Woody's WINDOWS WatchFor anyone on the list using Hotmail as I do I suggest
you check out the following info I got in a newsletter. When I checked my
account, sure enough Billy Gates' minions had signed me up for any amount of
rubbish and I've certainly been paying for it with an explosion of junk mail
in my account recently.
Suzie
**********
If you signed up for Hotmail - or anything else that uses Passport - more
than a couple of months ago, you may be in for a big surprise. It seems that
Microsoft changed the rules while you weren't looking. Unilaterally,
Microsoft may have granted itself permission to pass along your personal
information to other companies that use Passport on their Web sites. The
personal information includes your email address, your birthday, your
country and zip code, your gender and occupation.
Has Microsoft taken liberties with your data? There's an easy way to check.
Go into Hotmail. Click Options (to the right of the tab that says "Address
Book"). Click Personal Profile (in the upper left corner). Scroll down to
the bottom of the screen and see whether the boxes marked "Share my e-mail
address" and "Share my other registration information" have been checked.
Those boxes didn't exist when I signed up for Hotmail, and chances are
pretty good they didn't exist when you signed up for it, either. I certainly
never gave Microsoft permission to hand out my email address - or my
birthday, gender or occupation. I'd rather be dipped in oil. Yet both of
those boxes on my personal profile were checked. I bet they're checked on
your personal profile, too.
Details are still murky, but it looks like Microsoft added those two check
boxes a couple of months ago, and did itself a big favor by checking both of
them for all of the Passport holders at the time.
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