Before the afternoon of April 4, 2001, the "Microsoft Passport Web Site Terms of Use and Notices" contained language claiming Microsoft's right to use all data coming through their Passport services. On the afternoon or evening of April 4, 2001, Microsoft eliminated the most egregious contract language and issued a lame apology.
However, their license did, and still does (as of 4/5/2001), contain
the following:
| MODIFICATION OF THESE TERMS OF USE
Microsoft
reserves the right to change the terms, conditions, and notices under which
|
Basically, the user must review the terms of use before each and every usage of the Microsoft services, or accept the consequences.
Given the fact that Microsoft waited until websites began shutting down connectivity to MS based services before changing their terms of use, and given the lame apology (basically, "it's a mistake"), I believe there's a substantial risk that once the furor has died down, Microsoft could reenstate the original data-grabbing language, or some equally heinous language.
I therefore plan to create a program to monitor the Passport website (actually any website), and issue a warning when a change occurs. I'll be making the program GPL (GNU Public License -- Free Software), although the program will have provisions so that proprietary HTML content can be processed by the program.
In its most basic form, it downloads the web page, performs a diff between it and the latest known version, and if there's a change, issues a warning and stores the new version along with each other version. A user could thus run this program before each use of Passport, and be warned of any changes.
If anyone wants to help write this, email
me.
Email Steve Litt (but not from hotmail)