Bleah, new MS Passport Services user policies...

[Alan Au]

Browsing the Gone Gold forums and found a thread saying that MS has revised their user policies again. If you you any Passport services (e.g. Hotmail, etc.) they will now automatically share your personal info unless you go into your profile settings and explicitly tell them not to. :evil:

- Alan

[Mark Asher]

That's just bullshit. Microsoft should not be allowed to take your personal info and share it unless they get your permission to do so. AOL did this same kind of thing too. Glad I never signed up for Passport.

Hotmail's quickly about to lose most of its usefulness. By mid-July Microsoft will shut off pop access unless you pay them. It's certainly fair for them to charge, but one of the great things about Hotmail was that you could use it to retrieve your non-Hotmail email too, for free.

[rdarnese]

You can do the same thing with yahoo email and excite as well.

I normally use yahoo while I am away.

[Anonymous]

You can also just LIE in your Passport profile, you know.

[Brad Grenz]

Yeah, I can't even remember what name I made up when I created an account.

[Bullhajj]

Thanks for the tip, Allen.

I like to use a hotmail account for posting to Usenet and signing up with Web sites. The whole idea is to put another level of abstraction between me and all the bulk marketers out there. Now Hotmail is just another one of the groups I have to watch.

[Ben Sones]

I started an interesting experiment. I receive any mail sent to my domain (odditorium.net) at the admin account, even if the specific account that the mail is sent to doesn't exist. So even if you send me mail via made-up addresses like "shithead@odditorium.net," I'll still get it. Now every time I have to give some online service or business my email address, I give them an address named after their business (like "amazon@odditorium.net" or "hotmail@odditorium.net"). Now if I get spam, at least I know who it was that sold my information (and whether they did so legally).

[wumpus]

That's very clever-- great idea.

[Lee Johnson]

Strangely enough, I just went into my Passport options, and all of the "share my information with the Known Universe" boxes were unchecked. I resubmitted the form that way, though, just to be safe. :P