Privacy News from Wired News – MS Passport: Straight to the FTC. Microsoft's Passport is no friend to the consumer who values his privacy, especially now that it's so integrated into XP. That's the concern of privacy advocates who are complaining to the U.S. government.
In the new filing, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Junkbusters and other privacy groups say that after tinkering with the system and reading a lot of press reports about XP, they found more objectionable things.
They discovered, for example, that “Passport provides no mechanism for users to cancel their account and permanently delete their personal information from Microsoft servers.”
The complaint adds that people “who have requested that their personal information be removed from Microsoft servers have been told by the company they will have to wait one year for their accounts to expire” — which the groups say is not acceptable.
They also state that “Microsoft is attempting to eliminate anonymity on the Internet to enable .Net, a distributed computing platform…. If unchecked, Microsoft's distributed computing platform will result in users being required to identify themselves to merely surf the Internet.”