This Article was published in a national UK newspaper today.
YOU'VE BEEN HOTNAILED...
A STORM is brewing at Hotmail after its policy on spam (unsolicited email) suddenly changed overnight. The world's biggest email firm spectacularly failed to tell users it had signed everybody up to receive tons more irritating marketing messages. Instead, Hotmail's owner, Microsoft, secretly added three new tick-boxes to every single user's profile.
Two of them - "Share my email address'' and "Share my other registration information" - are already ticked, the other: "Share myfirst and last names'' has been - graciously - left blank.
This means Hotmail's 118 million users (7 million in the UK) will be inundated with even more spam abuse, beyond that which already floods hard-to-manage Hotmail accounts.
Why it didn't tell customers of this beggars belief, given Hotmail promises users it "will not share your email address with business partners" and "none of your personally identifiableinformation is shared with the third party websites''.
It can only be one thing: a cynical ploy to stuff more spam into inboxes that have a limit of 2 megabytes - so users are forced to upgrade their accounts to the paid-for service ($19.95 a year for 10 megabytes of extra storage space).
Thankfully, there is one way around this: change your settings or protest by closingyour account, reminding Microsoft that consumers hold the power.
The less people use Hotmail, the less money Microsoft will get through advertising. To change your settings back, go into "options", then "personal profile", scroll down to the bottom and un-tick the boxes.
Though hopefully after all the protests of the past few days, Microsoft might have already backed down and changed them for us. Don't hold your breath...
Olive.
[ 05-20-2002, 12:35 PM: Message edited by: Olive ]