There are all kinds of reasons not to use Hotmail as your free webmail account - the frequent downage, numerous security breaches, and now this...

It's courtesy of one of my main sources for info regarding security and the lack thereof in M$ products, along with other news, tips and tricks in working with the Office Suite.

From Woody's Office Watch...

"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."

Subscribe to his newsletter and read it for more than a month or two, and if you're still clueless enough to use LookOut, err, OutLook, then you deserve all the bad things that will happen to you. :-)

A friend of mine responded to this news by pointing out that Yahoo had pulled off similar highjinks a few months back, and he's right. I fired off an email to all my friends about that one, too. But it didn't bother me as much.

I find M$'s offenses a bit more serious, in light of their goals of becoming the Borg of online identity security, and repeated vows to safeguard everyone's personal and financial info furnished to them in the Passport initiative, .NET web services, yatta-yatta-yatta.

They, unlike many other providers of free webmail, can't make the argument that they need the moolah from selling this info in order to survive. Last I heard, they are still raking in some dough, even though the XP rollout has been a flop.

I'd wager they're using all of our personal info as bait to get the big e-commerce names to jump in bed with them and Passport. "Join us and we'll give you access to the millions of email addys of our HotMail and MSN subscribers." Most spammers have to spend money for that, either by buying them, or harvesting them the hard way.

They know dogdamn good and well that the average clueless user will not have the time, inclination, or knowledge to opt-out of this scheme, in the very unlikely event they even hear about it. In my opinion, you need to have your freakin' head examined for using HotMail, given the outages, numerous security breaches, and current status as Spam Haven par excellence'.

Having a HotMail account is almost prima facie evidence of serious cluelessness.

Of course, as Woody's newletter mentioned a bit later, there's no real legal or ethical wrong in filling in those personal information forms with whatever you fancy, and then he wondered aloud how things would turn out if we all claimed to be one William Gates, of Redmond, Washington. :-)

I found the idea amusing. Pehaps I'll join the ranks of the clueless and get me one of them there HotMail accounts too...