Terms of misuse

by Dave Kearns

May 10, 2001 —

In the wake of Microsoft's recent " HailStorm " announcement (which this newsletter covered two weeks ago, then commented on further last week), a number of people "discovered" the terms-of-use document on the Microsoft Passport Web site and inferred all sorts of sinister meanings.

In particular, many felt Microsoft was laying claim to all Passport users' personal information (name, address, credit card numbers, etc.) with the right to redistribute the information.

Microsoft must have heard users’ cries. Late last week, Microsoft announced a change in the "terms of use" for the Passport Web site, acknowledging that the previous one was a mistake and clarifying that personal data uploaded to the site would still be owned by users.

My guess is that Microsoft simply made an error. The language of the original terms of use was almost exactly the same as Microsoft's MSN terms of service (http://www.msn.com/help/legal/terms.htm) and was remarkably similar to the terms-of-service documents at Yahoo (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/) and RoadRunner (http://www.austin.rr.com/twaustin/termsandcond.html) - among many others.

What does it mean? Someone simply copied the boilerplate terms-of-use policy to all Microsoft Web sites - substituting the site name in each. Once the mistake was found, Microsoft had no choice but to change the wording. Otherwise, no one in their right mind would use it, and that's hardly the way to make the .Net strategy ubiquitous!

Network World