Re: Privacy concerns

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005, Doctor Bill wrote:

> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 22:55:07 -0400
> From: Doctor Bill <docbill@gmail.com>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: Privacy concerns
>
>
> I just downloaded abiword, and I have serious concerns about privacy.
> In particular, abiword contains plugins for opening to web services
> for translation. The one that raises the most concern is
> babelfish.altavista.com.

Any idea of the translation tools provided by google are any less clouded
in legal language?

> If I read their privacy policy,

Privacy policies are glorified disclaimers and tell you more about how
little privacy you have. I dont recall being required to agree to any
privacy policy when using babelfish. It does not seem like their policy
would be entirely enforcable in most cases, especially attempts to claim
publishing rights of your work (which seem entirely unreasonable but you
should consult a lawyer).

Having said that any unencrypted internet transmission is about as private
as a postcard. You should keep that in mind as a baseline comparision.

> they make no mention of what they will do with data sent to their
> website.

If pushed to do so they might be willing to clarify their intent and make
their policy a little less over-reaching. Over zealous lawyers probably
wrote an all encompassing disclaimer when all they really needed was to
make it entirely clear they need to "copy" the information to translate
it and they reserve the right to reuse it for their own internal testing
purposes or something like that.

> Since the feature is readily available from the word processor,

... only if plugins are installed.

What version of Abiword are you using and on what platform?

> and expect there information to be confidential.

they really shouldn't. the way I see it

I wonder what we can really do about this?

the best I think we can do is to bulk up our disclaimers, and make it as
clear as possible we do not have control over third party web based
services. (In general would like to find ways to clearly indicate which
menu items require external programs and take a long time to open such as
help files and web based plugins.)

Do you have any specific suggestions on what you think we might do?

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.
Received on Sun Oct 23 17:31:57 2005