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Monday 14 March 2005

AIM TOS

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

http://www.aim.com/tos/tos.adp (emphasis added)

Does this say that AOL can use the content of my instant messages in any way that it wants? IChat uses the AIM network. I'm offline until further notice.

Actually, um, I've strongly advised against IMing sensitive corporate material for a long time. It goes through AOL servers. They probably don't read individual messages. But I'd bet money that they're scanning for links and probably also key words, in order to compile statistics. La la la. When I worked there, I'd get a weekly report of web traffic through their servers, as they could tell what websites their subscribers were hitting. It was very interesting. I bet SBC also collects web stats. I bet somebody buys these sorts of stats. I bet there are folks paid to spend a lot of time and energy analyzing these stats to see what sort of useful data they can gleam from them.

What's a good replacement for AIM?

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