standard license agreements would be a big help, so that there could be a set of maybe a dozen licenses that you could choose for your software, and that way it would be easier to actually read them and know what they say.

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