Ever heard the word AIM used outside of Duck Hunting? If you have, you're probably a little familiar with Instant Messaging. And you're also well acquainted with the fact that AOL Corporation owns AIM. A corporation is legally a person with special benefits. And when you use e-mail or IM, you're sending your conversations and private thoughts through their servers and most often using their clients.
Lemme take a moment to show you an excerpt from Microsoft's privacy statement:
"In particular, we may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the law or respond to lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers, including the enforcement of our agreements or policies governing your use of the service; or (c) act on a good faith belief that such access or disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of Microsoft employees, customers or the public."
Did you read that last bit? Yeah, act on good faith. Okay, pretend for a second that the PS3 or the Nintendo Wii are better then the 360. I'm not saying they are or they aren't, but just using it as an example. Say you go to the Microsoft forum and log into MSN. You start posting topics about how some console that Microsoft doesn't own is better then the 360, and people start to believe you. So much so that the moderators and admins and soon the actual corporation is paying attention. You're endangering their product, and therefore endangering Microsoft's employees because Microsoft might not be able to pay them.
You're, in their eyes, endangering their employees. So what can they do? They can sell your private information to the highest bidder. They can **** up your IM's with some noob using filters like not sending any IM that has the words "Microsoft" and "lie" or something like that.
Okay, that doesn't sound dangerous. But what if you lived in Natzi Germany (pretend that the Internet existed)? You're IM-ing American soldiers about how bad Concentration Camps is and that sort of tragic stuff, and you're telling them that they should come and destroy Natzi Germany. Take the last three words of that sentence, "destroy Natzi Germany". Microsoft or AOL or Yahoo could start filtering your IM's for those three words and deleting the IM's that contain them. After all, you're threatening the government, which is supposed to "protect" the public. You're "threatening" the public.
Now you might be thinking, "You're making an awful lot of fuss about something that looks kinda small in my eyes". And I'll give you that. This might not seem like a big deal to you, and you might not want to put up too much work to protect your constitutional liberties. And I get that. That's why we have Jabber.
Jabber, or XMPP, is an open protocol (protocol is like AIM or MSN, a chatting service, not necessarily a program, but a group of people, like everyone signed up for Yahoo uses the Yahoo protocol). And open protocol is a protocol that isn't owned by anyone. It isn't owned by a corporation. You can have your own server, and you can communicate to other servers. A person on server A can talk to someone on server B.
There is a variety of Jabber clients, some that have features similar to AIM. If you prefer freedom, you probably prefer Jabber.
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