Blog

I talked about IM Usage Policies in my E-Pro newsletters, but...


Tags :


This article at Geek.com was more tuned to a blog entry than the previous articles I wrote here, here and here (ok the E-Pro site for the newsletters is down and I can't grab those links right this second).  But to boldly go forth

In the past few days AOL has updated the Terms of Service for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users. The changes have been met with raised eyebrows and anger, as AOL has included clauses that remove all privacy from the user. As part of the new terms AOL reserves the right to record all content posted through the AIM service and use it as it sees fit in the future without any communication with users.

If you read through this article, plus a handful of comments, you will see that AOL has decided that if you use it's products, including chat, they may at any time use portions of your chats as they see fit.  Now, one would presume they could not go through everything line by line.  But what about keyword type searches of the IM chatter on their network?  This is easily done and also can be found in at least one of the Sametime monitoring packages that are available for your enterprise.

This all jumps back to the IM Usage Policy.  AOL is stating it in a well defined policy, no matter how much we agree or disagree.
To agree says yes, this is a free public usage system, that I cannot even expect any privacy.  It goes across networks I do not know or own, into servers that are owned by AOL and then into other sites of systems I do not know or own.  This traffic could be captured in numerous places along the way.

To disagree says I expect some form of privacy.  AOL offers encrypted traffic ability in the recent versions, right?  Well yes they do, but does that still change the rights they have to the actual chat traffic across their servers?  No, not since they are announcing it to you in a EULA type arrangement.  I would expect some of your own companies have not issues that type of agreement with the users.  But I bet you have an Internet usage and e-mail usage policy don't you?

Reading around shows that Microsoft has only stated it does nothing and does with your chat data at all.  I didn't have time to check Yahoo, but ICQ I can imagine will the same as AOL since they are one in the same.