Privacy
For privacy regulations, AIM has strict age restrictions. AIM accounts are available only for children over the age of 13; younger children are not permitted access to AIM.
Under the AIM Privacy Policy, AOL has no rights to read or monitor any private communications between users. The profile of the user has no privacy.
If public content is accessed it can be used for online, print or even broadcast advertising etc. This is outlined in the policy and terms of service, "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". This allows anything one posts to be used without a separate request for permission.
The issue of AIM's security has been called into question. AOL states that it has taken great steps to insure that personal information will not be accessed by unauthorized members, but that it cannot guarantee that that will not happen.
AIM is different from other clients such as Yahoo! Messenger in that it does not require approval from one buddy to be added to another's buddy list. As a result, it is possible for users to keep other unsuspecting users on their buddy list to see when they are online, read their status and away messages, and read their profiles. In fact, there is a web API to display one's status and away message as a widget on one's webpage. However, one can block another user from communicating and seeing one's status; but this does not prevent the user from creating a new account that is not blocked and therefore can still track the first user's status. A more complete privacy option is to select a menu option allowing communication only with those on one's buddy list; this causes blocking (thus appear offline to) all users who are not on one's buddy list.
AOL recently teamed up with Facebook, allowing you to login to AIM using your Facebook account. However, many privacy advocates claim that the convenience comes at a high price. In order to sign up for AIM Express, the more lightweight, web-based version, you must accept all of their account access stipulations. These include access to your photos, videos, messages in your inbox (including private), custom friends list, friend requests, and more. You must also allow AIM to access your account when you're offline, as well as post messages and videos on your wall. If you refuse to accept all the terms, the sign-up process stops.
The new release logs all conversations, and there is no opt-out.
Read more about this topic: AOL Instant Messenger
Famous quotes containing the word privacy:
“The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“... privacy is ... connected to a politics of domination.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)