Is this true? - BigBlueBall

This topic has 5 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 20 years, 8 months ago by SlapShot.

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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July 7, 2005 at 8:31 am #19003

ixfd64
Member

http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Online_services/?f=aol_secret_tos.manual.txt

Looks scary to me…

(NOTE: link contains potentially obscene, vulgar, and/or offensive material. Be warned before clicking.)

July 7, 2005 at 12:23 pm #125692

Tigerblade
Participant

i would consider that to be suspicious at best. in the “list of offensive words” are ‘boy’, ‘girl’, and ‘hot’… good luck banning anyone who uses those. i suppose they could be considered “conditionally vulgar” depending on their context, but…

i imagine there is some sort of manual like this, but as to whether or not THIS is the actual one… i dont know.

July 7, 2005 at 3:14 pm #125690

Jeff Hester
Keymaster

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a legitimate watchdog group that seeks to protect the rights of the individual on the Internet. The fact that it’s on their site lends considerable credibility to the report.

Personally, I don’t know anyone that this has happened to, so I can’t confirm it’s accuracy. The way it’s worded, AOL has to catch you using these words. You would think that they would simply have a program that filters them, but the way the alleged “secret policy” is worded, they only take action if one of their chat sysops happened to be watching you:

Quote:

Use any of these words more than twice when an AOL sysop is spying on you, and AOL will terminate your account.

Finally, this is a fairly old document, dating back to 1996. It’s entirely possible that this was their policy at one time, but they’ve relaxed since then.

Anyone got a throwaway AOL account we can use to test? :p

July 7, 2005 at 3:50 pm #125694

SlapShot
Member

Yeah it does look suspicious, i dont know why they did that, it may be a fake or someone is just messing around with us, but yeah thats not right

July 7, 2005 at 6:12 pm #125693

Spike
Member

Now…is this AIM or AOL, becuase that makes all the difference. Also, if it is in fact AIM, what AOL or EFF SysOp is going to spy on your personal AIM conversations, out of the possible millions out there, if that’s even possible. I doubt it is, but then again, I could be wrong. Either way, highly unlikely, and as Jeff said, it’s very old, too.

July 7, 2005 at 7:38 pm #125691

Someguy03
Member

We all know that AOL has many policies that it does not enforce. They have this whole thing about your screenames becoming available again if you dont use it for 6 months, but that never happens. Things like these are probably the standard statements you need posted to keep activists off your back.
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